Full text of "The Catholic world"

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE,

VOL. LXX.
OCTOBER, 1899, TO MARCH, 1900.

NEW YORK :

THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD,

120 WEST 6oth STREET.

1900.

THE COLUMBUS PRESS, 12C WEST BOTH ST., NEW YORK.

CONTENTS.

Art is Long and Time is Fleeting.

" Teresa," 31

"Benevolent Assimilation" through

the Laity. M.J. Riordan, . . 539
Betrothed. Mrs. E. W. Lat inter, . 610
Biology, A Half-Century in. James J.

Walsh, Ph.D., M.D., ... 466
Birth of Christ, The, (Frontispiece.}

"Black but Beautiful," . . . .158
Brothers of the Christian Schools, The.

(Illustrated.') Max Mendel, . . 737
Canyon of the Colorado, The Grand.

(Illustrated}, . . . . . 305
Catholic Crisis in England Fifty Years

Ago, Reminiscences of &. Rev. C.

L. Walworth, . 59, 239, 412, 506
Child with Mary His Mother," "They

found the, (Frontispiece.}

Christian Religion, The Future of the.

Rev. William L. Sullivan, C. S. P , 146
Christmas in Rome. (Illustrated.}

Grace V. Christmas, . . . 341
Christmas Proposal, A. (Illustrated.}

Edward F. Garesche. . . . 363
Church in the Early Years of Henry

VIII., The. Rev. George McDer-

mot, C.S.P., 821

Church of England, The Crisis in the.

Rev. H. G. Ganss, . . . 437
Columbian Reading Union, The, 142, 285,

430, 574, 71?
Consent of the Governed," " The. E.

B. Briggs, D.C.L., . . . 253, 794
" De Profundis Clamavi ad te, Domine,"

(Frontispiece.)
Dr. Mivart on the Continuity of the

Church. Rev. fames f. Fox, D.D., 725
Dutch Guiana, The Bush Negroes of.

(Illustrated.} Rev. Charles War-
ren Currier, ..... 227
Editorial Notes, 139, 283, 428, 716, 858

Editorial Suggestion for the Year 1900,

An, 570

Education of our Priests, The, . . 51
Episcopalian Doctrine of the Eucharist,

The. Dr. A. A. MiUler, . . 178

Ethics of Realism, The. Rev . Thomas

J. Hagerty, A.M., S.T.B., . . 352
Evangelization of Cities, The, . . 577
" Facing the Twentieth Century," . 118
Father Hecker's Maxims for the Apos-

tolate of the Press, .... 410

Father Salvator's Penitent, . . . 382
Flight of an Angel, The, Minnie Gil-
more, ...... 328

Fountain-Swimmer of Damascus, The.

(Illustrated.) Mrs. Clara B.

Ewald, 547

French Literature, Reaction in. Rev.

Augustine David Malley, . . 70

Ginoux de Fermon, Anna, (Frontispiece.)
Holland Art Village, A. (Illustrated.}

Eliza Leypold Good, . . .514

" Holly -Eve." E. M. Lynch, . . 389

Holy Door, The Opening of the,

(Frontispiece.}

Holy See and the Jews, The. Elizabeth

Raymond-Barker, .... 394

Hunt Ball, The. Dorothy Gresham, . 684

Human Body, The Glory of the. Rev.

Henry E. O'Keeffe, C.S. P., . . 691

Humanism," " The New. Rev. Joseph

McSorley, C.S.P., .... 752

Insanity Increasing? Is. William Se-

ton, LL.D., 321

Italy, A Son of. Anne Elizabeth

O'Hare, . . . . . 763

Jerusalem to -Nazareth on Horseback,

From. (Illustrated.) Ethel Nast, 449

Jesuit, The First. Rev. Joseph McSor-
ley, C.S.P., 371

Lancaster," " Time- Honored. (Illus-
trated.} Rev. H. Pope, . . .632

Life of our Lord Jesus Christ, The.

(Illustrated), 290

Marriage and Divorce in their Legal
Aspect./. David Enright, A.M.,
LL.B., 673

Mr. Mallock on the Church and Science.

Rev. George McDermot, C S.P., . 527

Murder in the Name of Science. Rev.

George M. Searle, C.S.P., . . 493

Natural Selection, Divine Action in.

William Set on, LL D., . . .625

Nature Worship a Christian Sentiment.

Rev. Joseph McSorley, C.S.P., . 212

Nature Worship a Pagan Sentiment.

Rev. Joseph McSorley, C.S. P., . 580

Negro Catechists, A Catholic College

for. Very Rev. John- R. S-lattery, . i

New Year's Tale of the North, A. (Il-
lustrated.} Katherine Hughes, . 481

Old London, Street Names and Shop
Signs of. (Illustrated. ) Emma
Endres, ...... 593

Pater, Walter : A Study. Rev. A. D.

Malley, 602

Pere Genettes. Miriam Coles Harris, 641

Pius IX., A Romance in the Land of.

Mrs. Alexander, . . . .651

Porto Rico and the Portoricans. (Il-
lustrated.} Mark W. Harrington, 161

Prosperity in Ireland, How America
may open up an Era of. (Illus-
trated.) J. Murphy, ... 39

Regents have more Power, Should the ? 802

Religion, How we Abuse. Rev. Joseph

McSorley, C.S. P. 81

Rotten Row, London, (Frontispiece.}

Sacred Eloquence, A Master of. Rev.

Walter Elliott, . . . . 552

Saint Vincent de Paul and the Sisters of
Charity. (Illustrated.} Rev. Wal-
ter Elliott, C.S. P., . . . . 13

School Laws in New York State. Rev.

Thomas McMillan, C.S. P., . . 834

CONTENTS.

Seminarians as Soldiers. (Illustrated.}

Miles Christi, 385

Shakespeare Name, The. Neal H..

Ewing, 572

South African Republic, The. (Illus-
trated.} Rev. George Me Dermot,
C.S.P., 89

Supreme Court and Sectarian Institu-
tions, The, 859

Talk about New Books, 132, 261, 420, 557,

698, 841

"The Daly Bible," The Story of. (Il-
lustrated.) Lida Rose McCabe, . 809

Total Abstinence and the non-Catholic

Missions. Rev. T. F. Burke, . 359

Turn of the Century, On the, . . 433

Tyrol," " The Flower of the. (Illus-
trated.) Mary F. Nixon, . . 664

What the Thinkers Say, . . .141

Whither Thou Goest I will Go. (Illus-
trated.} Claude M. Girardeau, . 101

Wogan's Wolf-Dogs, The Revolt of.

P. G. Smyth, 193

World's Modern Pilgrimage," "The.
(Illustrated.} Special Correspon-
dent, 773

POETRY.

Ahnena Khieve. Lament i D'Cresona, 623
Autumn Ecstasy, An. (Illustrated.}

Frank X. English, . . . .210

Children of Cana. Minnie Gilmore, . 480

Conversion. Lucy Gertrude Kclley, . 362
De Profundis. Mary Grant O'Sheri-

dan, 801

" Domine, Exaudi Vocem Meam," . 145

Forgiven. Minnie Gilmore, . . . 682

Home. Clara Conway, .... 492
Hope. W. A. Maline, . . . .538

Hope Eternal. Thomas B. Reilly, . 80
In Memoriam : To Father Isaac T.

Hecker. (Portrait.} W. L. S., . 411

Memory, \.-Rev. William P. Cantwell, 840

Night-Shift, The. fames Buckham, . 58

Nuptials of Sorrow, The. /. O. Aus-
tin, 793

Old Cathedral, The. (Illustrated.}

Arthur Wheelock Upson, . . 29

Pass-word, The. F. X. E., . . . 762

Ronkonkoma. -John ferome Rooney, . 592

Royal Babe, The. Caroline D. Swan, 358

Snow-Flakes. Rev. William P. Cant-
well, 384

St. Agnes, the Roman Virgin and Mar-
tyr. T. S., C.SS.R., ... 696

" Watching unto God." Kate Hunt

Craddock, 505

Worshippers, The First. Mary F.

Nixon, *..... 289

Wyoming Sundown, A. Arthur

Wheelock Upson, .... 690

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Arnold, Matthew, 557

Blue Lady's Knight, The, . . .423
Breviarium Romanum, .... 136
Cardinal Newman, Personal Remin-
iscences of, 854

Carmel in England, .... 705

Carvel, Richard, ..... 132

Catechism Explained, The, . . . 277

Catechism Simply Explained, The, . 850
Catholics of Ireland under the Penal
Laws in the Eighteenth Century,

The, 704

Characteristics of the Early Church,

The, . - 263

Child of God, The, .... 262

Christian Education, .... 137

Christian Era, General History of the, 706

Church, The, 263

Cuba, To-morrow in, . . . 715

Daily Thoughts for Priests, . . 557

Dante Alighieri, The Life and Works of, 698

Education, Method in, . . . . 423
English Catholics under Charles II.,

The Condition of , . . . . 853

Four Gospels, The, .... 279

Fra Girolamo Savonarola, . . . 275

General History, Outlines of, . . 272

Heronford, 849

Holland and the Hollanders, . . 261
Holy Gospel according to Saint John,

The, 562

Jubilee Manual, The, .... 561

Jubilee Retreat, A Series of Ten Ser-
mons for a, . . . . . . 561

Killowen, Idyls of, 266

King's Mother, The, . . . .132

Letters of a Country Vicar, . . . 274

Liberalism, What is ? . . . 424

Ludwig II. of Bavaria, The Romance of, 559

Map of Life, The, 709

Marriage Process in the United States,

The 426

Mary's Children, Home Truths for, . 561

Meditations, Manual of, ... 559

Meredith, Janice, ..... 423

Natural Religion, ..... 852
Nineteenth Century and other Poems,

The 268

Old New York, Nooks and Corners in, 563
Oliphant, Mrs., Autobiography and Let-
ters of, ....... 700

Oxford and Cambridge Conferences, . 850

Patrology, Manual of, . . . . 269

Philosophy in France, History of

Modern, 855

Plato and Darwin, 262

Ralstons, The, 422

Retreat for Reception, .... 561
St. Francis of Assisi, The Little Flow-
ers of, 562

St. Louis, 713

Saviour Jesus Christ, The Life of our, . 706

Sevigne, Selected Letters of Madame de, 261
Songs of the Settlement and other

Poems, .... .268

Soul Here and Hereafter, The, . 271

Student's Standard Speller, The, . 424

Sunken Bell, The, ... . 701

Texts Explained, ... . 562

Via Crucis, .... . 420

ANNA GINOUX DE FERMON,

Sister of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, victim of the fire at the
Bazaar of Charity, Paris, May 4, 1897.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LXX. OCTOBER, 1899. No. 415

A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS.

BY VERY REV. JOHN R. SLATTERY.

IT. JOSEPH'S Society for Negro Missions now
numbers twenty-one priests, who labor in seven
States : Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana,
Maryland, Mississippi, and Virginia. They have
a seminary, apostolic college, churches, schools,
industrial institutes, and orphanages. At present St. Joseph's
Seminary has thirty-one divinity students on its roll, and its
feeder, the Epiphany Apostolic College, over sixty students.
The former sent out seven priests during the scholastic year
1898-99, and the latter in June, 1899, advanced fifteen graduates
to the seminary. With the spread of missions a new departure
has become necessary for the missioners, arising from the need
of helpers who will live in the various missions and take, as
far as possible, the place of the missionaries while absent. In
a word, Catechists, officially and publicly appointed, are now
in demand. To understand this let us recall the

RELIGIOUS STATUS OF THE NEGRO RACE.

Of this people 144,536 are given as Catholics in the official
report for 1898 of the venerable Commission in charge of the
Negro and Indian Fund. This is a very small percentage in-
deed of eight million American blacks. On the other hand,
the various Protestant sects in their official reports claim less
than four millions. " Of the eight millions in this country a
very large proportion belong to Christian churches ; one million
six hundred thousand are reported to be members of Baptist
churches, about the same number are enrolled in the Methodist

STATE OF NEW YORK. 1899.
VOL. LXX - I

2 A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. [Oct.,

churches, and besides these there are Presbyterians, Congrega-
tionalists, Episcopalians, and others " (Negro in America, by
Thomas J. Morgan, D.D.) Hence, four millions may be looked
upon as beyond the pale of any religious denomination. Fur-
thermore, in the South negro Catholics, like white Catholics,
are bunched, if we may use the term.

Maryland (Diocese of Baltimore) has 37,000 Negro Catholics.
Louisiana (New Orleans and Natchi-

toches) has 83,000

Kentucky (Louisville) has 6,000

Alabama (Mobile) has 3425

In these four States, 129,425 " "

In other words, Louisiana has more than one-half the negro
Catholics in the United States, and Maryland more than one-
fourth, both together six-sevenths of them. That is to say, of
every seven negro Catholics in this country four live in Louisi-
ana and two in Maryland. Thus there are left a trifle over
12,000 Catholic negroes in the other Southern States, and 3,000
in the Bahama Islands (Diocese of New York), which belong
to-Great Britain.

Again, it is noteworthy that the States in which negroes
are most numerous are the very ones having the fewest Catho-
lics of that race ; as, for example :

Virginia (Diocese of Richmond) has 650,000 Negroes, of whom

1,200 are Catholics;
South Carolina (Charleston) has 690,000 Negroes, of whom 800

are Catholics ;
Georgia (Savannah) has 900,000 Negroes, of whom 1,300 are

Catholics.

To reach these millions, as yet alien even t6 the sight or
voice of a priest, is the work appointed to St. Joseph's Society
for Colored Missions. It is of the true nature of the apostolic
vocation to make use of the people, themselves for whom the
vocation is divinely granted. As the farmer needs the earth,
the astronomer the heavens, the sailor the sea, so does the
missionary demand the people, the Josephite the negro. But
quite unlike the earth or sky or waves are the negroes. For
men are they, able to co-operate, not alone by their presence
and submissiveness, but also by their action in personally work-
ing with the missioners as well as in their influence over their
fellows.

1899-] A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. 3

NEED OF NEGRO WORKERS ON THE MISSIONS.

No wonder, then, that the common experience of the mis-
sionaries of St. Joseph's Society proves that to win and convert
the negroes an indispensable means are the blacks themselves.
Appeals, therefore, have come to St. Joseph's Seminary from
different fields of labor, urging that negroes should be trained
for the work both as priests and catechists. Now, from their
foundation, St. Joseph's Seminary and its feeder, the Epiphany
Apostolic College, have had as students negro boys as well as
whites in preparation for the apostolic priesthood to labor
among the blacks. At present there are three negroes in the
seminary, and four more in the college. The colored boys,
very few in number, are at once introduced among a dispropor-
tionate number of whites. Some of them rise to the occasion
and equal and even outrank the whites, v. g., two of four negro
seminarians won the A. M. at St. Mary's Seminary, of whom
one carried off prizes in both years of philosophy, gaining eight
out of ten all round in his studies.

The College for Catechists now under review will tend to
increase the number of priestly vocations among negro youths,
although primarily intended to establish a system of negro
catechists. Moreover by its means the bulk of the negro youths
will be trained apart. In this matter we have before us the
example of the Protestant sects, which, although throwing open
their universities and colleges to the negro race, have, however,
almost all their negro students in separate institutes.

CATECHISTS ON THE FOREIGN MISSIONS.

The need of native catechists and priests has been recog-
nized always in the Catholic foreign missions of Asia, Africa,
and Oceanica. We have been in correspondence with Eastern
missionaries as well as with the superiors, general and local, of
many missionary societies. It will help our readers to under-
stand better our proposed College for Catechists if we give
some of the results. The Very Rev. A. Lightheart, Provincial
of the Mill Hill Missioners to the Maoris, thus writes :

" The idea of training catechists is a good inspiration. If it were not for the
catechists on our missions in New Zealand and elsewhere, our work might not
only be a trying one but very unsuccessful in many cases. On missions like
mine, for example, the priest is nearly always on the tramp from village to village.
He visits the same villages about four times a year, sometimes more, sometimes
less ; it all depends upon distances. Now, every village has two or three
catechists who conduct public prayers, morning and night, and on Sundays

4 A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. [Oct.,

read the Mass prayers, sing Vespers, and teach catechism. We choose men of
good character only, and good speakers also. As a rule, they acquit them-
selves faithfully of this duty, for they consider it an honor to be appointed as
a catechist. They have the good will of the people, who, with perhaps a very
few exceptions, would not dare to stay away from Mass prayers and the in-
structions even of a catechist. So, you see, they are a great help in our work.
Furthermore, as most of our people cannot read, the catechist reads the cate-
chism out to them, night after night, until it is remembered. It does not, however,
take long, as the Maoris have magnificent memories and intellects. Then when
the priest comes round he explains the more obscure parts. The Maoris, on the
whole, are very well posted in their catechism, children and all " (Whangaroa,
Bay of Islands, New Zealand, October 10, 1898).

The Right Rev. J. U. Gendreau, Vicar-Apostolic of Western
Tonquin, under date " Hanoi, Western Tonquin, September 4,
1898," sent us the synodal decrees on the question of catechism,
which cover the practices of that part of Asia since 1670 :

" THE HOUSE OF GOD."

" Our first missionaries very soon saw the necessity of having some one to
help them in their labors, especially in catechising the natives. In order to fill
this want they chose young men whom they trained in piety and knowledge, so
that later on these might perform the same offices as the clerics in the early days
of the church. In this way was established our ' House of God,' where our
catechists receive their training. All are supported from the common purse and
none receive a salary. Moreover, these young men are in rowise bound by vow
or contract, and any of them may return to the world whenever he wishes to do
so. Applications are, as a rule, very numerous; but we accept only such as are
promising subjects and belong to good Christian families. According to the
Rules adopted in the Synod of 1795, each priest is supposed to bring up a certain
number of boys of twelve or thirteen years of age. These boys are first taught
Chinese, and when they are about fifteen or sixteen they are given in charge of
a catechist, who initiates them in the rudiments of Latin and plain chant. At
the age of seventeen or eighteen they enter the preparatory college, where they
remain for six years. The fathers are urged to recommend only such subjects as
are truly good and who can be really useful on the mission. Once their classics
are finished, they are examined, and, if found proficient enough, srt placed as
catechists either with some native priests, or else employed in teaching the
catechumens, according as circumstances demand. Each parish has ordinarily
three catechists ; one who acts as procurator, whose duty it is to look to the
material needs of the mission, a teacher for the children, and a third who ac-
companies the priest on his missions among the Christians. Missionaries in
charge of districts also have three or four catechists, whose duties are to preside
at prayers, instruct the children, and help the Christians prepare for the reception
of the sacraments. Hence, the true and devoted catechist has always enough to
do. After five or six years' trial as catechists, those who have shown by their
exemplary conduct that they are worthy of a higher state enter the seminary to
make their theological studies for the priesthood. The catechists are, in a
special manner, precious auxiliaries for us. I would even dare say that they are,
under the missionaries, the principal agents of all the good done throughout the
vicariate."

1899-] A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHJSJS. 5

Passing from the Eastern missions, let us return to the
missions in our own land. Arizona and New Mexico received
missionaries about the same time as Western Tonquin. In far-
off Asia we have seen catechists in vogue ; so were they also
in the Western world. We quote from a recent article by the
learned Father Dutto :

" As a rule he (Rev. Eusebius Kino, SJ.) had a number of converted Indians,
from the mission of Dolores or from those further south, to accompany him.
These drove herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs, some of which were to be left in
the care of the Indians at the different pueblos to multiply. His first visit to a
new territory was usually for the purpose of exploring it and to impart the first
notions of Christianity. On the second, the foundations of a mission were laid ;
that is, catechists (one or more Christian Indians) were appointed, who at the
same time acted as mechanical and agricultural instructors. Thus the first
steps were taken to insure not only a civilized mode of life, but also to provide
a permanent support for the mission, with a resident priest whenever that
might seem advisable or possible. In the meantime visits were frequently made
for the purpose of confirming the catechumens and rendering them steadfast in
their attachment to the Christian religion. Such were substantially the methods
of evangelization followed by both the Franciscans and the Jesuits during the
seventeenth century, all along the line from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific
Ocean" ("Jesuit Missions in Arizona," by Rev. L. A. Dutto, American Eccle-
siastical Review, July, 1899, p. 50).

The methods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
in both hemispheres, have continued on to our day in the
foreign missions of Asia, Africa, and Oceanica. Last spring,
during our trip to Rome and other places of Europe, we inter-
viewed the superiors of several missionary societies, viz.: The
superior of the Foreign Missions of Paris ; of the African
Fathers in Lyons ; the superior of the Procure of the White
Fathers in Rome ; the Right Rev. Vicar-Apostolic of North
Uganda, Africa, who is a " White Father" of Cardinal Lavigerie,
and whom we met at the Procure of his society in Rome. As
there is at bottom a substantial oneness of view and practice
among the various missionary societies in training catechists,
and the differences are only in their development and details,
a summary of our interview with Monseigneur Streicher, Vicar-
Apostolic of North Uganda, will give our readers a fair idea
of the way in which the Foreign Missions of Holy Church
foster native catechists and priests :

The White Fathers in his vicariate have not as yet the
seminary proper, only an apostolic college, in which the course
of studies covers four years. The opening year is passed in
studying the vernacular language ; the next year in mastering

6 A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. [Oct.,

a language which is used by the better classes throughout
Africa. It plays the same part in the Dark Continent that
French had in Europe at the beginning of this century. The
next three years the young negroes spend in poring over
Latin and the Christian doctrine. When advanced enough,
the boys begin to teach catechism, even while following their
own studies ; they give morning and evening instruction to
catechumens ; they also assist at the priests' instructions which
follow their own. Of these instructions they take notes and
have to rehearse them to one of their professors. To under-
stand this, it is well to add that in Uganda the catechumens,
to the number of 3,751 (Missions d'Afrique y January-February,
1899, Tables), assemble at appointed places at the beginning
of the week, returning to their homes at its end ; bringing with
them enough food for the week. While thus assembled they
are instructed partly by the students, chiefly by the mis-
sionaries.

At the Apostolic College the daily horarium is simple.
They rise at five-thirty, and after fifteen minutes' prayer, vocal
and mental, Holy Mass follows at six. Clashes fill up the
forenoon, and class divides the afternoon with manual labor of
one hour and one-half. For catechetical work, however, several
catechisms are in use during the four years' course. A very
simple one of about forty pages in the vernacular is first mas-
tered ; next a larger and fuller, in preparation for the sacra-
ments, and lastly the catechism of a Frenchman, Pere Pacifique.
It is taught daily till it is learned by rote. Last year (1898-
1899) Monseigneur Streicher himself explained to the highest
class St. John's Gospel. After finishing, the young men se-
lected for that purpose by the authorities are sent forth as
catechists, who numbered on January I, 1899, in the vicariate,
one hundred and one ; and these teach schools as well as cate-
chise. Every catechist is paid for his work, and should he
marry does not lose his place. Every year for one whole
month every catechist, married or single, has to come to the
preparatory college for a retreat, fresh instructions, etc. While
on the missions the catechists are entirely subject to the local
missionary, who pays the salaries, gives daily lessons in the-
ology, trains, corrects, and where necessary discharges them.
Upon him also does the preparatory college depend for pupils.
The seminary has not as yet been started, but Monseigneur
Streicher looks forward to see it in work at no distant day.
His present plans make no provision for Greek or philosophy,

I8Q9-J A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. 7

while for dogmatic theology the Catechism of the Council of
Trent, and in moral, the catechism of Pere Pacifique, will serve
as text-books, which competent professors shall explain and
make practically applicable to the needs of the heart of
Africa. The entire burden of the support, clothing, books, etc.,
of these boys falls upon the White Fathers. It must indeed
be very heavy and trying for the generous sons of Lavigerie.

Among missionaries of our day, Cardinal Massajo, who had
spent thirty-five years in Ethiopia, is one of the most eloquent
and emphatic advocates for native catechists and priests. His
memoirs, printed at Propaganda, Rome, fill eleven volumes
folio. While he had in his journeys a number of native youths,
a kind of walking seminary, he also left catechists at all mis-
sion stations, who taught the people. Some he kept longer
under instruction than others one lot as long as seven years.
The teaching was chiefly oral, and conducted by Massajo and
his assistants, while the only Bible they had was a Protestant
edition. Without hem or haw, he attributes the success of his
apostolate to the native catechists and priests.

Again, three of the bishops of Japan, writing February,
1891, to M> l'Abb Marnas of Lyons, a priest devoting himself
to the work of educating and supporting native catechists in
Japan, declare :

" Aujourd'hui helas ! les catechists sont, en effet en nombre
insuffisant dans tous nos vicariats. Les multiplier e"quivaut,
dans une certaine mesure, a multiplier les missionnaires eux-
memes."

We know not a better way to close our references to the
work of catechists in foreign fields than by giving the sum-
mary of it from the History of the Foreign Missions of Paris,
by 1'Abbe Adrien Launay :

SUMMARY OF INSTRUCTIONS TO CATECHISTS.

" The catechist on the missions is called to fulfil the duties of secretary,
sacristan, physician, and teacher; he is, in a word, a necessary aid to the mis-
sioner, and one of the principal instruments of the apostolate. \Vithout his as-
sistance the most ardent zeal would be barren; with him, the work of the
missioner is rendered comparatively easy. The priest is the head of the mis-
sion ; the catechist is the arm, but an intelligent arm, one who knows how to
adapt himself to circumstances. The calechist is in a position to know thor-
oughly the manners, customs, and weaknesses of his compatriots; and it is
from him ordinarily that the missioner receives that information \\hich enables
him to act discreetly and to judge the people whom he may be called to guide.

" As the duty of the catechist is to teach others, he should be well instructed

8 A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. [Oct.,

in the doctrines of his faith, so that he may transmit them pure and unadulterated
to the catechumens. His constant warfare will be against the errors of the in-
fidels ; hence he should be thoroughly acquainted with their u ritings ; he should
study their fables, stories, and superstitions. It were useful also to know the
principal points of the pagan religion which bear a resemblance to the Christian
religion. With this preparatory training he vull the more readily refute the
objections of the infidels by arguments drawn from their own works. He should
be clear and precise in his explanations of the mysteries of religion, and be pre-
pared to answer the difficulties which may arise in the minds of his hearers. . . .
" A man who possesses the requisite qualifications should not be engaged
in this ministry unless he have a particular district in which he may labor under
the direction of a missioner or an older catechist " (Histoire de la Societd dcs
Missions tran%eres, par A. Launay).

PROTESTANT NEGRO CHURCHES: THEIR CLERGY, THEIR
MANAGEMENT.

In Eastern lands Catholic missionaries deal with pagans ;
we, however, who labor for the negroes in the United States
are dealing with a people who cannot be classed as pagans
even if in great part unbaptized. Whatever religious senti-
ments and ideals, training and education the American negroes
enjoy, the vast bulk of them have imbibed from their Protest-
ant white neighbors, whose slaves they and their ancestors had
been for two and one-half centuries. The "African Methodist
Church" has its bishops, ministers, itinerants, deacons, elders,
exhorters, class-leaders, as well as congregations fully equal to
if not more than one million and a half. Likewise the " Afri-
can Baptist Church " has the same officers, except bishops, and
,perhaps a larger number of followers all black also in every
-case.

In the hands of these negro churchmen are the finances of
their respective congregations, which are never laggards in the
support and maintenance of their clergy and churches, having
a uniform yearly tax, besides Sunday offerings and special
efforts, v g.y lectures, concerts, bazaars, etc., not to speak of
help from the royal generosity with which their Protestant
white countrymen pour out money in supporting them.

The white Protestants, ministers, lay men and women, labor-
ing for the negro race in our Southland are to be seen in the
black people's universities, seminaries, colleges, normal and in-
dustrial schools. Not a corporal's guard of white ministers can
be found in charge of negro churches. Moreover in those in-
stitutes are twenty-five thousand negro scholars forty thousand,
-some say of whom the seminaries alone have over a thousand
preparing for the Protestant ministry. Fas est et ab hoste

J899-] A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. g

doceri. If we have not as yet attempted on the negro missions
the work of catechists, which has stood the test for two centur-
ies on the Eastern missions, our Protestant countrymen have
done so very successfully. In fact, what are all their efforts
but the work of catechists? Even those of the ministers can
be nothing more in our eyes than such, since the Catholic
Church refuses to recognize any valid orders among them.

OBJECT AND METHOD OF TRAINING NEGROES.

It is, in part, to keep alive the faith among our Catholic
negroes, scattered up and down, here and there, like the few
grapes left on the vines after the vintage. It is, however,
chiefly to meet and offset the influence among negroes general-
ly of the Protestant negro preachers and elders, class-leaders
and exhorters, that we need negro catechists, who should be
solidly grounded in Christian doctrine and morals and thorough-
ly trained in a good course of studies. The influence of the
Protestant negro clergy over their church members and people
generally should not be pooh-poohed or set down as trivial.
The priests in the negro missions have too often felt its
strength. And we were not surprised to receive urgent appeals
from our missionaries in five different dioceses urging that this
long-thought-of college for negro catechists be started. True,
in nearly every mission and station the missionary finds some
one an old " uncle " or " mammy " who acts as catechist,
baptizes the dying children, visits the sick, argues for his or
her religion, announces the visit of the priest, and gets things
to rights for his coming. But such help is precarious, without
the proper fibre and, especially, without official standing.
Catholic catechists should be put in a position which would
make them in the eyes of their black countrymen as important
officially as the Protestant negro ministers.

In the efforts about to be made for training catechists the
following tentative plan will be followed till experience and
time enable us to develop and improve it :

1. Negro candidates for the catechetical school will live
under the watchful eye and care of the various missioners,
who after trying them for some time will send the selected
ones to the school itself.

2. At this college for catechists the course of studies will
include :

a. Course in English, mathematics, kindred branches, Chris-
tian doctrine, and Latin, about three years.

io A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECIIISTS. [Oct.,

b. Course of philosophy in last year of preceding coufse.

c. Three years' course of theology and Sacred Scripture. In
the former the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and in the
latter the Douai and Rheims Testaments, especially the four
Gospels, will be used as text-books, the professors by their ex-
planations making them text-books for the catechist's use in
his future career among the negroes.

3. Throughout the whole course manual labor for about two
hours daily will be a feature. All work about the house and
premises shall be done by the students.

4. When graduating those fitted will be received as cate-
chists by an appropriate ceremony, and then sent to the various
missions for work, getting in return a fair salary.

5. Those of the catechists on the mission who persevere
will be advanced step by step to the priesthood, while they
who marry may remain as catechists. Mission schools will also
be taught by these catechists.

St. Joseph's College for Negro Catechists will require a
farm of a few hundred acres of land, from which should be
raised most of the support needed. The buildings, large enough
for a hundred inmates, should be simple and plain, so that the
catechists on returning to their homes would not fancy it a
disgrace to associate with their old companions. Again, the
college must not create wants in the catechists ill-suited to the
tobacco, rice, and sugar plantations upon which their fellows
live. When visiting Booker Washington's institute at Tuskegee,.
Ala., we were struck with the plainness of the buildings, the
meagreness of the food, and the simple appearance of the
scholars. No doubt poverty plays some part in this, but at
bottom the real reason seems to be not to wean the scholars
from their native surroundings, for we must remember that
Booker Washington receives from his white Protestant country-
men about one hundred thousand dollars yearly.

The foregoing pages are based upon a memorial which, in
April, 1899, we submitted to the Sacred Congregation de
Propaganda Fide. Armed with testimonials from Cardinal
Gibbons to Cardinal Ledochowsk*, Prefect of Propaganda, and
from Cardinal Vaughan to Cardinal Ciasca, then Secretary of
Propaganda, we first discussed the question with these prelates,,
and then, at the suggestion of the Cardinal Prefect, embodied
the scheme in a memorial. Our plan was received very cordial-
ly and a hearty " God speed " was given us on our departure
from Rome. Furthermore, we have consulted several arch-

1899-] A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. n

bishops, bishops, and various priests, who one and all look upon
this movement as a development of vital necessity for the
evangelization of the negro race, several adding that a similar
college for catechists for the whites is also needed. In fact,
when in Rome, in an interview with the Very Rev. Father
David, O.S.F., consultor of some Roman congregations and a
high official in his order, he assured us that the Franciscans
are thinking of establishing a school for training catechists in
England in order to reach the masses of Englishmen.

Unless fortified by negro catechists and negro priests, we
shall always be at a disadvantage in dealing with the negro
millions beyond the pale of Holy Church. The negro looks
with suspicion upon white men. The impression left from
slavery ; the many dishonest tricks upon them ; unpaid wages ;
" store pay " ; bad titles to land ; unjust mortgages upon their
crops ; prisoners' stockades these and countless other wrongs
make the negroes suspicious of the whites. During two-and-
twenty years we have been in the closest relations with the
black race, have had their confidence in countless ways, are
now steadily consulted by them in their little troubles, financial
and otherwise ; yet we are not afraid to say that there is no
white man living has a negro's full confidence. We are told
by those who know nothing of this poor people that they do
not trust their own, that they prefer white priests. How that
can be said in the face of the millions belonging to Protestant
churches, every mother's son of whom, from bishop to the
latest baptized infant, is black, goes beyond our comprehension.
Chiefly is this true of negro priests. How can any one say the
negroes do not want their own priests, since the experiment
has never been tried, for we have had but two, one of whom
is dead ? And to our own knowledge, at every big marriage or
funeral among the Catholic colored people of Baltimore, they
want the colored priest. From all parts of the country they
are ever inviting him. Human nature is human nature in a
black man as well as it is in a white man.

In conclusion, the Third Council of Baltimore speaks with
no uncertain sound in favor of negro catechists : " Finally, we
must not pass over in silence that the establishment of cate-
chists of both sexes would not be more difficult among us
than in heathen countries, if missionaries would diligently at-
tend to it. The aid of such co-workers should be made much
of. For they will prepare the way for the sacred ministers by
gathering together the negroes in the neighborhoods of

12 A CATHOLIC COLLEGE FOR NEGRO CATECHISTS. [Oct.,

churches and by teaching them catechism and religious hymns,
so that the hard labor of the priest will produce richer results "
(Tit. viii. 240).

The twentieth century looms up before us. Leo. XIII., our
illustrious Pontiff, has blessed the opening age in proclaiming
a universal Jubilee, and called upon the whole world to con-
secrate itself anew to God and Him whom He sent, Jesus
Christ.

The various sects, too, look forward to the era before us;
the Methodists of the British Isles are reported as about to
raise a million pounds sterling for their Foreign Missions.

Let St. Joseph's College for Negro Catechists be the offer-
ing of our white Catholics to the cause of Christ and His
Church in this land of ours.

Surely the Negro Race may hail the twentieth century in a
happier, better state than the progeny of Ham have ever
known in the annals of mankind. What they lack is the true
Faith of Mary's Divine Son.

The nineteenth century brought them emancipation, right
of ownership, education, citizenship. Let the twentieth cen-
tury crown all by imparting to them the truths of our Holy
Religion, in which glorious task, with God's blessed help, no
small part shall be played by Saint Joseph's College for Negro
Catechists.

St. Joseph's Seminary for Negro Missions, Baltimore, Md.

1899-] THE SISTERS OF CHARITY. 13

ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND THE SISTERS OF

CHARITY.*

BY REV. WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P.

{ ATHER HECKER once called the writer's atten-
tion to the uniform, almost invariable, rule of
Providence in the establishment of religious or-
ders and other great revivals of the Christian
spirit, by which women have been associated with
men both as the pioneers and as the perpetuators of the divine
purposes. Not men only but men and women equally have
from time to time reformed religion, advanced God's kingdom
by missionary enterprises, and peopled it with new gener-
ations of saints. A glance at church history shows the truth
of this view.

This rule held good in the wonderful revival of religion
which was led and fashioned by St. Vincent de Paul and St.
Francis de Sales in the seventeenth century. The Vincentians
and the Sisters of Charity are related in the same close kinship
as the first and second orders of the mediaeval communities,
and St. Francis de Sales would not be what he is to the church
had he not been the founder and teacher of the Visitandines,
the largest part of his priceless spiritual doctrine being his best
thoughts given to his nuns.f

* This article is the sequel to the one on St. Vincent in the September number of this
magazine.

t The exceptions to this rule are more in appearance than reality. Take, for instance, the
Sulpitians. Women cannot be associated in their work of educating the clergy, but Jean
Jacques Olier was placed in the closest supernatural association with saintly religious women,
who were of essential help to him in founding his community. The Sulpitians made it
possible for Mother Seton to establish the Sisters of Charity in America and directed her and
her successors in that great undertaking. Again, if we must admit that the martial spirit of
St. Ignatius is hardly adjustable to the female character, yet saintly Jesuits have been the
chief means of founding various religious communities of women, especially those devoted,
like themselves, to Christian education. It is well known that St. Ignatius was very unwill-
ing to have his fathers officially associated with communities of women. Yet St. Teresa
bears witness that in all her travels through Spain she found in every Jesuit college men capable
of directing her nuns in the contemplative life, and the Jesuit Baltassar Alvarez was one of
her best assistants in the Carmelite reform. The Exercises of St. Ignatius are the yearly
spiritual renewal of all or nearly all the orders of women. Over a hundred years ago the Jesuits
of Maryland rendered inestimable service to religion in this country by the establishment, under
incredible difficulties, of the Sisters of the Visitation near their college at Georgetown, D. C.
But it still remains true that the normal relation of men and women in the great works of
religion, as seen in history, is an official one.

14 ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND [Oct.,

As to St. Vincent, it is true to say that St. Francis alone
knew women as well as he, and knew as well as he how to
sanctify them. St. Vincent knew the good material among
them and advanced it to the highest degree of perfection. He
and his methods have made good women our angels. Bad
women he reformed, not in particular cases but in great
multitudes, saving the evil ones by means of the good ones.
Even worldly-minded women could not escape him, for he got
their money for holy charity as no man before or since ever
did, and occasionally he secured their personal help.

Thus there are two men in the modern history of the female
sex who are pre-eminently their Apostles, St. Francis de Sales
and St. Vincent de Paul, the first being their doctor of holy
living and the second the lawgiver of their charity to the poor.
St. Francis is the doctor of holy living to all mankind, no
less to men than to women. But there is a special attraction
in his teaching for women who are yearning for the divine
spouseship. In St. Vincent, however, the sex found its master
organizer. And indeed, as we well remember Father Hecker
insisting, an integral work for human kind must sanctify men
and women equally if it is to be a mighty work, and an en-
during one ; it must train its heroines as well as its heroes.

But it is the peculiar glory of St. Vincent that his corps
(Telite of heroic women, the female auxiliaries of his mission-
aries, the church's modern apostolate of love, were chosen from
the so-called lower classes. The Ladies of Charity were destined
to survive only in fitful, broken, variable forms of public charity,
but the Sisters of Charity at once took root in the everlasting
church, are almost as universal as that mother of all loving
sympathy herself, and seem destined to continue their glorious
career to the end of the world.

But what led to this was Vincent's organization of the ladies
of the French nobility in the relief of the poor. He first be-
gan to organize his charity among ladies of the world in 1617,
while he was cur6 of Chatillon-les-dombes, a large rural parish
in the diocese of Lyons, to which he had withdrawn to escape
the aristocratic surroundings of the Gondi family, of which he
was chaplain. The rules he there drew up are so full of
practical wisdom that they might stand to-day, and indeed for
ever brief and yet full, clear, easily observed and practical,
yet breathing devout sentiment. The best of the ladies, both
married and single, of the noble and gentle families of the
neighborhood of Chatillon-les-dombes were drawn into the

iS99-j ThE BISTERS OF CHARITY. 15

THE FOUNDRESS OF THE SISTERS OF CHARITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City, of Protestant parents, August 28, 1774.
She was the daughter of Dr. Richard Bayley, an eminent physician. At the age of twenty
she was married to Mr. William Seton, a merchant of New York, and after nine years of
married life was left a widow. She became a convert, and was received into the church on
the i4th of March, 1805. Very soon after becoming a Catholic she was led by the Spirit of
God to establish a community of Sisters. In this she received the hearty approval of the
leading prelates of the church, being directed by the Sulpitian Fathers of Baltimore and
other holy priests. She asked for a colony of the French Sisters of Charity, and not being
able to get them, she adopted St. Vincent's rules and began the American community at
Emmitsburg, Md. She died there in the odor of sanctity January 4, 1821. The success of her
work is shown by the fact that in the diocese of New York alone nearly thirteen hundred Sis-
ters wear her habit.

society, which elected its own officers, took charge of all the
sick poor in the parish, visiting them in person and feeding
and washing and caring for them in every particular. The
ladies managed everything themselves, but under Vincent's
general direction, we might better say his inspiration.

Hardly had this been accomplished when Vincent returned
to the Gondi family in Paris, and immediately began the for-
mation of the " Ladies of Charity, Servants of the Poor," as
they were termed, in the capital, upon precisely the same plan
he had adopted in the country.

16 ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND [Oct.,

Within an incredibly short time thirty such associations of
charity in as many different parishes, and composed all of
ladies of quality, were in active operation, begun and super-
vised by St. Vincent. True Christian socialist, he always
began these societies of the rich for the relief of the poor im-
mediately after preaching a mission in the parish church, and
it is hard to say whether he benefited the upper class any
less by teaching them charity to the poor, than he did the
lower class by the eternal message of our Lord's pity for
sinners.

The inceptive of Vincent's mighty work was thus taken among
the titled ladies of France. That race of beings who were
then and are yet the leaders in every frivolity, clean and
unclean, of fashion and love, became under his sway the fore-
most of their sex, even of all human kind, in the offices of
high and holy charity.

These ladies were the sisters of women who had totally for-
saken the world to become Carmelites and Visitandines, and if
the oblation of the contemplatives was well pleasing to God,
hardly less acceptable was that of these noble visitors of the
hovels of the poor and co-workers with the Lord's anointed
high-priest of mercy to the miserable. Ardent love of the
poor was the air these ladies were made to breathe.

Many of them were educated far beyond the average of
their day, all were women of solid character and good com-
mon sense, and all were likewise wealthy, most of them, in-
deed, mistresses of vast fortunes, who lavishly spent large
sums for the relief of human suffering, if we may use the
word lavish in connection with the careful charity and sys-
tematic accountability maintained by St. Vincent in all his
works of religion.

Of these ardent, enterprising, daring souls St. Vincent was
the guide, even the inspiring angel. He harnessed their fiery
zeal with his prudence and tempered it with his patience and
his tact. In him God they soon began to learn it had
placed at the head of their enterprises the most powerful
and most saintly character of his time. He alone, after the
death of St. Francis de Sales, was the most worthy to lead
women who proved themselves capable of selling their diamonds
and their carriages for the relief of the poor; and who begged
for them by every kind of begging, from extorting hundreds
and thousands of livres from dainty courtiers to picking up
the greasy sous flung to them at the street-corners. History

1 8 9 9-]

THE SISTERS OF CHARITY.

shows no parallel to Vincent's success in using women of
high society for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the lowest
classes.

At one crisis this organization, counting over three hundred
members, all of the highest classes, collected and spent nearly
two million dollars, equivalent in our money to at least twice
its nominal value. " But
these ladies," says St. Vin-
cent's biographer, " were
not content with collecting
money and becoming the
never-failing support of St.
Vincent; they went in per-
son to see the poor in the
Hotel Dieu. This is what
the saint held in highest es-
teem. 4 To send money is
good,' he said, * but we have
not really begun to serve
the poor till we visit them.' "
And he instructed them
elaborately on this point.
" When going to visit the
poor," he said, "you should
leave off your jewels and
finery, and be dressed very
simply, for the contrast of
luxury on the one side and
poverty on the other, makes
the condition of the poor
all the more painful." He
also loved " to point out in
detail the marks of pro-
found respect which should
be shown to the poor, saying that the men should raise their
hats and the ladies incline their heads as before their superiors."
He would have all feel as he did himself: the poor literally
represented Jesus Christ to him. If he happened to be alone
with a poor person, he did not hesitate to kiss his feet. "Our
dear poor and sick," he said, " are our lords and masters, for
our Lord is in them, and they in him."

The visiting of the great hospital, the Hotel Dieu, by these
ladies, conducted, as were all Vincent's undertakings, with as

VOL. LXX. 2

MRS. SETON, AFTERWARD FOUNDRESS OF THE
AMERICAN SISTERS OF CHARITY.

i8 ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND [Oct.,

much tact as charity, and thoroughly systematized, resulted
not only in the cessation of many abuses and the full develop,
ment of the institution's capacity for curing the sick, but the
very first year was the means of over seven hundred conver-
sions to the Catholic faith. The Huguenots were yet numerous
in France, and the Hotel Dieu was the receptacle of the un-
fortunate of every race, including Turks and barbarians. Much
the same may be said of the work of the Ladies of Charity
in the prisons. Their motto was always and everywhere
" God and the poor," the true faith of Christ and his tender
charity.

Nor did these ladies parade about as if they had renounced
their state of life as wives and daughters of the noblesse. No,
they were just ladies of the world, only fully alive to the
maxims of the Gospel. Of one who was, next to Mademoiselle
Le Gras, Vincent's chief lieutenant, it is said :

" What was most attractive in Madame Goussault was the
manner in which she united simplicity and affability with
virtue. She did not pose as a reformer, but lived simply and
uprightly. She thoroughly enjoyed an hour at backgammon,
for she always condescended in what was not sinful. Hence
she had only one regret after her stay at Angers, and that was
that she had refused to allow her portrait to be taken. 'It is
the custom,' she writes, ' everybody does it, and after death
it is placed in the church near the tomb. Now I refused to
have mine taken, and I am sorry, for it seems to me to have
been false humility, and condescension would have been bet-
ter." 1 Yet Madame Goussault was a heroine of the highest
order, and her deeds of charity would render her worthy of
canonization.

As to the spiritual side of their lives, the very feeding-bed
of all these fruitful plants of holy charity, St. Vincent sketched
it with his masterly hand thus: "These ladies shall study to
acquire Christian perfection suitable to their state, spend half
an hour in meditation, and hear Mass daily. They shall read
a chapter from the Introduction to a Devout Life, or The Love
of God [the chief spiritual works of St. Francis de Sales], make
an examination of conscience every day, and confess and com-
municate at least each week."

The high nobility of France was thus toned up to high
religious fervor, and the women of the proudest feudal fami-
lies in Christendom became the humble servants of the poor.
" For more than eight hundred years," said St. Vincent de

1 899.] THE SISTERS OF CHARITY. 19

Paul to them, "women have had no public employment in the
church. See here how Providence calls on you, ladies, to
supply this want: the support and instruction of the sick poor
at the Hotel Dieu, the nursing and rearing of foundlings, the
spiritual and temporal care of the galley-slaves, the relief of
the desolated frontiers and provinces of our country, the sup-
port of the missions in the East, North, and South, these are
the labors you have undertaken and accomplished during the
past twenty years." They might and doubtless did respond
that it was by his courage, patience, genius of organization,
and especially his supernatural sway over women's hearts, that
they had been able to begin and carry on such stupendous
enterprises of heavenly charity.

That all this was smooth sailing no one can imagine. The
most peaceful of men, he yet was forced to fight, and in his
own way did fight and win many battles with women before
he prevailed. We give a notable instance. It happened once
that Vincent managed, but only after a prolonged struggle, to
prevent the appointment of an unworthy young nobleman to a
" lucrative " bishopric, an appointment which the queen had
already promised. Vincent succeeded with the queen only
after incredible and persistent protest. When he called on the
duchess, the young man's mother, he was received with great
joy, because the lady was full sure of having obtained the
prize for her son. " You come from the queen ? " she eagerly
asked. " Yes, madame," and then he communicated the rejec-
tion of her son, and added: "The, queen counts on your re-
ligious principles, and does not doubt that on reflection you
will thank her now for withdrawing her promise, and you cer-
tainly will in eternity." Upon which the noble lady snatched
up a footstool and flung it at the saint. It struck him square
in the face and cut a gash in his forehead, covering his face
with blood. Without a word he wiped the blood off with
his handkerchief and quietly left the room. As he started
home he made this, his only comment : " Is it not a wonder-
ful thing to see how far a mother's love for her son will carry
her?"

Vincent must have seen from the beginning that his charities
needed more for their full development than the Association of
Ladies could give ; his vocation was that of a great founder,
and he needed a numerous and enduring and coherent organiza-
tion. Their duties at home were often imperative and hindered
their personal attention to charitable works ; their number was

Sr. VINCENT DE PAUL AND [Oct.,

limited ; their whole lives, except in such rare cases as Madame
Goussault and Mademoiselle Le Gras, could not be dedicated
to the poor, and, especially, their organization could not be
otherwise than partial and temporary. Vincent carefully watched
his opportunities, or rather followed his providences, and little
by little selected devout country girls living at service in Paris,
and made them the Ladies' helpers ; in time they were destined
to assume entire charge. At first they lodged with the Ladies,
helped them in their visits to the sick and to the prisons, and
here was an important step Vincent finally began to assemble
them at St. Lazare and instruct them on the spirit of their
work on their vocation, as he soon began to call it. And
this is the origin of one of the greatest religious orders of the
Catholic Church.

God sent Vincent such choice souls for this new undertak-
ing that we plainly see the divine hand in the selection of
the foundation stones. We must refer the reader to Bishop
Bougaud's work for the details, the study of which reveals the
marvellous, and yet almost imperceptible, guidance of the Holy
Spirit.*

For the organization of the Sisters Vincent needed a great
woman, and God sent him Mademoiselle Le Gras. She was his
chosen associate for more than thirty years, and these two were
like two archangels for courage, for enlightenment, for love of
God and man, for harmonious action, and were rewarded with
perfect success. Not the least of Vincent's gifts was his knowl-
edge of character, and, says his biographer, " he was not slow to
recognize the treasure God had sent him [in Mademoiselle Le
Gras], and he cultivated it like a master. He wrote to her almost
daily, and heard her confession weekly. He never left Paris
without going to see her, or excusing himself if he could not
do so. He directed her retreats and gave her the subjects of
her meditations. He solicited her advice on all matters, and
in such an humble and respectful manner that no sign of
superiority, much less of familiarity, ever appeared, leaving us
a perfect and enduring model of the relation of director and
penitent."

Louise de Marillac (such was her maiden name) was born
of a noble family in Paris in 1591. At the age of twenty-one,

* We call the reader's attention to a book which is worthy to serve as a companion to the
work of Bishop Bougaud. In 1884 the Benziger Brothers brought out an excellent translation
of a then very recent Life of Mademoiselle Le Gras (Louise de Marillac), Foundress of the
Sisters of Charity. Translated by a Sister of Charity. The anonymous author is probably of
the same community.

THE SISTERS OF CHARITY.

having lost her father, she married Antoine Le Gras. He was
not exactly of noble blood, though a gentleman of the court,
and hence his wife could not be called Madame ; this explains
her prefix of Mademoiselle. After twelve years of very happy
and very pious married life she was left a widow. Providence
had already blessed her with the acquaintance of St. Francis
de Sales, who had enriched her soul with many jewels of
heavenly wisdom. But it was a soul from first to last very
darksome, tending to doubtfulness
of God's love, over-sensitive to
its own faults. And her bodily
health was never robust. During
her whole life she bore the double
burden of an ailing body (and at
intervals one that was barely alive)
and an anxious spirit. To these
subjective trials family troubles
of the most grievous kind were
added after her husband's death,
for Richelieu beheaded her uncle,
Marshal Louis de Marillac, one of
the foremost soldiers of France,
and her other uncle, Michel, once
chancellor of France, escaped a MLLE> LE GRAS '

like fate by perishing miserably in prison. Louise loved both
these men tenderly, and they loved and cherished her, and, be-
sides, they were Christians of eminent virtue.

Overflowing thus with inner misery and overwhelmed with
outer misfortunes, Louise, meantime, worked zealously with the
Ladies of Charity and was guided by St. Vincent de Paul into
happier spiritual conditions ; these would last for shorter or
longer intervals, to be succeeded always by conditions of in-
terior distress, which again yielded to the influence of St. Vin-
cent. And so he helped her to bear her burden, as she shared
his heavy responsibilities in the relief of the poor and the foun-
dation of the Sisters of Charity. Louise was a saint of that
kind of heroism which must labor in the dark. She was like
an artist whose gifts are of the highest kind, and whose eye-
sight of the worst. Absolutely no height of self-denial was
beyond her aspiration, and the love'of God was her very pas-
sion. But her providential union with St. Vincent in the for-
mation of the Sisters of Charity turned all the waters of her
sadness and all the aspirations of her heroic soul into the one

22 ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND [Oct.,

absorbing purpose of her life, the solace of human misery for
the sake of Jesus Christ. There were many great women those
times, but to Louise Le Gras was given an honor in her asso-
ciation with Vincent de Paul only to be compared with that
of Jane Frances de Chantal similarly placed with St. Francis
de Sales. When Vincent had learned to know Louise well,
he found in her that Lady of Charity fitted to be the foun-
dress of the Sisters of Charity. What more could heart of
woman crave ?

This great soul went to her reward on the 1 5th of March,
1660, a few months before Vincent's death.

Every one now acknowledges that God favored the forma-
tion of this wondrous community with a Providential guidance
altogether extraordinary. But even a cursory reading of this
life (and particularly that of Mademoiselle Le Gras) shows that
even in minute particulars God guided Vincent and his coadjutrix
with special light. How otherwise explain the fact that these
daughters of peasants so seldom failed, we will not say of suc-
cess, but of remarkable success; that it was usual to send a hand-
ful of these country girls into a large town to take over the full
control of a great hospital or asylum, deal with exacting trus-
tees about funds and sometimes with suspicious and too often
with indifferent ecclesiastics about canonical affairs, and yet
never, or almost never, to fail ? The spiritual training which Vin-
cent and Mademoiselle Le Gras gave the sisters accounts mainly
for this ; and it was singularly patriarchal. His conferences to the
community in Paris, where all were prepared for their work,
were held frequently, and were the family reunions, we might
say, of father and mother and children. Vincent, after a short
prayer, proposed some virtue, and explained it very simply.
He then began asking questions, giving each sister an oppor-
tunity to apply her mind, and inviting her to express her views,
he commenting on them in the most naive spirit. Everything
was very informal, full of good sense, but aimed at the highest
standard of perfection. This method set the sisters thinking
for themselves upon spiritual things, and caused them to know
as well by personal reflection and intelligent assimilation as by
instruction the virtues of the Gospel, and the application of
them to their state of life and its various duties.

Pretty nearly all his dealings with the community, even the
most official, were carried on in this way. We quote a specimen
from the Life of Mademoiselle Le Gras (pages 218-219). Having
appointed a Sister Servant (as the superiors are called) for an

1899-] THE BISTERS OF CHARITY. 23

important undertaking, "a new mission in one of the largest
cities of the kingdom, he informed her in full community that
Providence had chosen her. * What shall we give Sister Eliza-
beth for her journey ? ' he asked, while she remained mute with
astonishment ; ' each one must give her something. Let us see.
What virtue can we give her?' The first sister who was inter-
rogated wished for her companion the love of God ; another,
wished her love for the poor ; Mademoiselle Le Gras, the cordial
support of her sisters; and M. Almeras, invited to make his gift
also, wished her l gay patience.' 'See what riches, my daugh-
ter; of which I wish you the plenitude/ said St. Vincent;
'but what I wish for you especially is to do the will of God,
which consists not only in doing what our superiors require,
though this is a sure way to arrive at it, but still more in cor-
responding with all the interior inspirations that God will
send us.' "

This reveals Vincent's confident trust in the ripeness of the
sisters' personal holiness, and his desire that they should turn
their glances inward for the Holy Spirit's guidance, never fail-
ing to use, however, the divine test of obedience to the exter-
nal order of God in the approval of superiors.

He never ceased to exalt their vocation to them, or to insist
upon its divine dignity. Mademoiselle Le Gras followed this up
in his own spirit and caught much of the familiar style of the
saint. We quote from her life (pages 291-292): " * Your spirit,'
she said to the community, ' consists in the love of our Saviour,
the source and model of all charity, and in rendering Him all
the service in your power, in the persons of old men, infants,
the sick, prisoners, and others. When I think of all your hap-
piness, I wonder why God has chosen you. What could you
desire on earth for your perfection that you have not? You
are called by God to employ all )our thoughts, words, and ac-
tions for His glory.' She insisted that although they were not
and never could be religious, they should lead a life as perfect
as that of the most holy professed in a monastery. . . .
They ought to be strong-minded women in the right sense,
finding no difficulty in labor ; open-hearted, cordial, and meek
with every one, having nothing constrained, much less affected,
in their manners. St. Vincent recommended them, and Made-
moiselle Le Gras repeated to them to keep the eyes modestly
lowered, for an excess of modesty in this respect might hinder
outsiders from the service of God, by frightening them, and thus
prevent the good often effected by modest gaiety."

24 ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND [Oct.,

The result of all this discipline of holy love was the Sister
of Charity as we know her to-day, and as men the world over
know her to their heavenly and earthly comfort womanhood
according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

While Vincent and Mademoiselle Le Gras were thus enrolling
and disciplining these peaceful cohorts of holy women, arming
them with those weapons of love with which they were to win
heavenly victories all over the world, Louis XIV. was begin-
ning to form those great armies of men who were to make his
reign so " glorious," and so bloody. Vincent began the con-
quest of the world with a few little groups of peasant girls.
His second in command was a delicate and scrupulous widow
lady who was always longing, as she was always waiting, to die
for the poor. Vincent's soldiers now garrison the cities of the
world, wearing a hundred different uniforms of love, daily vic-
tors in many conflicts between pity and woe. See the contrast
between the village lads of France and their sisters as disci-
plined respectively by Louis the Great and Vincent the Peace-
ful, the one using the terror and hate of war, and the other the
love and patience 'of the Gospel as the inspiring motives. When
the Sisters heard of their companions dying in pest-houses or
among the wounded on battle-fields, they eagerly volunteered
to take their places. At one time news came of such a death,
and an old sister wrote : " Sister Marguerite is dead sword in
hand" and hurried on to take her place. It has always been
so. General Jacob D. Cox, an American Protestant, writing
in The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, tells what hap-
pened when our great war broke out in 1861, and the regi-
ments which were made up of country boys suffered from
epidemics of sickness. The scene was Camp Dennison, near
Cincinnati :

" The Sisters of Charity, under the lead of Sister Anthony, a
noble woman, came out in force, and their black and white
robes harmonized picturesquely with the military surroundings,
as they flitted about under the rough timber framing of the
old barn, carrying comfort and hope from one rude couch to
another." And this was kept up on both sides of the dreadful
conflict and to the very end. During the recent Spanish war
hundreds of our Sisters of Charity and of the kindred com-
munities ministered to the sick and wounded soldiers, and if
the official thanks of the government were scanty, the soldiers
and officers and surgeons bore abundant witness to their unas-
suming but heroic devotedness. Then and before many notable

1 899.]

THE SISTERS OF CHARITY.

THE CRADLE OF THE INFANT COMMUNITY (1809), EMMITSBURG, MD.

conversions were the spiritual fruit of the Apostolate of bodily
charity.*

While teaching the Sisters the principles and practice of
perfection Vincent was himself slowly studying how to draw up
their constitution. "That constitution," says his biographer
(vol. i. p. 306), " was singularly courageous. It took our saint
more than twenty years to conquer public opinion, the objec-
tions of the king and parliament, and the prudent hesitation
of the pope and cardinals. It is true now, however, that that
constitution, after having been an object of wonder to the
world, has become an object of admiration." To perfectly
adapt the new institute to its work, St. Vincent not only decided
against solemn vows and the enclosure, not only passed over
perpetual vows, but he asked the Sister of Charity to bind her-
self only from year to year. " Perhaps," says Bishop Bougaud,
" if he had been free, he would have required no vows, and so
have allowed their devotedness its full liberty. . . . Despite
all opposition the saint created this new type of servants of

* It happened once that a poor wretch was brought to a Sisters' Hospital and died after
a few days of suffering. On entering he said he had no religion and no use for religion.
But the day he died he called for the chaplain. "Sir," he said, "I want to die in the reli-
gion of that lady with the big white bonnet who has been taking care of me."

26 ST. VINCENT DE PA UL AND [Oct.,

God in the service of his poor " (vol. i. p. 309). Nobody
thinks now that this great Christian legislator was anywise un-
true to that highest ideal of the spiritual life which is secured
by the solemn vows and the cloister. We suspect, however,
that he was roundly accused of it during his long and patient
struggle for those advantages which, under certain circumstances
and for particular ends, are to be gained by a larger degree of
personal liberty. " You are not religious in the strict sense,"
he said to the Sisters, " and can never be, because of the
service of the poor. You must therefore even be holier than
religious, since you have greater temptations and less security "
(vol. i. p. 310).

Providence blessed this courage to an unheard-of degree.
Vincent's institute, preserving intact its peculiar features, has,
both in itself and in the innumerable congregations of women
which pattern on it, become the wonder of the world and, we
may even say, the chief glory of the Church of Christ. Thus did
he create a new form of the religious life outside of what was
technically termed the religious state, and this he did without
prejudice to any older institute or form of religion; nay, the
spirit of St. Vincent has assisted various of the older forms to
reach out into newer methods without lesion to the salutary
bonds binding them to ancient ways.

The work of Vincent, evidently Christian as it seems to
our day, and peaceably, cautiously, we might almost say re-
luctantly undertaken, was yet hard of entrance into the favor
of many in authority. The idea of the Sisters of Charity, to
quote the author of the Life of Mademoiselle Le Gras, had been
" unfolded under the breath of God, and yet it was in opposi-
tion to the manners and ideas of the time." A community of
young girls having hardly a convent of their own, living as
much among the homes of the poor as anywhere else, "having
no enclosure but the streets of the city and the wards of the
hospital, having no grate but the fear of God, no veil
but holy modesty, was an innovation strange and bold, to
some rash." It was introduced, besides, at a time when the
monastic life of women under strict enclosure was flourishing
in a high degree. The reader will also bear in mind that St.
Francis de Sales, not many years before St. Vincent began,
had been compelled, much against his will, to place in en-
closure and under solemn vows his own community of women,
originally intended to be without either of these holy re-
straints. Now, we know that Vincent's relations with St.

1 899.]

THE SISTERS OF CHARITY.

THE ORIGINAL MOTHER-HOUSE OF THE SISTERS OF CHARITY.

Francis de Sales were most intimate. Perhaps during their
exchange of views on God's purposes in their day, Francis
made Vincent the legatee of some of his own lights about the
spiritual career of women.

In the founding of the Sisters of Charity love foreran the
law: the saint taught the canonist. This is nearly always the
case with God's greater works, for as the ordinary administra-
tion of religion needs the discipline of statutes and precedents
and the orderly but too often routine mind of the official, so the
renewal of the
fervor of the
gospel must fre-
quently break
through prece-
dents with self-
evident fruits of
love, must often
suffer hurt from
officials, who
endeavor to
whip it into con-
formity with

those legally established systems it is divinely appointed to differ
from because it must improve them, sometimes even supplant
them. Only this must be noted : the saints in carrying out God's
will of the renewal of souls are taught by his guidance the ways
of peace and of obedience. Love does not war against law, but
overcomes by persuasion, and by patience. Thus Vincent, the
foremost innovator of his age, was a feslina lentc innovator.

These new movements for the elevation of the peasant class,
who, as Bishop Bougaud tells us, were looked upon as little better
than beasts by the nobility, could not fail to arouse opposition.
The cry of novelty was raised, a cry ever at the lips of com-
fortable mediocrity, and that cry was heard even in high places.
Let us recall an instance. When Mademoiselle Le Gras began
to go about opening schools for the peasant children she always
and as a matter of course obtained leave of the clerical authori-
ties. Having spent two months at this work on one of her
journeys, "all at once the Bishop of Chalons, in whose diocese
she was travelling, became alarmed at the unusual practices and
demanded an account. ' If Monseigneur de Chalons wishes it
and he is near,' wrote St. Vincent, ' you would do well to see
him and tell him quite simply what you are doing. Offer to

28 THE SISTERS OF CHARITY. [Oct.

retrench as much as he wants, or to leave off altogether if not
agreeable to him : such is the spirit of God.' The bishop, whose
intentions are beyond all doubt, could not understand the ad-
vantage of this new form of charity ; and Mademoiselle Le Gras
was obliged to return to Paris. The saint congratulated her on
this trial. . . . ' Perhaps you will never meet with an occur-
rence redounding more to the glory of God than this one.
Oar Saviour will receive more glory from your submission than
from all the good you could have done ' " (Life of Mademoiselle
Le Gras, pp. 90-91).

We hear much in our day of the elevation of the female
sex, and we hear it very gladly, for it is the weaker sex, the
one that suffers most, and the one which in its grandeur of
affection is the type of God's loving kindness. But we must
admit that many useless and some hurtful results follow con-
temporary endeavors to better the condition of women. Vincent
de Paul leads the world in the true advancement of the sex,
always safe and yet wonderfully progressive.

Was ever a man so equal to the task of gaining women
their rights as Vincent ? Since our Lord emancipated the sex
by His mother's elevation to the throne of the Christian world,
no man, it seems to us, did so much as Vincent de Paul to
broaden the usefulness of woman, to enlighten her understand-
ing, to sanctify her affections. Yet he never gushed over wo-
men, nor relaxed his watchfulness against sexual familiarity.
He never forgot, not even unto extreme old age, the danger
that lurks in our fallen nature, even in the purest communica-
tions between man and woman. The authentic portrait of Vin-
cent shows us a man wholly unattractive in appearance, a face
worse than plain ; and we are told that his demeanor was
almost the reverse of joyous. Austere in his own private life,
he was so in his manners with the female sex. The most
chaste of men, he never relaxed the precautions of priestly
decorum, was never alone with any woman, had no lighter mo-
ments with them, took none of his recreation in their com-
pany. This is proof (the experienced priest needs none) that
women worth guiding to interior or exterior perfection, to
piety or to charity, are won as men are, by the solid quali-
ties of Christian virtue, and by these alone.

, HE OLD

BY ARTHUR WHEELCCK UFSON.

ELOQUENT of the Evermore

The old cathedral calmly stands

And blesses, as with outstretched hands,
The city plodding past its door.

The furrowed steps, the walls' gray stone,

The arched windows, plain and high,
That snatch white squares of sunlight down

From the brimmed bosom of the sky,
Are symbols of the hoary Faith

Whose steps lead up a foot-worn way,
And through whose misnamed window, Death,

There glances the abundant day.

Within, vague whis-
perings of hope
Go trembling by
where, echo-trod,
Prayer-crowded in-
cense pathways
grope

The dim way up-
ward unto God.

Though priestly
chant may
backward roll,
Heavy with
weight of con-
scious bas.s,
The faltered pray-
er of one faint
soul
Mounts the light incense

to His face.
Here the mute, quivering

heart may rest

However slight its wisdom be,
And beat its cares out on the breast
Of an omniscient sympathy.

1 899-] AKT IS LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. 31

ART IS LONG AND TIME IS FLEETING.

BY "TERESA."

SHAFT of sunlight fell slantwise through the
window of the studio.

It was not exactly such a studio as a fastidi-
ous artist of the Tadema school would have
longed to possess, but to its owner it was a very
paradise, the one spot upon earth that he would not willingly
have exchanged for a palace, even though a dream of archi-
tectural beauty and artistic delight.

He was standing before the easel, a thin, spare figure,
strangely youthful in outline despite his forty-two winters, and
the closely shaven crown, and coarse habit of dark brown
serge that marked him as a son of St. Francis.

The bare, cold cell, with its narrow window, its stone flags
and bare walls, and the tiny truckle bed in one corner, with
the crucifix and solitary prie-dieu of most uncomfortable con-
struction, was indeed a paradise to Fra Benedict. He would
willingly have spent the whole of his time there save that de-
voted to the offices in the church, but the prior was skilled in
mortification and penance, and he saw to it that Fra Benedict
did a sufficient number of distasteful tasks to win him a
guerdon of merit, albeit that he was a genius and his paint-
ings the only things wherein the humble brethren took a
pride.

The delicate features, worn with austerities, had a look of
pensive sadness not usual to them. There was a picture upon
the easel, and the monk's gaze was directed towards it. It
was an unfinished picture, yet the paint did not look fresh ; on
the contrary, it had the appearance of having been dry for
many years. The subject was evidently intended for the
Madonna and Child ; the figures were finished, the delicate
drapery of the Virgin's robes and the exquisite flesh-tints of
the lovely baby limbs showing the genius of the artist.

But one peculiarity immediately struck the beholder: the
figures were minus the heads, and where they should have
been the canvas showed traces of recent work.

" Will it never come ? " whispered Fra Benedict " the

32 ART is LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. [Oct.,

vision that was promised to me when that picture was begun
twenty years ago. Twenty years ! O Mother ! " and he sank
upon his knees, with his arms raised in supplication, " how
long wilt thou leave thy servant unconsoled ? Mary, Mother
of my Lord, let me but see thy face once, only once ! I ask
it, that I may show thee as thou art ; that all the world may
see the loveliness of Heaven's glorious Queen. No brush hath
painted thee, O Mary ; let me, for the love I bear thee, pic-
ture thy beauteous face and the face of thy Son."

The sunlight died down, and left the light in the cell a
delicate gray. Out of the shadow the two figures shone, mak
ing the only spot of brightness in the studio. Only, where the
faces should have been, there was nothing.

Outside, the quavering voice of Fra Antonio, the gate-
keeper, was wafted up through the still, evening air, answering
a beggar who importuned for food.

" Yes, yes, my poor brother ; sit down on the bench and
you shall have a basin of porridge."

" Porridge ! " grumbled the other. " Nice mess for a man
who has footed it from Carpineto. Sapristi ! What do they do
with those sheep over in the field yonder that they can't give
away a good stew of meat ? "

Fra Antonio's sandals were clattering through the corridor
on their, way to the kitchen and he did not hear the ungrate-
ful comments of the guest.

But, through the unglazed window of his cell Fra Benedict
heard, and for a moment an expression of disgust crossed his
beautiful face. The next instant he was on his knees before
the crucifix, asking pardon for his fault.

The dusk was deepening ; a colony of sparrows were going
to roost just outside the window, and were making as much
fuss over it as they thought necessary. The stranger had fin-
ished his porridge and departed, or so Fra Antonio thought ;
in reality, he was lying not far from the monastery gate, stricken
down with a fever that had been hanging over him for days.
But he was quite still, and nobody heard or saw anything of
him until two of the brethren returning from the fields found
him and carried him in.

Fra Benedict was in his place in choir and his sweet tenor
voice ted the brethren in the psalms and antiphons, but his
eyes were always fixed far before him in that gaze of expect-
ancy and longing that had become habitual, and made the
simple lay brothers regard him somewhat in awe. " Fra Bene-

1899-] ART is LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. 33

diet surely sees visions," whispered they. Alas! the vision he
had longed for for twenty years had not come to him yet.

Through the darkness and chill of the winter night the
brethren wended their way back to their cells to snatch a few
hours of sleep before midnight called them once more to
prayer.

But Fra Benedict could not sleep ; he threw himself on his
knees by the side of his hard couch, and prayed long and
fervently prayed that the vision for which his soul hungered
might be vouchsafed to him. Suddenly he started; the cell
seemed filled with a silvery radiance, and he looked around
eagerly, half expecting to see some answer to his petition. It
was only the moon, flooding the cell with her white beams and
seeming to single out the unfinished picture as a focus for her
light. The bell for Matins rang out, and again the noiseless
procession of monks filed back and forth.

Again Fra Benedict flung himself on the chill flags beside
his bed and prayed. How long he prayed he knew not it
seemed hours when suddenly his numbed senses awoke, or
seemed to wake, from a torpor, and he found the cell filled
with a bright and dazzling light that came from the picture on
the easel. Trembling and half afraid, he forced himself to look
towards it. As he did so his heart leaped. There on the
canvas was pictured a face so exquisite, so delicately lovely
and ethereal, that the mind of man could never have conceived
it. The tender lips, the yearning pity in the lovely eyes as of
a mother for her children, held him spell-bound, and filled his
soul with the intense, passionate longing of the artist to trans-
fer them to the canvas. He did not know how long the vision
lasted, or how it disappeared. When he returned again to
consciousness he was kneeling beside his bed and the soft gray
light of dawn was struggling through the casement. The picture
was as he had left it, but the vision had been enough; he had
the inspiration now and could finish it ; the Virgin and Child
were there in his mental vision, as clearly as they had been the
night before. Was it a dream, or really a vision vouchsafed
to his waking senses ? He could not tell, he only knew that
he remembered it and that it was the realization of his ideal.
The light was increasing moment by moment ; soon it would
be strong enough to work by. He seized the colors eagerly
and began mixing them ; he would have two or three hours
wherein to work before he was called to Mass, and he must
lose no time in transferring those exquisite faces to the canvas
VOL. LXX. 3

34 ART is LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. [Oct.,

before the memory of them grew duller. As he was preparing his
brushes and palette there came a knock at the cell door, and
the wrinkled face of Fra Antonio was thrust in : " Peace be to
thee, brother," said he. " And to thee," replied Fra Benedict
gravely.

"I am sent by the prior," continued the old monk, "to ask
you to come and see the stranger who was stricken down
yester eve at the gate. The man is from Carpineto, and since his
senses have returned he has been asking for one of the brethren
from that place. Only yourself and Fra Bartolomeo are from
Carpineto. The prior says that if you are at work you are
not to disturb yourself ; he will send for Fra Bartolomeo, who
has gone to the fields with the novices ; but the man is sinking
fast, and may die at any moment."

Fra Benedict listened half abstractedly. Should he go, and
risk the loss of his artistic inspiration ? He could say with truth
that he was indeed working, and the prior would accept the
excuse. But charity to the dying, was not that of more im-
portance even than his art and the moments that were so
precious to him ? True, he could do very little for the man
except soothe his last moments, for he was not a priest. He
looked wistfully at the picture. Should he stay or go?

Suddenly there came back to him the memory of his
momentary want of charity the day before. He would atone
for it. " I was preparing to work," he said simply, "but I can
leave it to another time ; I will come with you, brother."

Another look at the picture, a half articulate prayer to Mary,
and he followed Fra Antonio from the cell.

They traversed the cold corridors in the half light of early
morning, Fra Benedict's long, slender hands holding his rosary
as he rapidly and softly repeated the Aves of the first decade.
Fra Antonio stopped at the door of the infirmary and looked
back ; " He is very weak," he said, an accent of pity in the
quavering old voice ; then he opened the door and the two
entered. On a clean white bed at the further end of the long
room lay a still figure, exhausted by the violence of the rav-
ings that had continued all the night without intermission.
The Fra Infirmarian came towards them softly: "He is con-
scious," he whispered.

Fra Benedict approached the bed. As he looked at the sick
man his rosary fell from his nerveless fingers, and with a half
articulate cry he dropped on his knees beside the bed, clasping
one of the fever-wasted hands in both his own. Fra Antonio

1899-] ART is LONG AND TIME is FLEETIAG. 35

and the infirmarian looked on in amazement, which was not
decreased when they heard the patient muimur in a weak
voice : " Benedict ! "

" My brother, O my brother!" sobbed Fra Benedict. "And
I knew not that you were here."

"Nay, how should you?" returned the sick man, "when I
did not know you were a monk, much less in this monastery.
We thought you dead, we I fool that I was ! I thought to
worm myself into the love of our father when I had driven
you forth, and now, now I am an outcast, a penniless wanderer
on the earth. Soon I shall be dead and food for worms"; he
shuddered convulsively.

" Hush," said Fra Benedict soothingly; "ask pardon of the
good God, confess your sins, and he will forgive and receive you
again."

" Forgive ! " said the other wildly. " Is there forgiveness for
such a wretch as I ? I who drove my brother from his inheri-
tance and broke my father's heart, squandering his substance
in riotous living, and setting the laws of God at defiance. It
is too late ; I have sinned too deeply to hope for pardon."

" Giacomo," said Fra Benedict gently, "if a weak man can
forgive a wrong done to him, fully and freely forgive it, can
you not believe that He whose attributes are love and mercy
will receive a penitent sinner through the merits of the
Precious Blood of His Son, who died for sinners?"

The weak clasp of the hot hand grew suddenly strong, and,
with an effort, the sick man raised himself and gazed straight
into his brother's eyes.

"Do you really forgive me, Benedict? Am I in truth your
brother, as I was in childish innocence at our mother's knee ? "

" By that mother's name, Giacomo, and by hers who is
Mother alike of saint and sinner, you are my beloved brother,
and I do forgive you, now and for ever," was the solemn
reply.

The sick man covered his face with his hands and burst
into tears. Fra Benedict made a sign to Fra Antonio, who
immediately shuffled off in search of one of the padres.

In half an hour the burdened soul of another sinner had
been washed in the Blood of Christ and fortified with the
Bread of Heaven ; and Fra Benedict sealed his forgiveness with
the kiss of peace. The sun was high in the heavens when all
was over and Fra Benedict was at liberty to return to his cell.
He took up his brushes and palette, but the inspiration was

36 ART is LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. [Oct.,

gone, and try as he would, he could not recall it. But, despite
his inability to paint, his soul felt strangely peaceful ; there
were none of the vague longings that had tortured him before.
He knelt before the crucifix and repeated the rosary for the
soul of his brother, whom the brethren were even then pre-
paring for burial.

The hour of Vespers found the brethren in the chapel all
but Fra Benedict.

The prior called the sacristan and bade him dispatch a
messenger to tell Fra Benedict that Vespers were about to
commence. In a few moments the novice who had been sent
returned with a frightened face and the intelligence that Fra
Benedict had gone mad !

The prior and one or two other monks hurried to the cell.
A loud, high-pitched voice could be heard declaiming half way
down the corridor, and the scared monks beheld the painter,
palette and brushes in hand, standing before the easel whereon
rested the unfinished picture.

"The vision!" he exclaimed, "the vision of Heaven! Let
me transfer it to the canvas while I remember. The holy
Virgin came to her servant after twenty years, and he was
slothful, and caught not the vision of beauty in immortal
colors. She will be offended and will not come again. Go
away!" he said fiercely to the frightened brethren, who were
huddled in the doorway. " Go hence and do not trouble the
chosen of Mary, whom she has commissioned to paint her por-
trait as it should be. I will give to the world a picture of
loveliness such as Raphael never conceived ; but the time is
short ; life is short, and I must work, work ! "

" May the saints defend us ! " whimpered soft-hearted old An-
tonio ; " the dear brother is certainly mad."

"How long has he been thus?" demanded the prior.

"Indeed, father, no one seems to know," returned a monk.
" No one has seen him since noon."

At this moment the infirmarian arrived. One glance was
enough for his practised eyes. " Fever," he said concisely ;
"he must have taken the infection from his brother. I did
not think it was contagious. Heaven send we may save him ! "

"Amen!" said the prior solemnly.

In spite of his struggles, Fra Benedict was carried off to
the infirmary, where it took the united strength of two stalwart
brethren to control him.

All night he raved, sometimes about his beloved picture and

1 899-] ART IS LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. 37

the vision he had seen, sometimes about his brother, but
always ending with the one idea : he must paint in the heads
while he could remember, while the vision was fresh in his
mind, and he tried to get up and fought fiercely with his
nurses when they prevented him. Every paroxysm left him
weaker and rendered the task of his attendants easier, until,
when the morning came, the violence of the fever had abated
and left him conscious but as weak as water.

All night the brethren had been in the church praying for
him. Candles burned before the shrine of his patron, St. Bene-
dict, who looked down from the canvas he had painted. The
Blessed Virgin's altar was also lit up, and above the statue
the faint light of the candles showed the space that was to be
filled by the picture that stood on the easel in the lonely cell.

" Where am I ? " They were the first conscious words he
had uttered, and he needed no answer; a smile flitted across
his lips as he recognized the familiar surroundings of the in-
firmary, and his eyes closed.

He opened them again a moment later and asked for the
prior, who came instantly.

"God and His holy Mother be thanked, you are better?"
inquired the prior anxiously.

Fra Benedict shook his head. " My days are numbered,
father," he said, almost in a whisper.

"Do not say so, my son," said the prior sadly; "think of
your picture that is still to be finished."

The painter smiled again. " Ars longa, vita brevis," he
murmured, half to himself ; then, after a pause, " I sometimes
think, father, that I should have painted the best I could, in-
stead of watting for a vision. Visions come so seldom and
stay such a short time. But I could not paint the Blessed
Virgin as I know she is. I saw her in my soul's eye, but ever,
when I took up the brushes, I could not grasp the features as
my soul pictured them to itself, and so I waited and longed
and prayed for a vision to be shown to me, who was not
worthy. Have I sinned, father?"

" Your fault has been rather one of excess of honor and
love towards the Blessed Mother of God, whom you would not
represent inadequately," replied the prior. " Perhaps the vision
has been withheld from you in order to draw your heart and
fix your mind upon heavenly things."

Again Fra Benedict smiled.

"I am growing weaker," he whispered. "I would confess

38 ART js LONG AND TIME is FLEETING. [Oct.

and receive the last sacraments, and then if I might be per-
mitted to die in my cell, I would desire nothing more, father."

The prior instantly consented, and Fra Benedict was carried
to his cell and laid upon the hard, plank bed.

The brethren gathered around the beloved artist, whom
they regarded as a saint, and the sweetly solemn strains of the
" Miserere " rose upon the air.

Outside, the sunshine flecked the brown fields and the twit-
tering birds alighted upon the casement and peered in, search-
ing for the hand that had so often fed them. A beggar
knocked at the gate, and Fra Antonio, his eyes streaming with
tears, arose noiselessly and answered the summons. The man
asked for food, and the voices rose through the casement and
reached the ears of the dying painter.

" Giacomo ! " he murmured.

The psalm ceased and Fra Benedict opened his eyes.
" Raise me," he whispered to those standing near. One of the
brothers lifted him up gently and supported his head ; he
turned his eyes towards the picture, and the prior who stood
near it removed the covering from the easel. Many of the
brethren had not seen the picture, and they looked at it now
with some curiosity. Then, as by one impulse, all eyes turned
upon Fra Benedict. He was gazing, not at the picture but at
the wall immediately above it. Suddenly his face became trans-
figured, and an almost heavenly radiance illumined it.

The eyes of those present followed his, but saw nothing
save the featureless figures on the canvas.

"Mary!" murmured Fra Benedict, and his beautiful face
was as the face of a seraph. He saw, as he had longed to
see, that supernatural beauty for which painters have striven,
but which no mortal brush, however great, can paint. He saw,
and as he saw he knew his dream was vain. Color was noth-
ing, form and features were nothing compared to the vision
for which he had longed, and which his dying eyes saw too
late ? Nay, he knew now he could never have painted Mary
as she is.

" Mother ! " he murmured again. " Ave, Jesus, Mary Ars
longa, vita brevis " ; and the slender head sank back upon the
supporting arm. Fra Benedict was dead.

PUBLIC HIGHWAY OUTSIDE OF CORK.

HOW AMERICA MAY OPEN UP AN ERA OF
PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

BY J. MURPHY.

'HE American tourist leaving for Europe has in
his mind three or four objective points. If it
is in his power, he will aim at visiting England,
Switzerland, and Italy ; the capitals of France
and Germany ; possibly also Vienna, the Rhine,
and some of the historical spots in Spain. Having gone
through this programme he will consider he has " done "
Europe.

Of the scenes mentioned some are of primary importance,
others are often visited merely "to have it to say." Thus he
would never think of returning to his home without having
threaded the mazes of Westminster Abbey; gazed from the
visitors' gallery in the Houses of Parliament on the Thames ;
looked on the eternal snows of Mont Blanc, Rigi, Pilatus, and
the Matterhorn ; surveyed the colossal grandeur of St. Peter's,

Ho w AMERICA MAY OPEN UP

[Oct.,

STREET IN CORK.

witnessed the mys-
tic loveliness of the
moonlight streaming
through the broken
arches of the Coli-
seum, and admired
Raphael's " Trans-
figuration " and the
" Laocoon " and the
"Apollo " of the Bel-
videre. If he has
looked on the Eng-
lish and Scotch
lakes, drunk a bock
under an awning on
the Boulevard des
Italiens, paraded Unter den Linden and the Ringstrasse, gloated
over the Alhambra with Washington Irving as his guide, floated
in a gondola and sailed to Capri, then verily has he accom-
plished all that the average tourist's heart could hanker for.

One fair land of Europe is not in his programme, at least
from the point of view of mere sight-seeing and scenery. Ire-
land, one of the fairest lands that the sun shines on, may be
visited by him, but it will probably be some particular county
and townland that will attract his steps as being the cradle of
his stock. Of Ireland as a tourist centre he scarcely stays to
think. The reason of this is simple in the extreme.

The American tourist is a potent factor in the prosperity
of beautiful and his-
torical localities, and
of important centres
of life in Europe.
Poor Ireland has had
all capacity for en-
terprise so thorough-
ly crushed out of her
that she has not
been able to com-
pete in a business
way for the attrac-
tion of tourists.
Other parts have the

enterprise, without THATCHED COTTAGE.

1 8 9 9]

AN ERA OF PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

STREET SCENE IN CORK.

having either beauty or historical association, and they thrive

right brilliantly. Thus the American who arrives in London

has rarely but little intention of travelling further westward for

European sights. But once in the great metropolis of the

British Empire, he

is informed of the

great natural beauty

of a place called the

Isle of Man. The

fact is thrust upon

him in every nook

and corner in the

city of London. He

had not previously

suspected it. Now

he goes to visit the

Isle of Man.

The fact is that
this little dot in the
sea is the most hus- MARKET OF CORK.

How AMERICA MAY OPEN UP

[Oct.,

AN IRISH ARISTOCRAT.

tling, self-advertising spot on earth. Its inhabitants subscribe
a poll-tax of about two dollars a head annually to keep
the merits of the place before the travelling world in Europe.
A central advertis-
ing headquarters is
maintained with un-
paralleled expendi-
ture at Ludgate Cir-
cus, in the city of
London, and at the
head of this depart-
ment is a brother of
Mr. Hall Caine, the
novelist. Mr. Hall
Caine, by the way, is
himself one of the
never-failing, attrac-
tive sights of the lit-
tle island. The same may be said of Greeba Castle. Mr. Caine
figures prominently in the prospectuses and is alluded to as
the Master. At all events, the inhabitants of the Isle of Man
attain their ends. They get the tourist traffic, and as a com-
munity are consequently rich and prosperous to a degree that
almost surpasses belief.

Switzerland too, in a thorough and even scientific business
manner, is kept before the wealthy part of the public of the
west of Europe who may be at all disposed to move out from

their own country.
Differently from
the Isle of Man,
Switzerland thor-
oughly deserves
all the praise that
is given it even
by its own inhabi-
tants. And yet
it is an acknow-
ledged fact that
hardly in a less de-
gree than the Isle
of Man itself does
Switzerland owe

A MARKET SCENE IN CORK. the huge pros-

1 899-]

AN ERA OF PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

perity that accrues to it from the able and business like man-
ner in which it is steadily and consistently advertised abroad.

Cities like Rome and Paris are their own attraction, although
again the great popularity of the peninsula of Italy as a happy
hunting-ground for the American tourist is in a great measure
attributable to the fact that the hotels and minor banking in-
stitutions of the entire country being now almost exclusively
in the hands of Germans and Englishmen, the country is con-

GLEN AT GLENGARIFF.

sistently and conscientiously worked up as a tourist centre from
a business point of view.

The business capacity for keeping Ireland before the public
is wanting. Even if it were forthcoming, even if the inhabi-
tants had all the zeal and desire necessary and were inclined
to make monetary sacrifices for the business welfare of the
community, the success and the popularity of Ireland with
American tourists would be not yet. Many things are lacking.
The American when travelling is accustomed to and expects a
high-class system of transit, commodious hotels, and comfort-
able surroundings and conditions of every kind. These in Ire-

How AMERICA MAY OPEN UP

[Oct.,

land are wanting.
Or at least hereto-
fore they have been
wanting, for, as will
be explained further
on, a step has been
taken in the right
direction within very
recent days. Ire-
land has not adver-
tised or been in a
position to attract to
her shores a heavy
volume of the Ameri-
can tourist traffic,
and this it is that has caused her to be neglected for other
points of Europe, which of themselves should have been of very
much less human interest to the American tourist, and has indi-
rectly caused her a loss of popularity and of national prosperity.
And yet who shall say that Erin does not deserve to rank

ON THE WAY TO CHURCH.

STAGE LEAVING GLENGARIFF.

AN ERA OF PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

AGHADOE RUINS, KILLARNEY.

among the most
chosen regions of
the world for
beauty of natural
s c e n ery ? The
gentle gradations
of surface, where
nothing is unduly
flat or exaggerat-
edly rugged ; the
favorable climate ;
the fertile soil
and rich, park-like
vegetation ; the
softly flowing
streams and the
placid peacefulness all these characteristics of Ireland stamp
themselves in the most pleasing manner on the soul and are
reflected in the writings of the poets, from Spenser, the great
poet's poet, who here composed the major portion of the
" Faerie Queene," to Oliver Goldsmith, and in more modern
days to Thomas Moore, Gerald Griffin, James Clarence Man-
gan, R. A. Wilson, and a multitude of others.

Killarney is a household word wherever the English language
is known, and a description of the famous lakes and islands
and mountains, or an account of the castle built by the great
and legendary O'Donoghue of the Eagle's Nest, of the wonder-
ful holly-tree in In-
nisfallen, from the
root of which shoots
forth at once an ash,
a hawthorn and an
ivy, of the Devil's
Punch Bowl, of the
intensely pathetic
rites and ceremonies
that may be witness-
ed at the peasant
burials in the neigh-
borhood a narra-
tion of these would
be an affront to cul-

CHAIR TOWER, AGHADOE RUINS. tured readers, SO well

46 How AMERICA MAY OPEN UP [Oct.,

are the sights and places known to literature. But other parts
of Ireland are hardly less worthy of visit and contemplation.

Lough Erne, with its forty miles of water stretching through
Fermanagh County, its network of channels, its myriads of
islands, its delightful nooks and recesses, and the wonderful and
iridescent hues of its leafy banks, is hardly second even to
Killarney.

The beauty of the Vale of Avoca and of Glendalough, in

AN IRISH COTTAGE.

County Wicklow, have often been sung. Not alone the lake
but the fine ruins of the latter valley, the Round Tower, the
Cathedral, the Church of Our Lady, that of St. Kelvin, the
huge granite cross of ancient times, the Sacristy, that little en-
closure which serves as place of interment for the clergy, work
like an enchantment on the spirit of all those who behold them.
The other sights that might be enumerated are almost without
number. And in Ireland it must be remembered that only half
the charm is attributable to the physical aspect of the localities
themselves, the legends and folk-lore that are identified with
them being of the most captivating and interesting character.

i8 99 -]

AN ERA OF PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

TOP OF BLARNEY CASTLE.

On Lough Neagh the fisherman, towards the setting of the
sun, " sees the round towers of other days in the waves be-
neath him shining." This is because the fair sheet of water,
like so many others in Ireland, was formed under poetical and
somewhat pathetic circumstances. It issued from one of the
spring-wells which in days gone by only waited for an oppor-
tunity of being left uncovered to send forth a mighty flood.
The inhabitants of the neighborhood, aware of the danger, na-
turally kept the well
securely covered ; but
of course the fatal
day finally came, and
of course also it was
a beautiful maiden in
the culmination of
joy at there unex-
pectedly meeting her
lover knight just re-
turned from the war,
who walked off with
her pitcher and for-
got to replace the
smooth, round flag

BLARNEY CASTLE. on the well.

48 How AMERICA MAY OPEN UP [Oct.,

It is hard to believe, without actually witnessing the fact,
that in an age of practical business enterprise so charming a
centre should have been to such an extent neglected. A few
years ago, it is true, some steps were taken to improve matters
in this regard. The initiative was taken, not in Ireland itself
but in the British capital. An association for promoting tourist
travel in Ireland was founded when Mr. A. J. Balfour, the
present first lord of the treasury, was chief secretary for Ireland.
It had the cordial support of this gentleman, who, although a
bitter antagonist of Ireland's most cherished aspirations in the
matter of autonomy, has, it must be admitted, lavishly devoted

A TENANT'S HOME.

funds for the building of light railways and the opening of
harbors, and has been prodigal of public discourses and cf
personal example to induce Englishmen to visit Ireland and
help to promote the prosperity of that country.

This association has undoubtedly been beneficial, but the
good still to do is limitless. In spite of a more dignified and
more liberal attitude on the part of the English press, the
mass of the public of England is still imbued with strange
prejudices regarding the Green Isle. It popularly believes that
every second Irishman is a moonlighter, wearing a mask and
gunning for human prey, and that it is taking one's life in
one's hands to cross the Irish Sea.

i8 9 9-]

AN ERA OF PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

KEIMANEIGH PASS.

The prosperity
that could come to
Ireland from a big in-
flux of tourists is not
for the moment to
be hoped from Eng-
land. This is what
the Honorable
James B. Roche,
member of Parlia-
ment for Kerry, free-
ly asserted during his
recent visit to New
York. "It is from
the United States
alone," he said, "that the moneyed travellers must come, if Ire-
land is soon to acquire something of the tourist prosperity of
Switzerland, of the Rhineland, of Southern Scotland, and of the
Isle of Man." As the quickest means to this end, Mr. Roche
advocated the outright purchase of the Lakes of Killarney. He
was convinced that if a beginning were made to popularize and
make known the marvellous beauty of the Kerry Lakes, the rest
would come of itself, and the other delightful spots of Erin would
soon have their visitors and votaries, with the consequent re-
plenishment of the national and individual purse, which, though
a very material end to aim at in the exploitation of the beauty
of nature, is nevertheless in the present case so palpably legiti-
mate and justifiable that no apology for it need be entered upon.
Mr. Burke Roche's
project of having the
Lakes of Killarney
bought up by a num-
ber of wealthy Irish-
Americans met with
a hearty response in
New York. Well-
known men promptly
expressed their will-
ingness to individu-
ally advance hand-
some sums, and
others guaranteed
the finding of the re-
VOL. LXX. 4

RUINS ON INNISFALLSN ISLAND.

AN ERA OF PROSPERITY IN IRELAND.

[Oct.,

mainder of the money when the hour for the concluding of
definite and concrete terms of sale and purchase should ccme.
The actual sale of the Lakes of Killarney appears destined
to be not unattended with some difficulty. The price asked for
the Muckross estate, which includes all that is most beautiful
around Killarney, is $350,000. This sum would not be difficult
to raise among Americans of Irish origin, but the talk of the
sale has excited some opposition.

The London Times once, in its tone of finest cynicism,

affirmed that any
benefit done to Ire-
land must be done
against the will of
the Irish themselves.
This statement, no
doubt, is in some
small measure true.
When the sale of
Killarney was recent-
ly for the first time
mooted, a number of
sycophantic inhabi-
tants of that region
at once sent a
memorial to the
British government petitioning that Killarney be purchased for
the crown and made a royal residence. Several Irish members
of Parliament have also seen fit to publicly express their dis-
approval of the purchase by Americans.

But to those convinced of the excellence of the project
this opposition need not cause any alarm. If the practical
financial profit that is aimed at is to be early attained, it can
be accomplished only by practical up-to-date American busi-
ness methods brought to bear on the soliciting and proper
handling of American tourist trade. When the pecuniary bene-
fit of it is realized in Ireland, only blessings will be showered
on the heads of those responsible for it, and in any eventuality
the consciousness of an entirely generous and beneficent action
towards the land from which they sprung must be a meet re-
ward for those Americans who will in this way have aimed at
contributing to the prosperity of Ireland.

A LANDING ON BANTRY BAY.

[899-] THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIES? s. 51

THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS.*

HE importance of training our priests so that
they may understand the forms of modern
thought and possess, at least in outline, the re-
sults of investigation in the science of criticism,
in the natural and in the social sciences, is in-
sisted upon by the Holy Father in the encyclical sEterni
PatriS) published in 1879. Twenty years have passed since
then ; much has been done in Europe and in this country to
carry out the principles and rules laid down or suggested in
that invaluable pronouncement, but a great deal remains to be
done, a great deal particularly in the education of the priest-
hood. Dr. Hogan has interpreted it, and in these pages we
shall try to reproduce the spirit of his rendering. Non-Catho-
lics condemn the church as the enemy of science, one or two
converts have said they came into the church without aid
from Catholic exegesis, criticism, apologetics, history. There
are Catholics born in the faith who have lost that sense
of the supreme importance of entire and absolute submis-
sion to the church's teaching which distinguished all ages
back to the Apostles' own time. They have given a prac-
tical meaning wide as heresy to the dictum, tolerance in
non-essentials ; they do not look upon heresy as a crime in
comparison with which all violations of moral and social law
are as dust, and high treason an excusable impulse. There
are, no doubt, Catholics, who live in the secure possession of
their inheritance of faith, whose whole mental texture is so
wrought into its substance that there would seem no possi-
bility of its being lost by them. But the rising generation is
menaced by the dangers coming from a reckless pursuit of
the taking generalities of modern science. Electricity, forces,
molecules are on every tongue and account for everything, so
that the senses and a plausible theory form the circle of all
knowledge. Young Catholics breathe an atmosphere tainted with
the various forms of modern thought, agnosticism, determinism,
rationalism, and the moral views to which they lead.

* Clerical Studies. By Rev. J. B. Hogan, 3.S., D.D. Boston : Marlier, Callanan & Co.

52 THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS. [Oct.,

THOMISTIC IMPULSE FROM THE HOLY FATHER.

Keenly alive to those conditions, the Holy Father gave the
signal in the encyclical for a curriculum in the seminaries ard
seats of learning from which priests should go forth with
knowledge up to the current of the time. Recognizing St.
Thomas as the guide and model for students and teachers, he
would have us understand that if that great doctor were
now alive no hypothesis would be strange to him, no method
of pursuing an investigation beneath his notice, no conclusion
would be tested by any standard except its merits. Those
who cried out that the encyclical pushed back the hand upon
the dial remind one of the extraordinary observation of Mr.
Herbert Spencer, that certain hygienic legislation was repealing
a law of nature. Mr. Spencer's law of nature was not a law at
all; and those who thought Leo XIII. lived in the middle ages
must have forgotten the encyclicals on the problems of the
nineteenth century which surpassed anything written on eco-
nomic and social questions since the Pentateuch.

In the chapter on the vicissitudes of scholastic philosophy
our author briefly but clearly points out the causes of its decay.
It is recovering now from the neglect under which it long lay
buried ; and the resuscitation is not confined to Catholics. The
Scotch universities have welcomed St. Thomas to an extent
not surprising to those who were acquainted with the school
which rose to distinction in Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton.

We think it cannot be disputed that there is much in the
metaphysics of this school akin to the methods of the great
leaders of mediaeval thought. In passing, it is worth while to
observe that whatever scorn was cast on their philosophy it
was regarded as upon the whole sound by the intellectual
leaders of that part of Great Britain which is held to have
supplied the only genuine metaphysicians to the English-speak-
ing world. In boldness of speculation Hamilton might be com-
pared to Scotus, who flung himself into abysses of inquiry
never before attempted and which no fathom-line could sound.
Something of the failure of the scholastic sjstem is to be
found in such a tendency ; for we take it that Scotus repre-
sented the extreme to which aberrations might be carried on
the one hand along the lines of deduction from conceded prin-
ciples, and on the other hand the error of pursuing investi-
gation by a priori processes into realms where no discovery
could be made unless by methods mainly experimental.

1899-] THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS. 53

HISTORY OF SCHOLASTICISM.

Dr. Hogan, however, looks for the cause of what he seems
to think the superseded scholastic philosophy in the scientific
light that there is a law of development which governs the
life of systems. Laying down the proposition, or at any rate
its equivalent, that the great philosophical movement begun
in the eleventh century had reached the stage of sterility in
the thirteenth, he infers that it had run its course.* Yet this
is but another way of stating that there was no material
left on which speculation could really exercise itself. Neither
does he lose sight of this consideration, but he seems to fear
that he would admit too much if he attributed what he regards
as the sterility which the later history of the system presents to
anything but the operation of a law to which all growths are
subject. Now, there must have been in the system itself a
limit beyond which it could not be carried as a means of dis-
covery. The importance of recognizing this on the re-estab-
lishing of the system cannot be overestimated, because by such
recognition only is to be avoided the mistakes so fatal to it in
the past. Any other course will perpetuate the contempt which
the Humanists heaped upon it at the Renaissance, and under
which it lay until Professor Ritchey and other non-Catholic
thinkers turned to St. Thomas as to a recently discovered mine
of indefinite promise.

In this place Dr. Hogan throws light on the influence which
the Protestantism of the sixteenth century had in completing
the dethronement of scholasticism, and that in a manner to sur-
prise biblical and patristic students of the English Establish-
ment and the lions of the Higher Criticism. The warfare of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made Catholic theology
polemical. Consequently the abstractions and subtleties of the
school were dropped and recourse was had to the more effec-
tive instruments of biblical Greek, Hebrew, and well-authenti-
cated facts. Catholics no longer rested on the metaphysical
arguments of the past ; these were effaced from the record, and
similarly to-day the arguments to be used must be such as bear
a value to the non-Catholic mind.

* It is to be observed that Dr. Hogan, though he maintains that the period of power ter-
minated in the thirteenth century, briefly traces the fortunes of the scholastic philosophy down
to the time when it received the greatest blow to its popularity from Descartes. In the first
half of this century, as he points out, the leading professors of the Jesuits were Cartesians, in
the second half of the century they returned to the philosophy of St. Thomas. The respect
for it beginning to be shown by men outside the Church is the natural influence of common
sense breaking away from the folly of theories appealing to experience while denying the
evidence of the senses.

54 THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS. [Oct.,

The natural and social sciences, and the methods by which
they are cultivated, are now in possession of the field. What
is the apologist to do with regard to them except to see how
they affect the thought of the time ? If he wishes to influence
any mind, he must become familiar with its habits and logical
methods ; but as all around him are directed from springs rising
either in the action of external nature or the working of so-
cial forms, or both, he must go to those hidden sources of
opinion and action, and for the time at least offer a new
presentation of the evidences of Christianity ; that is, a presen-
tation according to the mode of the recipient, as the school-
men would say.

Nothing can be better than the manner in which Dr. Hogan
guides his reader in the perception of his duties and the way
to discharge them than in the article on Apologetics. The
union of firmness and caution is beyond praise.

THE PROBLEM OF. MIRACLES.

The earth has been explored to its extremities and to its
depths, he truly observes, and made to tell the history of its
origin and vicissitudes. Modern research has extended itself
over the whole field covered by religion and the Bible ; so
that there is hardly a statement of importance made by either
which may not now be tested by some form or other of modern
science. What is the result ? The leaders in the various
branches of human knowledge are strangers, nay, opponents, to
the Christian faith. The fact can be explained by a tendency
produced in the pursuit of the natural sciences to question a
belief in the miraculous. Men engaged in them are trained to
consider nature as subject to constant and universal laws.
But all supernatural religion includes miracles as objects of
faith, and it is itself based on miracles ; and as miracles are an
interference with those constant and universal laws of nature,
it is a contradiction in terms to accept them. This is a slightly
altered revival of Hume's objection.

Yet how fallacious is all this reasoning ! The mere acci-
dent that some phenomena which were called miracles could
be accounted for by natural causes is regarded as a sufficient
reason to discredit facts which could not be so explained. The
Christian case must be looked upon as a whole. It is true
that on the other hand this means a long line of defence,
almost any point of which may be attacked; but the question
is not whether miracles have been witnessed by A. in his uni-

1899-] THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS. 55

versity, or that B. has discovered discrepancies in the Gospel
accounts, or that C. finds very few of the books of the New
Testament were produced at the periods to which they were
assigned, or that D. has the clearest reason, in his own judg-
ment, for maintaining that the early books of the Old Testa-
ment were compilations of a later age. We suggest the follow-
ing as a fair way of dealing with minute or isolated objections
to faith. If there be a man of fair mind who has lived a life
in accordance with the dignity of human nature, to whom jus-
tice is a principle demanding his allegiance, benevolence an in-
fluence claiming his respect, duty a law binding him to obser-
vance ; if he thinks there is a cause for which he could make
a sacrifice, if he admires the man capable of dying for the
truth or what he believes the truth ; then we ask him to ex-
plain the person and character of the Lord Christ in any man-
ner other than that which makes him the centre of the revela-
tion said to be given in the Scriptures and continued in the
life of the Christian Church. If he be such a man as we de-
scribe, we confidently await his answer.

Again, we ask him what does he think of the Gospel teach-
ing ? or would he be surprised to hear that thoughtful men
have looked upon it as the revelation of God, because it ap-
peals to what is noblest and best in man and reveals to him
his other and higher self? If it be like no other book, if noth-
ing approaches it in all human thought except what is bor-
rowed from it, if it stands alone in the simplicity, purity, sub-
limity, and practical wisdom of its teachings, what matter about
alleged discrepancies ? What value concerning the contradic-
tory and unhistorical conclusions of those who from so-called
internal evidence attribute the writing to a time later than the
accepted date? On which side lies the more rational theory,
tested by the rule of accounting for the facts ?

THE MANNER OF APOLOGETICS.

Has the Christian faith bestowed benefits upon mankind, or
has it done more to promote progress and happiness than all
other creeds and institutions? Can there be an honest doubt
that what is best in the human race since our Lord came is
directly traceable to his influence? And will a man be con-
demned as a bigot or a fool because he thinks that the Lord
is morally and socially as well as spiritually the Saviour of the
world ? Or will not that high-minded rationalist we cite into
court envy the belief which regards the Lord Christ as all

56 THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS. [Oct.,

this? These are fair questions to put our opponent on in-
quiry, but they are only a few. Having come thus far with
him, we may ask what is the difficulty which stands in his way?
Is it from the opposition existing, or supposed to exist, between
revealed religion and human knowledge? The considerations
which Dr. Hogan points out to the apologist we offer to our
ideal unbeliever. Of course we estimate the want of a common
ground if he have no conception of God, such as reason and
faith unite in revealing him, yet there are some intellectual
principles common to us, and we are sure that apart from
this conception of God, Creator, Father, and Conserver of all
things the principal objections of our friend would be directed
not against the faith, but against a distorted view of Christian
doctrines, or against opinions which form no essential part of
them. Our unbeliever says he will die rather than surrender
one iota of scientific truth, let the votaries of revealed religion
do their worst. Like a Catholic in a recent article, he will call
up Galileo. Would it not be well before going to the stake,
or even to the palatial prison of a cardinal's house, to ascertain,
1st. What is the statement of science on the particular objec-
tion? 2d. What the teaching of Christian faith on the sub-
ject seemingly in conflict? 3d. How far do they agree or
disagree? The difficulty in question may be no more than a
plausible induction, an ingenious theory, or a mere conjecture.
Our unbeliever being a genuine man of science, knows that in
every science, mathematics excepted, together with ascertained
truths, there are any number of positions, statements, deduc-
tions, and so on which are very far from being certain. With
regard to these there can be no conflict with revealed religion,
because we do not know the truth about them ; they are the
same as visions of the night. There are facts and laws of
physical science ascertained beyond all doubt, but how many
hang in the air waiting verification ! Are the general theories,
so popular and so talked of, more than plausible guesses? We
venture to say, with all respect for our unbelieving friend if
he takes the stand, that as a structure resting on evidence, we
mean the whole evidence, psychological, historical, and critical,
the Christian faith cannot but seem to him the most wonderful
thing in the universe. He can say that commensurate forces
explain the motions of the stars, but he cannot account by
ordinary means for Galilean fishermen winning Greece and
Rome all those names meant at that time to a belief in the
divinity of a Criminal dying a shameful death ; or for the con-

1899-] THE EDUCATION OF OUR PRIESTS. 57

tinuance of the system of authority and laws established by
them amid the changes of the centuries since. He must reject
these marvels as miracles, or a miracle, and refuse belief to
anything outside his own mind. Where can he find a place for
his foot except in the severest form of idealism ? Yet his
school scoff at idealism ; at least they take the existence of an
external world for granted in their experiments. If, however,
he should take the other view and regard the Christian claim as
a fact entitled to consideration equal to the promises of any
branch of science and this he must do unless he puts out his
eyes he will discover what apologists insist upon, that there
is no real conflict between human knowledge and revealed reli-
gion.

We have in the foregoing remarks presented some idea of
the temper in which Dr. Hogan has approached the task he
set himself. The article on Dogmatic Theology is full of valu-
able suggestion ; the same may be said of that entitled Moral
Theology. We regret we have not the space to say something
about the other topics, especially his mode of handling the
study of the Bible. Adopting as though it were a motto the
words of the Holy Father in the encyclical of 1893, in which
he proposes " to give an impulse to the noble science of Scrip-
ture," Dr. Hogan, in a chapter hardly short of the compass of
a treatise, points out the manner in which the study of it can be
made suitable to the needs of the present day, and this he
does with a fulness of knowledge, an authority and precision,
which will afford delight to every reader.

Seldom, indeed, do we find a work on a subject of this
kind likely to draw readers, unless they expect to derive profit
from it as contrasted with pleasure in the perusal. The work
before us in each branch is charged with the interest of sug-
gestion ; it opens up glimpses of fields of study as though we
were looking at a landscape beyond a parting in immemorial
woods. We think the reader who follows his tract it is noth-
ing less on the study of church history will take the meaning
of our illustration. Candor is the ruling note of his opinions
throughout ; and especially in dealing with this subject, in which,
more than any other, prepossessions, fears, and anxieties are
so likely to have an influence. In this he has borne in mind
the Holy Father's application of a dictum of Cicero, and so
completely that we are unable to say whether he prefers
Fleury to Rohrbacher; that is to say, the popes to the tem-
poral sovereigns, or vice versa.

58 THE NIGHT-SHIFT. [Oct.,

BY JAMES BUCKHAM.

Ced bp tbe flickering lantern's rap.

In heaop march, bp twos and tbrees,
Che nigbt=$bift plods upon its wap

BeneatD tDe black and sigbing trees.

Witb peaceful arms of pick and bar
find sbouel, down tbe street tbep pass,

J\ sbadowp squad detailed for war
Upon tbe belpless soil and grass.

Strange toilers in tbe breatbiess nigbt
When all is still and pbantom=wi$e

Cbe poplars mope tbeir brancbes wbite,
flnd nortbern ligbts flit up tbe skies !

Wbat feed tbep on for tbougbts, tbese men
Who sleep bp dap and toil bp dark,

Bending to eartb all nigbt and tben
Co bed witb song of tbrusb and lark?

Can tbep draw near to bope and God?
flp, doubt it not ! for well I know

Cbere's gospel e'en in stone and sod-
In all things, if we seek it so*

1899-] REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS. 59

REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS IN
ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

BY REV. C. L. WALWORTH.

IX.

EXPERIENCE GATHERED FROM MISSION WORK IN ENGLAND.

RETREAT is not a mission; a mission is not
a retreat, although missions, such as preached
by Le Jeune and Brydaine and all true masters
of this holy art, have been founded on that
great wisdom which presided in the mind of
St. Ignatius Loyola and which produced the famous Exercises
which bear his name.

The first missions given by the Redemptorists in England, in
which I bore a joyous part, were an attempt to introduce into
England the method of St. Alphonsus, devised by him and fol-
lowed in Italy by the missionary members of his congregation.

The mission of St. Alphonsus was, of course, like that of
all saintly and apostolic men, to save souls by bringing sinners
home to God. In this wide field, however, he felt a preference,
a peculiar vocation to labor amongst the most abandoned
souls that is, amongst souls the most neglected and the most
difficult to reach. The poor are not necessarily the wickedest,
that is, the most self-abandoned, but they are the most
neglected by others. The church doors, even, and the ordinary
means of grace are less open to the poor than to others.

St. Alphonsus appreciated fully the power of great religious
truths when brought before intelligent minds secluded for
many days from the world, as were the scholars who gathered
about the great Loyola at the University of Paris. Such
minds as theirs could not resist the force of divine truth so
gradually and skilfully unfolded by such a master mind. Out
from such a series of Exercises emerged a new band of apos-
tles, and scattered themselves throughout the world in order to
follow their calling.

When Father De Held, our English provincial, selected his
preachers for our first mission at St. George's, in Southwark,
he said :

60 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Oct.,

-" Let your course of sermons and instructions be graduated
substantially according to the method of St. Ignatius devised
for Retreats. Don't forget, however, to make them popular.
Your audience will not consist of a class of scholars. It will
be a crowd of people. You must try to reach their hearts
through sound reasoning, but your reasoning must not be above
their heads. This would lessen their respect for the preacher
and his influence on them."

All of our first missions were given in large towns. There
was no difficulty, of course, in filling the church. On the con-
trary it was the crowd itself that embarrassed us most. The
parishioners who ought to be present, seat-holders even, were
crowded out to make way for outsiders who had no special
claims on the parish. If these were truly devout persons, they
did not belong to the class of neglected souls. If they were
merely devotees, they could not, as a class, be expected to
profit much by the mission. In fine, the general result was
that too few of those we came to aid could receive that bene-
fit which a successful mission brings with it, namely, the
gradual accumulation upon the heart of divine truth conveyed
to it through solid reasoning. A true missionary is not afraid
of producing excitement in his audience, but he wants that
excitement to be genuine, deep, and lasting. He is willing to
draw tears from his hearers, if they be tears of true sorrow
for sin. He is glad to elicit from his hearers tides of strong
emotion when he knows that deep waters lie below. He is
glad to leave joy behind him when that joy is a promise of
lasting peace.

The three successive and progressive roads so necessary to
a retreat must be kept in mind when giving a mission :
1 Via Purgativa ; 2- Via Illuminativa ; 3- Via Unitiva. In
large cities, however, the mission-preachers are hampered in
their choice of topics by the ever changing make-up of the
crowd. The new-comers make it necessary to prolong the via
purgativa to meet the requirements of the confessional, and
little time is left to give further light to pardoned souls and
draw them to a closer walk with God. These difficulties,
which attended our labors in St. George's, Southwark, we
found also afterwards at the Spanish Chapel on the other side
of the Thames, at Liverpool also, and Manchester. New experi-
ences, indeed, met us at these later missions.

At St. Nicholas' Church, on Copperas Hill, Liverpool, the
clergy attached to that parish in 1849 hoped to reach through

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 61

our labors a multitude of Catholics who, by their very num-
bers, were excluded from the privileges of their faith. St.
Nicholas' Church was a large one, but too small for the mag-
nitude of the parish. With a special view to them, the church
was made free during the mission. This was not enough,
however, to meet the emergency. Their long exclusion from
public worship, their poverty, misery, and the vices which pre-
vailed in such a condition of things, had naturally brought
them to an indifference in regard to religious matters. Notices
given from the pulpit do not easily reach a crowd so forlorn.
It was thought necessary to go to them in the streets, alleys,
and courts, where they nestled so closely, and there invite
them to take part in the mission.

Conducted by a zealous priest of St. Nicholas, Father
Nugent, I went to the Spitalfields, a forlorn, poverty-stricken,
and destitute locality of Liverpool, which happened to be in
the parish, to announce the mission and invite them to attend.
A sodality of young men preceded us in their uniform, carry-
ing a banner. We found a small square or court with an
opening from the street, into which we entered and planted
our banner. We were soon surrounded by an interested audi-
ence, to whom I preached a skeleton of the morning's sermon
in the church, with such a modification as circumstances made
necessary. Of course we had no altar, no Mass, no tall, black
mission cross with its nine yards of white drapery drawn over
the arms and falling frontwise in a single loop. It was our
good fortune, however, to detect and appropriate an empty
egg-box, which was strong and steady and ample enough to
serve for a pulpit. My audience was all that could be wished
in numbers and in respectful attention, not only looking up to
me, but down at me from tiers of windows on every side.
There was no cheering from the crowd of auditors, nor any
kind of interruption that was intended to interrupt. I give all
these particulars because it was my first attempt to preach in
the open air. I do not recommend it as a general thing ex-
cept where special and extraordinary circumstances make it
necessary ; as, for instance, where a large part of the people
that the missionary is most anxious to work upon cannot be
reached by sermons given in the church, nor brought to church
by notices given from the pulpit.

Soon after the mission at Liverpool came another large en-
gagement for our missionary labors at Manchester. I forget
the name of the parish, but the church was a capacious one,

62 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Oct.,

recently built after a plan devised by the famous architect
Pugin. It was strictly Gothic, for Pugin would tolerate nothing
which was not in that style. Its pastor boasted of its purity
and simplicity, but to me it seemed to prove most painfully
how ugly a purely Gothic edifice can be when its purity is
obtained only by the cheapest poverty.

We found nothing like the Spitalfields in Manchester. At
least, if any such forlorn quarter existed in that city, it was
beyond the boundary to which our labors were confined. We
were encamped in a field of factories, principally cotton factor-
ies. We expected to find here a spiritual destitution beyond
anything we had ever seen. In this we were happily mistaken.
The girls who worked at the looms were isolated from each
other during their time of work, which occupied the whole day.
There was little chance for any evil intercourse, for indeed
there was little chance for any intercourse at all with each
other. From their work at evening they went straight home
for supper, and after supper their wearied bodies called for
rest and sleep. As a class these young women were innocent,
pious, and pure. This favorable state of things could never
have existed if they had lived apart from their own families,
which was not the case. It was a beautiful sight in Manches-
ter to see the long streets leading away from the factories,
with rows of houses on either side, built with a view to keep
families together. If there is innocence in family life, there is
a holiness too, when that life is Catholic, when a church is
near with its altar and sacraments, and when the hard labors
of a week are made to terminate in a Sabbath-day of rest. Of
course, we found evils existing in some other employments
where the work was not so isolating as, for instance, in shoe
factories, rubber factories, and other works where much sewing
was to be done, and a chance for more fun and more talking.
When I look back, however, upon this mission at Manchester,
my mind calls back most vividly these Quaker-like streets of
the laboring poor with their files of pallid-faced girls going to
and fro with wearied steps and listless eyes. It was a pleasure
to preach hope and joy to such souls, a pleasure so great that
it has obliterated almost everything else from my memory of
this mission.

One more great and important mission in London was given
during this period of my reminiscences in that country. This
was in the Spanish Chapel. I shall not speak much of this in
detail. It did not contribute much to add to that kind of

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 63

knowledge which leads devoted and apostolic minds forward
slowly, gradually, but surely to any high experience and success
in their sacred art. On the contrary, our labors were much
hampered and crippled by new arrangements, which made more
work to be done in the pulpit and in the confessional by men
furnished with little material for the first and with little ex-
perience for the latter. The make-up of the crowd of worship-
pers which belonged most naturally to the Spanish Chapel, and
would be most sure to gather there at a mission, is a most
valuable treasure to the church. Historically speaking, a great
interest attaches to the few places of worship then left open
to Catholics in London. It was no liberality on the part of
the British government which left it lawful to worship at these
chapels. It was a necessity exacted by foreign governments,
and was attached by Catholic states abroad to the persons of
their ambassadors, and to the retinue of officials and friends
which followed them. As little by little religious bitterness
grew less and greater liberality extended itself, it was in these
chapels that Catholic life found greater freedom to breathe.
Of course the Catholic life that gathered about the Spanish
Chapel would contain much of what would be called the aristo
cratic element. This element would not, of course, become
the especial object of preference to missionary followers of St.
Liguori, whose chief and highest call is to the succor of souls the
most abandoned. We did make it our aim, however, to establish
a true mission here, and not a mere retreat under the name of
a mission.

It was a pleasure to hear this testimonial given to us by a man
so justly celebrated in all ecclesiastical circles, both in England
and in Continental Europe, as the Very Rev. Pere Martin, S.J.

In England he is frequently mentioned, for brevity's sake,
as the French Pugin. This is scarcely an appreciative name
either for the French ecclesiastic or for the English architects,
whether father or son, for I confess that my knowledge of all
these three celebrities is very casual and does not go very far.
I happened to become more especially familiar with the vest-
ments of Pugin, and cannot conceive of anything more beauti-
ful, graceful, than their ample, flexible flow. Circumstances
have debarred me from much use of these since my return to
America, and I have had neither time nor do I care to waste
any regrets upon the fact.

Soon after beginning our work at the Spanish Chapel I learned
that Father Martin was announced to preach one morning at

64 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Oct.,

the French Chapel. Anxious to hear so celebrated an orator,
and one whom I understood to be full of missionary fervor
and experience, I made an opportunity to go and hear him,
He produced a great impression on me as an earnest and fer-
vent pulpit orator. A day or two afterward he came in his
turn to the Spanish Chapel and took notice of our missionary
work there. He seemed much pleased with all he saw.

" Why, this," said he, " is no retreat, but a real mission ;
something which is getting to be rare in our days."

I confess that I myself did not feel all that confidence in
the character of our work which his words expressed. I was,
nevertheless, well pleased with what he said, the commenda-
tion coming from such a quarter, for although our mission at
the Spanish Chapel was not a very notable one, nor very fruit-
ful in its experience, yet I knew that we were working in the
right direction and in accordance with the spirit of our great
founder, St. Liguori, with a view to the salvation of souls the
most abandoned.

SOME ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS CONCERNING MISSIONS AND

CONVERTS.

The experience gained in the missions given in England
was how to make them profitable to those actually present.
These were Catholics already having the Faith, and requiring
little or no controversy. Why preach the Faith to those who
had it already? Penance, the sacraments, and urging to a
holy life were what they required, and the experience we gained
was in this line. In other words, giving parish missions to
Catholics was not the way to preach the Faith to Protestant
England. I speak of real missions, not popular retreats with
some slight show of seclusion and meditation based on the
"Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius Loyola. Protestant Eng-
land was not there, and could not be there. Hereditary Catho-
lics were there always and in great numbers. These had the
Faith already and were generally firm in that Faith. Their
spiritual wants called for very little change, if any, from the
soul-stirring topics and wise methods pursued by St. Alphonsus
in Italy. To say this much belongs to my own personal remi-
niscences in England, and can be said without borrowing from
anything later.

Was I disappointed in discovering this ? As a convert to

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 65

the true Faith and church did I feel my vocation blocked up?
Was I eager to return to my own country to bring Americans
into the fold ? Or, at least, did I not feel hampered to think
I could not use these missions to preach the Faith to the
English? No. Most certainly I was perfectly conscious of
being an American, but as a Christian and a Catholic I did
not feel that I was chained by my vocation to any particular
region of the world. I cannot recall any intimation ever given
me by my superiors of a design to send me back to my own
country. I did not allow myself to raise any such question in
my own thoughts. My career in England was closed when
Father Bernard Hafkenscheid, having been appointed in 1850
to be provincial of a new Redemptorist province in America,
claimed Father Hecker and myself as naturally belonging to
his jurisdiction in the Redemptorist Order. His claim having
been acknowledged by his superiors, this settled the question
for me. It was settled without asking me. I am glad to
remember now that I had nothing to do with the settlement
of it.

As to my work in England, I frankly answer, I did not
feel myself hampered by the evident impracticability of
" preaching the Faith " to English Protestants and using our
missions to do that work. It must be remembered that I was
as yet a young and inexperienced man. I was only there as a
neophyte with means enough to gather experience not yet
gathered. At Hanley and Upton-on-Severn I found English
Protestants enough to deal with between missions. The work
was a joyous one to a convert like me, and a fruitful one. I
was not situated like Newman or any of his immediate disci-
ples in the Oratory. I had never been at Oxford or Liver-
more, or trained to truth under his eye at Birmingham. I felt
what grand opportunities of doing good lay embodied in giv-
ing missions. But during the intervals between this work I
felt at home in gleaning after such men as these. I was glad
to aid them in their great work. My vocation was in many
respects different from theirs. Although, like them, a convert,
my heart could be satisfied where their hearts could not and
ought not to rest so easily contented. It was God that led us
all, but not all in the same way.

To be a missionary was the first especial vocation which
opened itself to my hope when a student in the Protestant
seminary in New York City. But then I thought only of de-
voting myself to the work of foreign missions to the heathen.
VOL. LXX. 5

66 REMINISCENCES OF A CA THOLIC CRISIS [Oct.,

Soon grew up the desire of leading the monastic life, with mis-
sionary labor attached to that life.

Later on, when I united myself to the ancient Catholic
Faith and Church, I became acquainted with another kind of
missionary labor, namely, home missions, not given to heathen
but to Catholic Christians. This was a parish work given by
missionary orders on the invitation of bishops and secular
priests. Its object was to save believing Catholics who had be-
come involved in sin, and to urge good Catholics to a higher
and holier life. This was to me no change of calling, but a
development of vocation. My first knowledge of missions had
come to me through Ward's Ideal of a Christian Church. The
first priests that opened their arms to me were preachers
trained to this kind of labor. But there was nothing that tied
them down against enlarging this field without any substantial
change of vocation. I felt myself as much at home in Worces-
tershire, amongst its gentry and peasantry, when calling stray
sheep into the sheepfold as when nursing the sheep and the
lambs already folded in.

So much for England and so much for America.

When one wishes to study better what belongs to the
whole career of such a man as Cardinal Wiseman, or such an-
other as John Henry Newman, or such another as Bishop Er-
rington, or such another as Archbishop Manning, they must
refer to later events than those which belong strictly to the
time of the great crisis.

John Henry Newman, the chief leader in the great Oxford
Movement and founder of the Oratory in that country, firmly
believed that his vocation called him to establish a Catholic
college at Oxford. There was no good reason to urge against
this conviction except one that argued greater weakness in the
true Faith and only true church than in the ranks of heresy.
Is it the proper time for a victorious army to look out for a
safe place of refuge when adversaries are advancing to sur-
render their arms? Is it the proper time to circumvallate and
entrench yourself when you see the enemy disorganizing and
in confusion ? Is it a time to show fear and decline combat
when ancient foes are lowering their flags ? Is it a time for the
Holy Church to avoid discussion and controversy when heretics
and unbelievers are opening their ears to listen and confessing
their own weakness and inability to answer? Oxford is in-
deed a formidable university, but just at the time when New-
man wished to found a college there she was searching ear-

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 67

nestly to find out the old paths and get back to unity which
she could not find in the Anglican community.

And now a few words in regard to Dr. Newman's especial
and peculiar vocation as leader of the great Oxford Movement
towards Rome. He tells us himself that when he began the
study of the early Christian Fathers it was to prove that
Romanism, as Protestants love to call it, was contrary to the
teaching of those Fathers and in better accordance with the
Anglican Church. He found just the contrary to be the truth.
He found the Fathers talking like Roman Catholics, and not
like Anglicans or Protestants of any kind. This came to his
mind like a new revelation of fact and of doctrine. He found
even ways and manners in the church of the Fathers bore the
same impress, favoring what is now practically followed by
Roman Catholics when they speak devoutly as representative
Catholics are accustomed to do. This he shows to be beauti-
fully true when St. Basil and his sister and St. Gregory Nazi-
anzen, with their families and kindred, met together, corre-
sponded together, and in their corresponderce referred to their
religious intercourse with each other.

He soon came to understand what is really meant by the
four notes or marks of the true church still retained in the
early creeds, including the Nicene and what we call the Apos-
tles' Creed. In his famous "Tract No. 90" he explains how
it is that so much which looks like the present teaching of the
Church Catholic and Roman was retained by so many divines
who took part in the Protestant rebellion and the establish-
ment of the British sovereign as the head of the church. It
was a compromise to lure the unwilling into the great re-
bellion against the papal authority. He argued that Anglicans
had the same right to insist upon what the compromise granted
to them of the High Church as Low Churchmen and Metho-
dists claimed for themselves. This was the very head and
front of his offending in this tract. When Catholic doctrine is
expressed in the catechism, in the liturgies, and in so many
homilies still retained in the Book of Common Prayer, or publicly
read in their churches, it is entitled to as much respect as the
Thirty-nine Articles.

This discovery, which Dr. Newman made by a fair and
honest study of the early Fathers, was to him a very great
discovery. Bdng truth, and opening to a truer knowledge of
the four grc t notes of the true church contained in the
Apostles' Cre.J and other early creeds, an honest mind like

68 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Oct.,

his could not afford to lay it down as something inconvenient
to hold. Neither could a great leader in religious truth deal
so treacherously with followers and friends as to suppress it.
Hence " No. 90" of the series of Tracts which gave the name
of Tractarians to him and his. This name included many
learned and studious men, many of those progressive thinkers
also in the Oxford Movement. " No. 90 " kept back some
leaders in the Movement who were not inclined to proceed
any further, being more inquisitive in matters of theology than
earnest seekers after truth. It made enemies also, as novel
truths are apt to do when inconvenient to maintain. This last
thought I will endeavor to fortify by two letters in Dr. New-
man's unmistakable handwriting in my possession. The first of
these was written to me in 1866, the year when I became
pastor of St. Mary's, the position which I still hold. It gives
Newman's attitude at the time in regard to a supposed conflict
between natural science and revelation. This question has given
me more trouble than it did to the great Oratorian. At least,
it gave him little labor of the intellect.

Let me now return for a moment to the position of Dr.
Newman and all that there was of true Tractarianism when he
indited and published " Tract No. 90." This tract raised a
veritable storm over the devoted head of Dr. Newman. Some
of those who should have understood it recoiled from it.
Truth or no truth, they could not take it in its true light, or
rather, would not. Either they stood irresolute or were de-
termined to go no further. Where we know or feel that Dr.
Newman, a Catholic convert, or Cardinal Wiseman, a true
friend of Newman's, as we believe, and a friend to converts
already made or on the way to such making where either of
these two great men would have hesitated from prudence or
from delicacy, I will not give names.

A great many others did not at the time understand that
famous tract. Still more never did understand it. Others
never will. For example, so far as I myself am concerned, I
think I see good reasons for it now and a certain necessity for
it. I see now, at least, that it was opportune at that time.
I did not when I first read it. Now it seems to me that I
understand better that crisis in the Oxford Movement with
deference to other minds, but without so much diffidence
now as then. In that storm mere High-Clr.:rch book-worms
resolved to go no farther, but to hide lemselves again
behind the judicious Hooker and others who had furnished

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 69

them with the most of what they knew about the early
Fathers.

Ritualistic triflers with vestments and crosses turned off to
the right and left at this time, ringing their bells as they sep-
arated from the reforming tide, like cows at Martigny, march-
ing to occupy their true places as aforetime.

Others, like Ward in England, and Putnam, McMaster,
Hecker, and myself in America, and I think Wadhams also,
came home to God and the old faith and church before New-
man. I have never heard that he cautioned Ward from doing
what he himself had not sufficient light to do at the time. He
knew what disciples in America were doing, but gave none
of us a word of warning or rebuke as we passed near him, then
at Livermore, to assume our places in the holy church. He
received McMaster, who notified him of the step we had taken,
with a grasp of the hand and a smile, but not a word of dis-
couragement. Ward's Ideal of a Christian Church and his fam-
ous defiance of the authorities at Oxford broke up the Trac-
tarian Movement, making a confusion in its ranks and leaving
him in a state of temporary inaction which I think I can under-
stand, but in this may possibly be mistaken.

My friend Wadhams had said to me already to go ahead
and take the step which is always a great leap for a Protest-
ant to make. His words I remember as being substantially
these :

" Walworth, go on and follow your conscience; there is
nothing to detain you where you are. But I have been posted
here by an authority which I have hitjierto accepted, and am
not so free to quit it without some arrangement with that
authority."

Some there were, also, so far identified with Romeward-
bound converts that they could no longer retain or regain
their position in the schismatic and heretical Church of Eng-
land, and so were forced by a sort of public opinion to move
reluctantly onward. Many not very conversant with the Ox-
ford Movement, or the march of a thoughtful mind Romeward,
will not understand me when I say this. I write for those
who can. Qui potest capere, capiat.

"You all belong to the same boat," said a voice behind
them. "Your hearts are not in the old English home, and the
old home can easily spare you."

In this way they did not leave with entire freedom to stay
or go, but were crowded out.

7o REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. [Oct.,

REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE.

BY REV. AUGUSTINE DAVID MALLEY.

HAIL you, young man of to-day !

" I hail you : you who have come from afar,
from the valleys of darkness and of despair
where past generations brought you forth, have
now climbed up the dry and desolate mountains
of this life, even to the summits where you have found purity
of conscience in order to give it forth to the world and the
future ; the future is big with hope of you, the world is ex-
pecting you."

Something of the gift of prophecy must be conceded to
the modern seer, the psychological novelist. Bourget wrote
the preceding address ten years ago in his preface to the
Disciple. No doubt it will be a marvellous and welcome trans-
formation when the younger literary men of France teach the
world the way to find peace and purity of conscience. Yet
this change is surely taking place in the realm of French
literary art. The end of art now is to regenerate mankind,
not to debase it, or convince it that the animal enters largely
into its composition.

DUPANLOUP'S DICTUM.

Years ago the great Bishop Dupanloup preached to ears
that were very deaf : " The only art worthy of the name is
that which is practised in the worthiest manner in the schools
of the great masters; of such a nature that it is a foundation
for virtue itself, strength for the soul, or, as it were, a wing,
by means of which we mount from artistic beauty to the
primal source of all beauty, which is God ; of such a nature
that the religious cult of art nourishes that love of beauty,
that thirst for the ideal, which lifts up the soul to those
realms of pure beauty and holy love : love which, if it does
not yet partake of the nature of piety that is to say, is not
yet a direct love of God yet indeed approaches to it and
sighs after it."

This definition of art, recalling to mind the best traditions
of Christianity, and even memories of Plato, the Symrosium,

1899-] REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 71

colloquies by the side of the blue Ilissus of the green sedges,
suggesting at the same time austerity and gentle sensuousness,
is slowly influencing the younger writers of France, who long
ago tired of the scarlet trappings of romanticism, and are now
disgusted with the brutality of naturalism. They long for
peace and rest ; the mystery of the churches attracts them,
they are soothed by the cadences of plain chant, in which
they detect no earthly sensuousness, nothing but spirit "cette
douce musique blanche." They long to be moral. As Maurice
Pujo says, the symbol for the new movement among the young
men is St. John leaning his head on Christ's breast. " It is to
Him we must remount to-day ; behold, the times are all
changed, it is no longer on the Acropolis we shall go to pray;
we have at last found thee thee whom we have so long sought
despite dogmas and sciences, despite the barriers which separ-
ate us from thee. Thou hast conquered the oppression of
things, and thy light, which mounts clearer to our veiled eyes,
brightens them with a new day. How much are we going to
love thee now that we fear thee no longer ! " Renan once
urged them by his example to worship on the Acropolis, to
give themselves over to pleasure simply : " Let us rejoice, O
my poor soul ! in the world such as we find it. It is not a
serious work ; it is a farce, the huge joke of a merry old
demiurge! Pleasure is the only theology for this grand farce.
Ah, but for that you must not die ; if you die you make a
great mistake." " I have but two enemies," wrote Anatole
France, "Christ and Chastity!"

We turn from this philosophy with great relief; it would
be the ruin of France. Zola, the erstwhile leader, has nothing
better to offer " les jeunes gens." " Take a salon," he says;
" I am speaking as an honest man : if you could obtain a sin-
cere confession from all those present, you would have a
document which would put to shame thieves and assassins ! "
France surely has had enough of the teachers of materialism
in all its forms, scepticism, hedonism, pessimism ; there are but
two alternatives destruction or a religious revival. Renan
knew it when he wrote : " Who is it that will save us ? Mon
Dieu ! for some it is virtue, for others the search for truth ; for
this one, art ; for that other, curiosity, ambition, travel, luxury,
women, riches, and, in the last stage, morphine or charcoal."
True lovers of the gallant nation will be glad to welcome
writers who will hold up some higher ideal to the French than
pleasure or destruction.

72 REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. [Oct.,

RETURN TO PURER SENTIMENTS.

As in men, so in nations : the ascetic and mystic often
verges on the darkest sensualism, while, on the other hand,
the debauchee in a sudden bound frees himself from the tram-
mels of passion. It would be very natural now to expect a
swing of the pendulum towards the pure and the mystic.

" Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mere Marie,
Oh ! comme j'etais faible et bien mechant encore,
Elle baissa mes yeux et me joignat les mains,
Et m'enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore,"

sang Paul Valoire, the poet of the new movement. These
lines express well the motive of the return towards a higher
and more religious life. They are simply weary of the past,
and, like tired children, would rest on some comforting and
consoling theory of life. The classical school, earlier in the
century, failed for want of vitality ; rigid rules were enforced,
models were set up, to disobey which meant expulsion from
select coteries. This system killed originality and was felt to
be artificial. Romanticism arose like a young giant, a splendid
Goth, clothed in skins, despising the long toga and classic
calm. Yet romanticism was but a stage Goth ; men saw the
footlights, the painted scenery, the wigs and the masks, and
declared this was not life which was presented to them. The
authors of the romantic movement protested against the killing
rules of the old school, but reacted towards an exaggerated
personality. Their works do not reflect life, but the author.
We never dream of saying while perusing them : " This is life ;
it must be so. I cannot imagine things happening otherwise";
but we say, " This is Balzac, this is Dumas, this is Hugo."
They were men of great power, but not interpreters of life ;
rather, poets who used prose instead of verse. Their works
exhibit all the delight a poet takes in detailing how things
affect him, rather than the sober observance of a man who
regards objective facts and suppresses his own interpretation
of them the method of the true narrator. But if it is argued
that romanticism never meant to interpret life, but simply to
please, it has failed for the same reasons which influenced the
good curate to burn all the library of the famous knight Don
Quixote de la Mancha.

1899-] REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 73

REVOLT AGAINST NATURALISM.

Naturalism, also, has had its day, and now in France is
rapidly declining because it, too, has not been found true. It
has said too much and too little about life ; it has spoken too
much about the animal that is in man, and too little about the
angel. Man, with the writers of the naturalistic school, is sim-
ply a machine, or rather the resultant of innumerable impulses.
When these are good, he is good ; when bad, he is totally de-
praved. A subject, or rather a temperament, is placed in a
certain environment, the machinery of the story started, the
inward inclinations, the outward circumstances, and we have
the necessary final resultant, over which no one seems to have
control. " Virtue and vice are products, just as are vitriol and
sugar," is the theory of Zola and his school.

Herein lies the first great weakness and falsity of natural-
ism, the outcome of modern materialism. Energetic western
peoples can never be convinced of the doctrine of fatalism.
In all their religions, governments, constitutions, man is re-
garded as a free agent, responsible for all his acts. No state
in Europe or America will ever declare that crime is a natural
product, and therefore criminals are but the innocent result of
bad environment. What is true, of course, is that some men
are affected more than others by association, not necessarily
all men ; nor does life afford enough examples for the sweep-
ing and morbid deductions of the naturalists. As Brunetiere
well said : " From the Madeleine to the Bastile, from the
East station to Montrouge, there are plenty of good, honest
folk who count themselves happy with a modest competency
fathers of families who are saving, wives who are faithful,
mothers who mend the clothes of their little children." Neither
in the salon nor in the Rue St. Michel do we find the philoso-
phy of the naturalists holding true. In sober fact, Zola,
Daudet, or the others do not believe this theory of life; they
would have the perverted criminal brought to justice and pun-
ished, notwithstanding their theories in regard to free will, just
as would the metaphysician and the pietist who believe most
rigidly in the responsibility of man that is, if the criminal
rifled one of their own coffers or stole the manuscript of a
novel.

NATURALISM FALSE AS TO DETAILS.

True, men do not always act with full consent of the will

74 REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. [Oct.,

nor with clear prevision, but where in life do we find the ma-
terial for the absolute fixity of types found among the char-
acters of the naturalists? With them the thief is. always intent
on thieving, the pugnacious on trouble, the lecherous in seek-
ing victims. Peculiarities arising from certain trades and pro-
fessions have been so exaggerated that we find new species of
men. Instead of being called naturalism, the whole school
could well be called travesty, unnaturalism, for nowhere would
nature find her own among them. The children of men
commit many acts which are bad, many which are good, and a
great many more which are indifferent. Good men have with-
in themselves many tendencies which would lead to destruction ;
the sinner has within him the possibility of the saint. One
will look in vain for this sane and healthy view of life among
the most widely read books of these authors ; yet who can
doubt it ? By some strange chance, realism or naturalism was
supposed to deal only with the lower classes, washerwomen,
tradesmen, poor farmers, the drudges of humanity, and these
worn-out beings are given passions and inclinations only suited
to the pampered, luxurious natures of a Nero or Domitian.
One would think the lives of these people were spent in con-
tinual debauch. Add to this the insufferable detail found in
these works, and you will have the reason why future genera-
tions will look back with astonishment at the patience or un-
bounded curiosity of the passing age.

We must have detail, to be sure ; but why are we supposed
to be interested in the description of a very commonplace room,
its carpets, curtains, chairs, and tables, the dawdling conversa-
tions of the occupants, their looks, and gestures ? All this
pleases the same uncultivated tastes which make the audiences
of a third or fourth rate theatre applaud wildly when they see
a steam-engine, fire-wagon, an ambulance with real horses, on
the stage, simply because these very ordinary things are in an
extraordinary place. This zeal for detail is a fault against
literary art, which like all others must leave something to the
imagination, not tie it down to the printed page.

There is not need now, however, to argue against the
methods of the naturalists, for the school is passing or has
passed. Its best results are found in the fact that it has done
a great work in training men to observe life ; its weakness was
exaggeration. These methods were the outcome of the scienti-
fic spirit influencing all branches of art. The theatre could not
be very deeply or permanently influenced, because its nature

1899-] REACTION IN FRENCH LITERAIURE. 75

depends almost entirely on artificial conventions to arouse the
emotions, and a drama composed merely of scenes taken from
actual life would empty the chairs rapidly. Here there must
be romance, idealism, studied situations. But it is in the novel
that the scientific spirit has most prevailed, the latter pro-
ductions being hardly more than studies in anatomy, pathology,
psychology, with strong tendencies to dwell merely on the mor-
bid and unclean. The scientists have always had contempt for
the writers of fiction, regarding them as somewhat monstrous
beings, in whom imagination prevailed over logic and reason ;
who are therefore to be relegated to the categories of those
entities over which law and order has had no sway.

NATURALISM WITH A SCIENTIFIC TEMPER.

To conciliate this new scientific spirit and conviction, which
was permeating all classes, the novelists studied science, and
became as devout worshippers of the new masters as they had
been of the old classic authorities. Science ignored God and
religion as dreams which could not be verified ; the novelists
answered Amen, going further in their zeal and attacking the
foundations of morality. The scientists said naught to this,
but looked on it as one of the necessary ebullitions of the yet
untrained brethren, physically incapable of the calm, judicious
temperament which nature had bestowed on themselves. They
had not out-and-out declared against morality, although there
were things in their works which the weaker brethren might
wrest to their own destruction. Science but held itself in re-
serve, and would not apply itself to the ethical problems of
men until it had first settled with the universe. So the more
emotional novelists rushed forward and dealt with these pro-
blems in their own fashion. With this new scientific temper,
they found out that life was hollow and a dream, and virtue
a fond delusion that men were trying to persuade themselves
they could attain. This sudden and absolute conviction of the
falsity of all religious teachings reminds one of the apostasy
of the young French lad who, after studying his Latin gram-
mar, heard the priest on Ash Wednesday say Memento homo
quia' pulvis es, instead of using the infinitive ; thus violating all
scientific grammar, and proving conclusively his incompetency
to teach other branches of knowledge, sacred or profane.
Under scientific names and phraseology as much romance and
unreal treatment of life was given forth to the world as during
the dry classical or florid periods of the century.

76 REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. [Oct.,

BEGAN WITH THE POETS.

It is hard to state exactly where the revolt was first made
against the scientific theories, but it seems to have come first
from the poets. For Poetry also had been enthralled by science :
the muse had to go to the conservatory and be taught to sing
before she should dare open her mouth in public. Verse-mak-
ing was technical, and must be submitted to rule and law.
The uncouth, the bizarre, the farouche must all be eliminated.
Under the severe eye of the archpriest of Parnassus, Leconte
de Lisle, not a rhyme, rhythm, sentiment could pass unless it
satisfied the most severe conditions. Among his followers, such
as Catulle Mendes, Francois Coppee, generally subjects from
every-day life were chosen in harmony with the rest of the
naturalistic school, and these were set off in verse of exquisite
polish. But modern poets are not satisfied with merely stating
a fact ; they must state also its impression on themselves ; they
gaze on it from all Sides, it arouses in them dream, mystery,
connotation. That outward fact was then something sublime,
mysterious; it was sent from whence? It is more than a mere
fact ; it is a symbol. As the emotions which arose then neces-
sarily became complex, intangible, evanescent, they had to be
expressed in suitable verse, no matter whether the latter was
according to rule or not. The importation of German philoso-
phy increased the new spirit ; the vague, fantastic, absorbing
theories of subjectivism, pantheism, idealism, begot disgust for
the concrete and the matter-of-fact. Verlaine, Mallarme, Moreas,
Morice became now the models of the hour. With these men
religion and morality are not ridiculed ; they yearn for them.
Christianity alone can soothe them. The whole world is full
of sadness and mystery ; like Tissot's peasants, they sit on the
ruins of modern castles, and feel about them the same sweet
Presence which can heal. They are disturbed and sad.

" Les sanglots longs,

Des violons,
De 1'automne,

Blessent mon cceur
D'une langueur

Monotone,"

sings Verlaine. He is taken as the typical poet of the new
movement, the absinthe-drinker of the Rue St. Michel, the de-

1899-] REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 77

votee of the churches. " How I hate everything that is Jan-
senistic, Protestant ; in a word, what is narrow ! They would
belittle human nature, take away from me the supreme joy of
Communion ! Communion, where I share in the body of God.
Whoever thinks my faith is not sincere does not know the
ecstasy of receiving in his body the flesh of the Lord. The
last time that I went to Communion, I felt for an instant pure
and washed from all sin ; but that very same evening . . .
no, no, I am not worthy." In Verlaine the extremes of sen-
suality and deep religious longings seem to meet. He is ^t
the same time a child and a satyr. The mind that could give
forth to the world such productions as the " Confessions,"
41 Chansons pour elle," " Ganymede," was capable also of some
of the sweetest and tenderest prayers to the Virgin ma mere
Marie.

M. August Dorchain, another representative, writes exclu-
sively for young men. He belongs to the "jeunesse blanche."
The sorrows attendant on misspent youth is his constant theme.
What is the worth of living without belief, without hope, with-
out purity?

" Le cceur d'un homme vierge est un vase profond.

Tristes sont les roses fanes!
Tristes les jours perdus et les nuits profandes,
Les amours qu'un matin suffit a dfleurir,
Triste la source impure et qu'on ne peut tarir,
La beaute" que le temps inexorable emporte
Et la virginit^ du cceur fletrie et morte ! "

Together with him there are many others who are striving
to inculcate a love for the pure and simple pleasures of life,
notably Ch. Recolin in his book Solitaires, Henry Desplaces in
Melodies d"ame, Maurice Pujo in Rcgne de la Grace, Eugene
Holland in Beaute, and Pierre Lassere in the history of the
whole movement, La Crise Chrttienne.

THE PURPOSE OF THE NEW SCHOOL.

As there was a revolt in poetry, so there came also the in-
evitable revolt in prose. The naturalistic novelists had confined
themselves to individuals as " temperaments," had followed out
strict lines of evolution or degeneracy in characters, preaching
a doctrine of determinism, fatalism, and inevitably pessimism.
The younger men justly feel this is a wrong view of the world ;

78 REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. [Oct.,

they feel a glorious conviction that they can guide their c\vn
lives, and are not simply the products of time and place. Nay,
so much so that M. Henry de Regnier wishes " to banish de-
liberately, in full conscience, the accidents of place, epochs, all
particularizing facts "; in truth, relate nothing but what is
representative of being or humanity in general. The enthusias-
tic M. Paul Adam declares that the purpose of the new school
is " to seize the true relations amid the heterogeneous matter
presented by the naturalists and psychologists, to draw thence
the essential and vital reason for human acts, which are, in-
deed, intimately bound up with the movements of our planet,
of which man is, so to speak, a cerebral cellule, and all man-
kind the encephalon ; to express the conformity of these rela-
tions with the higher laws of gravitation, between the Un-
known or God and the conscious individual phenomenon of the
person in question, who is in the end only a passing form in
which manifests itself from outside the Divine Primal Essence."
Evidently these young men are the antipodes of Flaubert, the
De Goncourts, Zola. They deliberately contradict all that the
whilom leaders have said. Man with them is not an animal,
he is a spirit ; they are rushing to the other extreme of mak-
ing him something uncanny, with strange and occult relations
with plants, animals, suns, and stars. They are mystic, but
often detestably immoral, clothing vice in a religious gaib.
This phase of the movement would remind one of the dreams
of the Alexandrians during the paganism and sensualism of the
early centuries. It is a strange mystery in human nature that
this should be so, yet during all times we see both spirits fol-
lowing each other, sensualism, false mysticism,' the man who
doubts or denies for the sake of pleasure, turning and believing
the wildest absurdities. There is only one belief which holds
nature in poise, and this at present is denied a fair hearing.
These young men constitute the school of the " Magi," who
are striving to unite, in some way or other, science, Chaldee
astrology, and Christianity. They address each other as " Sar,"
and are gazed at in bewilderment by the old conservative
masters.

THE TREND TOWARDS A DEEPER SENSE OF RELIGION.

Amidst all this turmoil it is safe to predict that the school
of the future will be moral, religious, with a tendency among
some toward pantheism, the effect of Germany, and among
others a reaction towards Christianity and the church. There

1899-] REACTION IN FRENCH LITERATURE. 79

are, however, many schools on the field clamoring for first
place: Symbolists, Decadents, Neo-Realists, Neo-Christians, In-
dependents, " Tolstoiants," Buddhists, Magi, Supernaturalists ;
as M. Pellissier says, literary France is calling out " Anne, ma
sceur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?" Why is this? Christianity
has introduced unrest into the world. On, on ! is its watch-
word. Naturalism was the modern paganism, wishing for the
concrete and definite, satisfied with what is seen and touched.
Christianity continually urges men and nations towards what
has not been realized as yet, and it is this spirit that is fer-
menting slowly as yet in Paris. M. Melchior de Vogue has
translated the modern Russian novelists into French, those
stern idealists with revolutionary pictures of a world rejuven-
ated by nations living the life laid down in the Gospel.
Wagner in his " Parsifal," the modern " Canticle of Canticles,"
holds up the ideal of life, the consecrated youth in his quest
of the Holy Grail. Puvis de Chavannes has caught and im-
prisoned this new spirit in many of his mural paintings, and
many of the older writers, like Hu>smann, have .abandoned
the celebration of sin and the flesh, seeking peace and content
in the sheltering arms of the church. Yet it would be wrong
to say that there is a general movement towards the church
among the great mass of Frenchmen, who are indifferent to all
creeds ; rather there is a slow conviction growing that what
France needs is stronger morality, and that this cannot be
obtained without some form of religious belief. The old re-
volt against religion is deplored, and amazement is expressed
that so many in France accepted and still accept the flimsy
gibe of Voltaire, that religion was an invention of priests to
delude mankind. The younger men are serious and wish to
perform some great moral work, heartily endorsing Bourget
when he said : " We must suffer, we must love, we must create.
This is all ethics and aesthetics. It is also Life." France, the
rich, the fruitful, with the scars of many battles on her noble
brow, now looks sorrowingly on her sons. She stretches out
her hands to the youth of the land, crying to them : " Aid me
with tongue and pen ; build up my people, who are fast hasten-
ing towards degeneracy and destruction; ennoble their ideals;
bring back what was pure and holy, cast out the weak, foolish,
and trivial, or I too must sink into the inferno of nations
where naught is heard but sighs and vain regrets for what
might have been ! "

8o HOPE ETERNAL. [Oct.,

BY THOMAS B. REILLY.

DOWN through aisles of darkness
Come echoing wind and sea,
Like the chant of a psalm eternal
From gates of mystery.

Long lines of landward breakers
Pitch ever in monotone
On sullen rocks in the starshine,
On the wreck of ships unknown.

From an ocean of years unnumbered
Run the surfings of memory
On the plundered dreams of youth-time
In sweet, sad melody.

But now, when the gloom is lifting
And the dirge of the sea is hushed,
The sorrows that night engendered
In the arms of dawn lie crushed.

The voice of the reeded marshes
Lifts clear when the shadows cease,
Like a harp in the Halls of David
Sighing for light and peace.

And out on the arc of the ocean,
Through inkles of living gold,
My ships go bending seaward
Just as in days of old.

1899-] How WE ABUSE RELIGION. 81

HOW WE ABUSE RELIGION.*

BY REV. JOSEPH McSORLEY, C.S.P.

fOME little time ago there appeared in a French
magazine a rather unusual article on the subject
of moral energy in religion. f The writer pro-
posed for consideration an interesting and diffi-
cult problem, namely, why temporal prosperity
and profession of the Protestant faith as a general thing, now-
adays, go hand-in-hand. He instanced as most remarkable the
evident and acknowledged ascendency of the English-speaking
races in all quarters of the globe, thus stating the problem in
terms apparently conclusive against the material, social, or in-
tellectual pre-eminence of Catholic peoples.

Now, it behooves us, declared the writer, to find some way
of explaining this difficulty other than the expedient of taking
refuge in the well-worn axiom that God's kingdom is not of
this world. For, true as this is, its application to the question
in hand is both far-fetched and discouraging, and though our
faith is indeed primarily concerned with well-being in the next
life, we have likewise received that other promise : " Seek ye
first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things
shall be added unto you." \

So the article proceeds to venture suggestions towards ex-
plaining the phenomenon ; and though we must declare our-
selves out of sympathy with some of the statements made, still
the main point of the essay is undoubtedly well taken, richly
suggestive, and directed against a wide-spread evil hampering
the efficiency of our holy religion. That to which Protestant-
ism owes its ascendency is, beyond doubt, the careful cultiva-
tion of good things borrowed from Catholicity, the principles
of free will, sound reason, personal responsibility, and so on.
And any decadence discernible among Catholics unquestionably
is to be traced to an imperfect and distorted comprehension
of principles clearly defined by the church, betraying itself,
for instance, in a forced and exaggerated notion as to the use

* External Religion : Its Use and Abuse. By George Tyrrell, SJ. London: Sands &
Co.; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder.

t " L'Energie et la Liberte," Le Spectateur Catholique, Sept., 1897. \ Matthew vi. 33.

VOL. LXX. 6

82 How WE ABUSE RELIGION. [Oct.,

of authority in the domain of the intelligence, and in an arti-
ficial, formal, unreal conception of prayer, sacramental grace,
and the whole external order of religion.

Not dissimilar is the point of view taken by the distin-
guished Jesuit whose latest publication is named at the begin-
ning of this article. The volume is made up of a collection of
conferences delivered before the Catholic undergraduates at
Oxford, on the Sundays in Lent teim of the current year.
Starting out with a defence of the necessity of an external,
teaching church, the writer promptly leaves this well-beaten
track to deliver his message concerning the foolishness and
wickedness of exaggerating external religion into a complete
substitute for that interior life, that adoration in spirit and
truth, which is the essential element in the relationship of every
human soul with its Creator.

Now, unfortunate as is the necessity compelling us to admit
the existence of such a tendency as he rebukes, the very
strength and pointedness and power of conviction in his words,
as in those of a few other writers of kindred spirit, justifies a
firm hope of speedy improvement. The eyes on Israel's watch-
tower are not blind to surrounding dangers. More than once
warning cries have sounded forth from leaders who, intent on
the future foreshadowed in the present, are summoning our
people to shake off lethargy, to assimilate new ideas and new
vigor, and to bring personal intelligence and moral initiative
to bear on those critical issues that cannot be settled for any
man by another day or another conscience than his own. In
the domain of thought and the domain of action are unex-
plored wastes, ready to exhaust an indefinite application of
energy, but certain to yield thereto almost infinite wealth.
And once let the rank and file become conscious of their posi-
tion and impressed with a sense of personal responsibility and,
animated by the ardor of older days, they too will rush for-
ward to the successful transformation of an age and a world.

The actual state of affairs is nothing inexplicable ; it is the
logical result of an inevitable human tendency. But most hu-
man tendencies were created that they might be interfered with
by man's imperious controlling will. And so too with this
most natural, but most distressing, bid for degeneracy. Most
natural, we say, for is it not the everlasting habit of human
nature to exaggerate the temporary into the eternal, the acci-
dental into the essential, the means into the end?

Let us reflect. In the wisdom of Divine Providence an ex-

1899-] How WE ABUSE RELIGION. 83

ternal, visible institution has been decided on as the ordinary
channel of grace, the means whereby men may be led to the
highest cultivation of that internal religion which is the loftiest
gift of the human soul. The organization of that Visible
Church has been a standing marvel, as far and away superior
to the grandest invention of human genius. Its body of doc-
trine, solid, complete, rounded out into perfect symmetry, towers
as a masterpiece among the trivial productions of imitative
minds. Its ethical cede has trained men to the constant per-
forming of wonders utterly beyond the power of nature, has
made sublimity and heroism of action a commonplace, a fact
of every day in the lives of Christian husbands and Christian
mothers. The asceticism it claims as its own displays the
scientific and successful cultivation of what is grandest and
noblest in the human soul. Even its very devotional system
exhibits for all ages, all countries, all dispositions, a range and
variety calculated to meet the need of every child of Adam,
emotional or intellectual, poetic or practical, reserved or affec-
tionate, as their temperaments may be.

This very perfection of our external religion sometimes has
seduced the observer into falling down and worshipping it as
God himself, heedless of the warning: "See thou do it not,
for I am thy fellow-servant." ' The sublimity and range of
Catholic dogma, the supremacy of the Teaching Power, the
promise of indefectibility itself, these, in narrow and childish
minds, frequently become an excuse for a passive attitude with
regard to great current issues in the religious or intellectual
world. The consciousness of a power able to control and
compel mental assent to propositions, of a weapon infallible in
the conquest of truth, sometimes becomes so utterly destructive
of wise judgment as to make men seek from authority the re-
sults which God has left to be a reward of honest and indus-
trious intellectual activity: "in place of having recourse to the
church only when a distressing breach opened between the
brethren in Christ Jesus, they have applied to her to hunt
down ideas seemingly in discord with certain principles, or to
arrest ideas that might become dangerous if developed, or to
crush ideas which are distasteful. "f

And so, again, narrowness betrays itself in a continual mea-
suring ad literam ; an uneasy wish to prevent further exploita-
tion of truth already partially defined by authority; an anxiety,
as has been fairly objected against us, to seek for an aibitrary

* Apocalypse xix. 10. t See article cited above, p. 127.

84 How WE ABUSE RELIGION. [Oct.,

line of demarcation between fundamental and accessory dog-
mas, rather than for a line within each dogma separating the
religious content which must be safeguarded from the less
vital symbolical expression.* This is to mistake the purpose
of definitions, aimed rather at preserving from error than at
terminating intelligent study of doctrine. For, as Father
Tyrrell says, " The human words and ideas in which eternal
truths are clad cannot, even through divine skill, convey to us
more than a shadow of the realities they stand for."f It is
this misunderstanding which leads to low appreciation of the
importance of new methods in the teaching of doctrine, of
" new presentations of Christian truth more in harmony with
the present condition of human thought, a need, however,
that has been fully understood by the most successful modern
exponents of Catholic doctrine. It is by translating afresh the
unchanging doctrine of the church into the language and
thoughts of their contemporaries that such men as Lacordaire,
Ozanam, Nicolas, Bougaud, Monsabr in France, Newman and
his disciples in England, the ablest apologists in Germany and
elsewhere, have won back countless numbers to the faith, or
reawakened their fervor. Each generation, each country, each
village almost, needs a vision of its own. Christianity has, un-
happily, lost its empire over the most active and most culti-
vated minds of our age. Yet in one shape or another they
are ever brought back to it, and crave for a faith that may
adapt itself to the form in which their minds have been shaped,
and fill the void of their souls. What they look for is not so
much positive proofs as reason ; that is, a harmonizing of what
is taught them in the name of God with their mental system,
such as it has been made by the study of history, philosophy,
science, and the experience of life. To supply this need be-
comes a paramount duty, and were St. Thomas to return among
us to-day, momentarily shorn of the beatific vision, and pos-
sessing only his original gifts, we should find him once more
eager to take in all knowledge, busy with the most recent dis-
coveries, alive to the great questions of the hour, watching the
developments of minds and of events, gathering light from
everything and harmoniously blending it with light from
above, "if

* Esquisse d'une Philosophic de la Religion, etc., p. 404. By Auguste Sabatier, Professor
at the University of Paris, Mean of the Faculty of Protestant Theology,
t External Religion, p. 119.
% Clerical Studies, p. 195. By Very Rev. J. B. Hogan, S.S., D.D.

1 899.] How WE ABUSE RELIGION. 85

The other great gift presented by the church to human
minds, besides infallibly exact instruction, is the bestowal of
strength on our will, the communicating of graces, sacramental
and otherwise. Here too, though not through lack of clearness
and certainty in Catholic teaching, we find ground for the
charge that many abuse this aid, so that it is made "to hinder
rather than promote spiritual development, to discourage spon-
taneity, to destroy independence of action and thought in all
religious matters, to accustom us from our infancy onwards to
moral and intellectual crutches, and to persuade us that we can-
not possibly do without them."* Now, as a matter of fact,
" we may hold it for a certain and universal truth, that God, in
offering us helps, never intends to spare us any profitable labor,
or superable difficulty, which we should otherwise have had to
face." f He wishes us to work out our own salvation accord-
ing to the laws of our nature, and in so doing, as a writer
familiar to us has phrased it, " to pray as if all depended on
God, and work as if all depended on self."J Father Tyrrell
continues : " Neither condition dependence on God, or de-
pendence on self avails without the other. We must rely on
God and rely on ordinary means. The Pelagians thought that
their own natural vigilance was enough ; and this is an error in
which we all follow them at some time or another of our life
perhaps always to some little extent. But just as dangerous is
the error of a certain pious fatalism which confounds trust in
God with presumption ; which regards prayer and the sacra-
ments as substitutes for vigilance instead of as means to it.
. . . We always try the path of least resistance, the cheap-
est, the easiest route. We are ever the too-ready dupes of
any one who pretends to have found out some trouble-saving
method of salvation ; something we can get through once and
for all and have done with ; some substitute for weary vigilance,
and tiresome perseverance, and bitter mortification, and for the
other necessary causes without which even God himself often
could not insure the desired effects. W 7 e clutch eagerly at a
miraculous medal, a girdle, an infallible prayer, a scapular, a
novena, a pledge, a vow all helps, in their way, all excellent
if used rightly as stimulants to greater exertion, greater vigil-
ance, greater prayerfulness ; but if adopted as substitutes for
labor, for the eternally necessary and indispensable means, then,
no longer helps, but most hurtful superstitions. Do they
stimulate or do they relax our efforts ? That is the one test as

* External Religion, p. 86. \Ibid., p. 88. \ Father Hecker.

86 How WE ABUSE RELIGION. Oct.,

to whether we are using such things to our help or abusing
them to our hurt. We shall not be saved by anything we hang
round our necks, except so far as the grace it conveys to us
in virtue of the church's blessing stimulates us to that exertion
and watchfulness by which alone, under God, we are to sanctify
and save ourselves. . . . Stranger still, even mortification,
asceticism, and self-denial may be, and often are, abused in just
the same way, when they are used as substitutes for the natural
and necessary means of attaining virtue."*

It is these considerations which discover the reason why
Catholicity fails of rejuvenating the world, why sacraments are
approached and prayers multiplied with deceptive earnestness
and without fruit, and why those who see cry out in their bit-
terness against that false conception of the church's mission
which is so fatally hampering her success. For " there are
Catholic Christians forgetting that the Christ and the Religion
that is outside them is but a means to wake up and develop
the Christ and the Religion that is latent within them."f No
wonder, then, that a Protestant bishop fancies he is assaulting
our position when he proclaims that, according to his system,
" Religion is eminently a personal business between yourself
and Christ. It will not save your soul to be an outward mem-
ber of any ecclesiastical body whatever, however sound that
body may be. There must be personal faith in Christ, personal
dealings between yourself and God, personal felt communion
between your heart and the Holy Ghost." Assuredly so, and
the statement is good sound Catholic doctrine. Woe betide
those Catholics who build imaginary entrenchments behind
which their personality may escape the scathing fire that must
try their souls ! Has not the church ever held man's innermost
personality to be a sanctum whither not even she could pene-
trate? Has she not infinitely dignified and ennobled it by the
share she assigns it in working out God's will? Truly. Nor
can we imagine an influence more elevating than continued
meditation on the church's teaching as to the value of every
human personality. No one of us is made in vain. Every
man that cometh into this world brings with him a personal
vocation, a personal destiny, the working out of which means
the accomplishment of a masterpiece far surpassing the great-
est poem, or painting, that human effort ever designed. And
the completion of that masterpiece is each new man's contri-
bution to the glory of the everlasting God. " The Eternal

* External Religion, pp. 88-91. t Ibid., p. 44.

.1899-] Ho iv WE ABUSE RELIGION. 87

Absolute is ever creating new forms of expressing Itself," says
Father Hecker ; and Father Tyrrell, in words scarce different,
writes: "That same divine Truth and Goodness which is in-
carnate in Christ, though simple in itself, is inexhaustible _ in
the infinite diversity of its possible manifestations. Each par-
ticular soul is capable of reflecting only some single and indivi-
dual aspect of it. ... No two ages, no two nationalities,
no two individuals receive Christ or receive the Catholic religion
into the same mould; and though what is received is the same,
yet the measure of its reception, the shape it takes, the result
of the combination, is always different. Vide paris sumptionis,
quam sit dispar exitus, says Aquinas : words which we may
a PP lv generally to the results of the external Catholic religion
on different souls. The agent is always the same, but the re-
action is never the same."* What new dignity comes to men
thus pictured as really the Sons of the Most High ! What new
stimulus to moral perfection, to be and to do everything great
that our Maker enables us to be and to do ! What large
incentive to universal co-operation in the Divine Plan, that
priest and people alike, by personal initiative, by wise zeal, by
intelligent co-ordination of all God-given activities, may build up
the City of God, everlastingly fair, everlastingly good! Ah! it
is through the cultivation of ideals such as these that the real
flowering of Catholicity must come.

The reading public owes Father Tyrrell no mean debt for
his share in developing and proclaiming them ; nor is this the
first time his labors have produced golden harvest. Perhaps no
other thing will play so important a part in the victory we
hope for as the wide-spread teaching of Catholic doctrines in
their native grandeur, lofty, broad, pure, reasonable, carrying
the seed of many a brilliant growth that, sown in congenial
soil and carefully tended, will make the desert blossom as
the rose. What more clearly a movement in this direction
than the work in which our author has been engaging his

* External Religion, pp. 74, 75. The same truth is voiced by Leo XIII. in his Letter on
Americanism in the following passage :

"The rule of life which is laid down for Catholics is not of such a nature as not to
admit modifications, according to the diversity of time and place. The Church indeed pos-
sesses what her Author has bestowed on her, a kind and merciful disposition ; for which rea-
son from the very beginning she willingly showed herself to be what Paul proclaimed in his
own regard : I became all things to all men, that I might save all. The history of all past
ages is witness that the Apostolic See, to which not only the office of teaching, but also the
supreme government of the whole Church was committed, has constantly adhered to the same
doctrine, in the same sense and in the same mind ; but it has always been accustomed to so
modify the rule of life that, while keeping the divine right inviolate, it has never disregarded
the manners and customs of the various nations which it embraces."

How WE ABUSE RELIGION.

[Oct.

energies? These Conferences, just published, that splendid
volume of last year, Hard Sayings, his English edition of The
Saints* are various indications of his interest in the cultiva-
tion by our people of what is highest and best. Hard Sayings
can scarcely be overpraised so truly does it strike home to a
long-neglected want. " Only the books," says the Abbe" Hogan
in his chapter on Spiritual Reading, " which are to some extent
in harmony with the man can be really helpful to him ; to per-
sist in using others is worse than a waste of time ; it begets
disgust, and leads to a total abandonment of what should be
an inexhaustible source of spiritual knowledge and strength."
A striking comment on the failure of much that is current as
spiritual literature, and the use of which never produces any
palpable result. But a movement in the right direction is
under way. With a truer conception of Catholic ideals, with
the example of men like Father Tyrrell, spiritual, learned,
graceful, vigorous, modern as he is, with the inspiration born
of nourishment fit for persons at once pious and intelligent,
with all this now apparently in our grasp, the dawn of a
brighter day seems to be glimmering on the hill-tops, and we
pray with new courage and hope for a Catholic revival that
will equal the greatest epoch of rejuvenation in other ages and
other lands.

* A French series of hagiographical works, under the general editorship of M. Joly,
sometime professor at the Sorbonne.

OOM PAUL KRUGER, PRESIDENT OF THE TRANSVAAL REPUBLIC.
(Most recent photograph.)

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC.

BY REV. GEORGE McDERMOT, C.S.P.

T is thought that the controversy between the
United Kingdom and the South African Repub-
lic has reached the last argument of states. In
the cause of justice we should be pleased to put
before the readers of this magazine our opinions
on the merits of the question.

From the most recent information we learn that a force of
fifty thousand men are ready for service against the Republic.
They are trained troops from every part of the British Empire
except Ireland. We have not heard that there is any intention
of diminishing the army of occupation in that part of the
United Kingdom.

RIGHTS AS A SUZERAIN POWER.
The question is officially treated in fact must be treated

90 THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC. [Oct.,

on the part of the Empire as a breach by the Republic of the
sovereign rights of the Empire as the suzerain power. Suze-
rainty is a word of indefinite import ; it has found its way into
a convention between the Empire and the Republic, it is con-
stantly on the lips of Mr. Chamberlain; the changes are rung
upon it in the English press; it is like the blessed word Meso-
potamia with the old country-woman, the whole law and the
Gospel.*

It is by virtue of this word that a right to interfere with
and control the domestic legislation of the Republic is claimed
by the Empire. We do not know what American citizens
would say if the United Kingdom claimed a right to regulate
the franchise of the United States ; still less are we able to
form a judgment of the view they would take if that power
insisted that British subjects should be vested with all the
rights of American citizens while retaining British allegiance,
and avowedly for the purpose of using those rights to destroy
the government of the United States. In this inability to
gauge the public spirit of Americans \ve are at least able to
apply ourselves to those fundamental principles of morality
upon which all international relations rest.

THE HISTORY OF THE CASE.

In 1884 the debatable points between the Republic and the
Empire were considered settled. The word suzerainty had
been omitted from the London Convention signed in the pre-
ceding year. It is again resuscitated, partly on the ground that
all the conventions are still in force and partly because it ex-
presses the relation between the two powers fixed by certain
covenants contained in the London Convention. We do not
at all suggest that the colonial sccietar) a man skilful in de-
bate likes a high sounding word on the meaning of which
even authorities in English and feudal law are not agreed.

But in 1884 the Boers were left to themselves. There was
no question as to the status of the Republic. It had agreed
not to extend its boundaries in two directions, it had agreed
not to make treaties with any foreign power, except the
Orange Free State, without permission from the Colonial Office.

* We take the following declarations from the Times of Thursday, August 31, with
reference to the liberal concessions offered by President Kri:ger : "They are offered to
us . . . if we will renounce our suzerainty or consent to go to arbitration with the
Transvaal as with a 'sovereign international state Conditions of that kind could not be
discussed, much less accepted, in return for any concessions, however ample or however
genuine." .

iS 9 9.]

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC.

For the rest, the Boers might enjoy peace on the broad, barren
tracts at times blasted of all herbage by the sun, and upon
which, for the most part, life could only be maintained under
conditions similar to those under which the black men before
them had lived. The black men, when not hunting, shifted

THE PEOPLE OF JOHANNESBURG LISTENING TO WAR NEWS.

their cattle from place to place, chasing the changes of the
sky. So bare of grass is the land for parts of the } ear that it
is only by the possession of a great range subsistence for cat-
tle can be obtained. The dwellings of the Boers were in con-
sequence far apart, hence thesajing that a Boer \\ill migrate if
he sees smoke on any part cf the horizon. They are a lonely
and morose people, stern as the old Puritans, seeking in Deu-
teronomy for the guidance of conduct. This is the painting of
their enemies. Yet it may be said there must be fine qualities
in the men who sacrificed their hcnus in Cape Colony and in
Natal rather than submit to the rule of strangers, fine quali-
ties in those who abandoned their homesteads and their farms
in a fertile land to seek a free home in the distant wilderness
and face a life in which the usages and the needs of civiliza-

92 THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC. [Oct.,

tion would find no place. This was how things stood when
the gold mines were discovered and opened prospects of un-
told wealth to the speculator and the miner of the British
colonies, to the capitalists of England, to the countless share-
holders of the Chartered Company, so many of whom had
found their stock a damnosa hcreditas, but who might now hope
to be repaid for their trust in the virtual proconsul of South
Africa.

THE MEANING OF SUZERAINTY.

The use of the word suzerainty was given up in the last
Convention in deference to the objections of the Boers. It is
now revived as though a constitutional term, and is everywhere,
in the press and on the platform, so employed that, consciously
or unconsciously, the idea has spread that the Transvaal is
not merely a dependent state and this would be going far
enough but a state the existence of which is terminable at
will by the superior power. It may be of interest and assistance
to consider some instances of the relation of states expressed
by the word. We have already referred to it as one of some-
what vague application, and we have hinted the possibility that
crown lawyers suggested its employment in the expectation
that the representatives of a rude and primitive people would
take it as only a descriptive title of the effect of certain arti-
cles in the older convention and not as the constitutional ex-
pression of dependence on the British crown.

A good instance of the general character of the relation ex-
pressed by suzerainty was that between the crown of France
and the great feudatories of the kingdom. The Duke of Bur-
gundy, the Duke of Brittany, the Duke of Normandy were
sovereign princes, but not independent princes ; they were the
vassals of the King of France. The Duke of Normandy as
King of England was a sovereign of equal pretensions with the
King of France, but he held his duchy of Normandy from that
potentate. But the only bond in fact was that of allegiance.
The duke did homage, but it does not appear that he was
bound to service or to the other incidents of feudal tenure.
It appears, however, that the Duke of Burgundy and the other
sovereign princes were in a greater or less degree deemed, at
least technically, subject to all the incidents including ward-
ship and military service. But in no instance, not even in
those cases in which the feudatory approached almost to the
boundaries of ordinary vassalage, was it ever pretended that a

1 8 9 9-]

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC.

king of France could
interfere with the do-
mestic concerns of a
sovereign vassal. It
was held that any such
interference released a
vassal of this class
from his allegiance,
and ipso facto consti-
tuted him an inde-
pendent prince.

NO SUZERAINTY IN THE
LAST CONVENTION.

If we look to the
last Convention, there
is no suzerainty over
the Transvaal; if we,
for a moment, take the
effect of certain articles
as tantamount to such
a claim, unquestionably
coercive interference
with the domestic af-
fairs of that Republic

would, on the analogy of the cases mentioned, terminate the
dependence. We have presented the contention on the basis
offered by the Colonial Office, but we have yet to learn that a
state forfeits its independence when it enters into a compact
limiting the exercise of its rights. There are treaties of all
kinds. When America, by virtue of an extradition treaty, sur-
renders a fugitive from justice, she surrenders no right ; she
only expresses the proposition that her territory shall not be
the asylum of crime. The whole civilized world says the crim-
inal must hide himself in regions to which the comity of
nations does not extend ; but no state within that comity means
to surrender one jot, one tittle of its independence when it
recognizes the claims of justice in another nation. Nothing
can be inferred in favor of the British contention from the
conditions contained in treaties. Quite the reverse ; the very
existence of a treaty is the recognition of a title to make it
that is to say, the title of an equal with an equal, not a sub-
ject with a sovereign. Who has ever heard of a subject bind-

GENERAL JOUBERT, OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN
REPUBLIC.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC.

[Oct.,

ing himself by a treaty to enter into no engagements with
foreign powers ? The Foreign Enlistment Acts would soon
settle his pretensions if he had engaged himself to serve
against a power in amity with the United Kingdom. The cats-
paws of the Jameson Raid discovered, that though the African
proconsul was behind them, that though the Colonial Office
was watching with interest the rising of the tide, that failure
meant ignoring by the proconsul and disavowal by the minister.

A SCOTCH INSTANCE.

There is an instance of a claim of suzerainty to which we
invite the attention of our fellow-citizens of Scotch descent.
Edward I. of England claimed such a right over the crown of
Scotland. The claim, so far as the authority of English
heralds goes, was never abandoned ; yet notwithstanding that
claim the distinction or doctrine of the Post Nati became a
burning question after the accession of James I. The truth is
there was no right of the kind, though such a right was
pretended. It was the assertion put forward by might, cloth-
ing itself in the garb of right. Fortunately the Scotch de-
fended themselves by arms and not by arguments. If they

had done the latter, a few men
living in England would now
draw great incomes from vast
pastures between the Border and
the Grampians, a dozen of herds-
men would form the population
of the Lowlands, a fishing vil-
lage would occupy a small spot
of the site of Glasgow, the
changes which make Edinburgh
an object of interest to every
man of taste would not have
passed over the inhabitants of
a hamlet lying at a castle's feet,
the Highlands would be the
home of naked hunters like
those of New York State three
hundred years ago.

SIR HENRY LOCH, CHIEF COMMISSIONER
OF CAPE COLONY.

VARIOUS TITLES DISCUSSED.

We are bound to treat the conventions as evidence by the
British Empire against itself on the status of the other high

1 899.]

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC.

THE PRESIDENT AND MRS. KRUGER.

contracting party ; as the admission of the strong power that
the weak one had an original and fundamental independence,
and not a contingent autonomy granted by the strong power.
In this view anything conceded by the Republic must be re-
garded as either wrung from her or agreed to for the purpose
of securing peace. The question of right is not determined by
concessions of expediency, though they may be looked to as
evidence pro tanto where the title has become obscured by
lapse of time. But they are of no value where the title of the
party employing them is based upon a transaction within living
memory. Now this is the case on which the advocates of the

96 THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC. [Oct.,

British title stand. They say the Boers were subjugated in
1877, and the Empire acquired a title by conquest. Our desire
to keep strictly within the space allotted to us prevents any-
thing like an examination of a title by conquest. Nothing can
be more difficult than to determine, first, what conquest means ;
second, what rights of the conquered are extinguished and
when. Every difficulty in the way of a title by prescription
lies in the way of one by conquest, in addition to all the diffi-
culties peculiar to itself.

But the advocates of the British claim see no difficulty
whatever ; the South African Republic was created by the
British Empire, and so created that its existence depended on
the will of that power. Our Scotch fellow-citizerft have in
their own history a practical illustration of the nature of a
title by conquest and the difficulties attending it. No Scotch-
man will admit, no Englishman for that matter will now assert,
that what was called the conquest of Scotland by Edward I.
extinguished the national life of that country. That monarch
had overrun Scotland, his castles everywhere controlled the
subject people ; but resistance was maintained in fastnesses by
desperate men who were called outlaws, robbers, murderers,
rebels. For five centuries the name of one of those outlaws
has been an inspiration to every lover of freedom. He was at
length captured, executed as a rebel, quartered, and his limbs
hung in chains to intimidate all who might again dare to stand
against the power of a Plantagenet. But the name of Wallace
stirs to its depths the heart of every Scotchman, and we can
only wonder that Scotchmen in Australia have volunteered to
serve against the Boers.

A GLIMPSE OF THE TRANSVAAL HISTORY.

The history of the South African Republic is peculiar and
interesting. Certain Dutch colonists at the Cape did not ac-
cept the authority of the British when Cape Colony was taken
from the Dutch. They abandoned their homes and founded a
settlement in Natal. It is, we think, admitted that the repre-
sentatives of Britain did not fail to make the Dutch feel some-
thing of the pains of possession by a strange power. It can
hardly be contended that the British acquired rights to the
whole unoccupied part of the African Continent by their en-
trance into the Dutch possessions. This seems to have been
the view of the colonists who intended to seek a home else-
where. They set up a system of government in Natal in cir-

1899-] THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC. 97

cumstances and under conditions somewhat similar to those
attending the establishment of the North American colonies by
men from Holland and men from England. Now, there is
something like what is called by feudal lawyers the scintilla
juris in the British claim to Natal. They followed the Dutch
settlers and laid claim to the territory won by them from na-
ture and the savages. Among these Dutchmen were some to
whom this exercise of British power seemed an aggression
without right or against right. These men went into the re-
mote wilderness beyond the Vaal and were again followed by
the British government, as though it was impossible for men
born in a territory acquired by the Empire, and against whose
authority their whole lives was a protest, to divest themselves
of British allegiance. The consequence of this doctrine is, that
no matter into what unoccupied lands the Boers might find
their way their settlement in them made the territory British.
This is at least one unconscious premise of the British argu-
ment, and by no means the least effective in producing the
vigor of feeling which has been manifested for some time.

THE YIELDING OF RIGHTS IN 1 88 1.

Though the title by conquest is the formal one asserted,
the doctrine we speak of is the principle underlying the title
of suzerainty enlarged to a right to interfere with the domes-
tic concerns of the Boers. It would seem to have some kind
of an authority when, by the Convention of 1881, the British
were empowered to appoint a Resident at Pretoria, with the
right of veto upon all the dealings of the Boers with the na-
tives within the Transvaal. But surely even this right, as it
sprang from a treaty, could not have drawn with it other rights,
and above all a right to control the legislature. Be that as it
may, the Boers were constantly protesting against the Resi-
dent's action. We cannot determine whether it was unneces-
sarily vexatious or, on the other hand, whether the Boers
dealt with the Kafirs as men deal with slaves, and that in con-
sequence energy was demanded at the hands of the Resident.
The important consideration is that Mr. Gladstone amended the
Convention of 1881. Every objection of the Boers was allowed,
and among them that against the office of Resident. By the
London Convention, instead of a resident, an official, partly a
consul-general, partly a chargd d'affaires, with a smaller salary,
took up his quarters at Pretoria. This is important on the
constitutional question. Diplomatic relations pure and simple
VOL. LXX. 7

98 THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC. [Oct.,

are a very different matter from a condition of things in which
the representative of one power possesses a degree of control-
ling influence over another. The ambassadors of the powers
at Constantinople, no doubt, restrain the Sultan. But without
going farther into the question of what the appointment of a
resident meant as an expression of the relations between the
Empire and the Republic, the abolition of the office removes it
as an element of argument.

THE QUESTION IN A NUTSHELL.

There can be no question of this : that it was the discovery
of the gold mines that created all the interest and excitement
attending the relations of the two states. What happened ?
Speculators and their followers rushed to the scene. A wave
of cupidity swept over Great Britain. Mr. Chamberlain, at the
Colonial Office, had the ambition to send down his name to
posterity as a minister who consolidated the British Empire
over the earth as no one before him had dreamed of. Every-
thing was favorable to the views of an ambitious and unscru-
pulous man. The African proconsul could not brook the idea
of an independent power, not merely in proximity to the South
African possessions but girdled by them. The conflicting in-
terests of the capitalists and the Republic ripened into pas-
sions, and the town which had sprung up by magic near the
mines became the theatre of a foreign conspiracy against the
government which protected those aliens by its laws. The way
the matter seems now to hang is : Are the Boers to surrender
to strangers all that they acquired by sacrifice and courage
rare in our day?

This question of franchise in the South African Republic
ought not to be looked at in a way different from that in
which a similar question in this country would be regarded if
British subjects claimed to exercise a power of voting against
the judgment of the United States. It resolves itself into this :
strangers who went into the Transvaal with no intention of
remaining there permanently, whose object was to make
money, seek a dominant influence in the government. It is
not a claim to the franchise ; it is a demand that all the results
of a war shall be granted to them under the form of a civil
privilege and the pretence of a civil right. The raid, which
stands unparalleled for the hypocrisy of its professions and the
effrontery with which it was organized, cannot be put out of
account as a factor in the controversy. It settles the question

1 899.]

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC.

MR. RHODES' ALLY, KHAMA, CHIEF OF THE BAMANGWATO.

of the independence of the Republic. The acts under which
Jameson and his associates were tried are laws passed to pre-
serve the neutrality of the United Kingdom in respect of
friendly powers. The directions of Lord Russell at the trial
and the finding of the jury are the authoritative judgment of
the British Empire on the constitutional relation ; that is, on
the question not only of what constitutes a friendly power
within the meaning of the enactments, but on the question
whether the South African Republic was such a power within
their meaning.

CONTENTIOUS SPIRIT OF THE COLONIAL OFFICE.

It is amazing, with this decision within a few years, that we
have the claim of a suzerainty revived ; we have it gradually
widened, we have it at length extending to the degree of wip-
ing out the weaker power. Conferences between the High
Commissioner at the Cape and President Kriiger are pointed

ioo THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC. [Oct. r

out as a recognition of the fundamental claims of the Uitlanders
to the franchise, and the only matter in doubt is as to terms
and conditions. We cannot see it in that light. We are very
certain if the President were not anxious to avoid a war he
would not have agreed to a conference at all. We think that
a sense of fair play, that a spirit of justice, should have guided
the counsels of the great Empire, which is dragged into this
quarrel by the greed of men already rich, and the greed of men
hastening to be rich, when for them and their instruments she
used an influence practically irresistible to compel a little state
to submit to a conference questions in no way within the purview
of international relations. There ought to have been a marked
regard for the susceptibilities of a high-spirited people. Instead,
threats not veiled, a public opinion at boiling point, demands
put forward as the vindication of a violated right, a minister
acting like an agitator, have combined to bring on a crisis the
history of which will have a place among the crimes of nations.
We have purposely avoided presenting some points which
would bear upon the good faith of the persons urging the im-
perial government to extreme measures. We are glad that
Radical opinion, for the most part, is still true to those princi-
ples of justice to which Mr. Gladstone consecrated his life. If
those Liberals who, like Mr. Chamberlain have abandoned those
principles, had one particle of foresight, they would have fore-
seen the possibility of some curb to the fierce career of the
Colonial Office such as that given so recently by the German
press ; and spared all British subjects the shame of seeing it
shrink from the opinion of a great power when deaf to the rights
of a weak one.

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. 101

WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL GO.

BY CLAUDE M. GIRARDEAU.

'MONG the few old Catholic families of Riverton
were the Bonnemortes ; once, indeed, of proud
estate and slaves innumerable, but now, in com-
pany with many others of blood as blue, reduced
to a dilapidated manor and one maid-of-all-work.

Vivien Bonnemorte had married, much against his mother's
wish, a village beauty of his own faith, but of family far below
him. She was also a woman of tenacity, not to say obstinacy,
and Mme. Bonnemorte found it more and more agreeable to
confine herself to her own apartments in a wing of the old
house.

Her contemporaries, bereft of fortune like herself, were
either dead or exiled to other parishes. She concentrated her
ambition and affection upon her only granddaughter, Constance,
who had inherited nothing from her plebeian mother, for the
Bonnemorte women were also beautiful.

Vivien and his wife, feeling the pinch of poverty under
stress of bringing up a family of boys, were quite willing that
Constance should profit by her grandmother's partiality, for,
like all Southern women of good birth, Mme. Bonnemorte had
been soundly instructed in music, languages, and certain
branches of art. She was, truth to tell, somewhat contemptu-
ous of mathematics, but an elegante in literatuie and criticism.
Her philosophy she took from the Fathers of the church, but
Bach and Beethoven were the gods of her musical idolatry,
and if poverty in later years prevented an acquaintance with
Saint-Saens and Wagner, she had been as well drilled in
Italian music as a Catalani or a Malibran, and had had a
noble voice.

Constance, therefore, found as much solid pleasure in the
"Missa Papae Marcelli " of Palestrina and the madrigals of
Festa and Marenzio as a more modern student would have
found in the " St. Paul" of .Mendelssohn or the u Genevieve "
of Schumann.

But the girl was now seventeen, and Mme. Bonnemorte
realized keenly the limit of her resources. The idea of Con-

102 WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

stance marrying in the village and settling down to ordinary
existence was insupportable to her. Yet, what could she do?

At this juncture of affairs the energetic leader of the
choir, a certain Mrs. Marshbanks, decided upon a concert of
" home talent " (since there was none other to be had), as a
prelude to the desirable conclusion of enough money with
which at least to begin the building of a new church.

Constance good humoredly forgot various snubbings in choir
and consented to contribute to the evening's entertainment.
Mme. Bonnemorte was to play her accompaniments, and the
Riverton public gazed curiously at her, for she seldom went out.

While waiting behind the scenes of the improvised stage,
Mrs. Marshbanks brought some one to her for introduction,
and she put up a glass to scan the visitor with a haughtiness
that excited his curiosity.

" My nephew, Cyril Desmond, madame. He has come un-
expectedly from New York."

" Ah ! " said madame, dropping the glass. To be from the
North was scarcely a recommendation to her favor.

" He is," Mrs. Marshbanks hastily added, " a professional
cotton-buyer and an amateur piano-player."

"Could there be a more hopeless conjunction?" exclaimed
Desmond, laughing. " That is too bad of you, Aunt Sophie.
Allow me, madame, to play for you."

" I shall be pleased to hear >ou," said madame indifferently.
" It has been a long time since I have heard any music."

This was cruel of her, for when Cyril had protested against
the infliction of a village concert, his aunt had replied sharply :

"Don't be ridiculous. We are not in the backwoods.
Some of Mme. Bonnemorte's pupils know quite as much about
piano as you do, and I want you to hear Constance sing."
This was self-sacrificing on her part, as Mrs. Marshbanks sang
also.

Cyril forgot his fin-de siecle attitude when Constance ap-
peared.

" Ah !" he said to himself, "Aunt Sophie omitted to men-
tion that her nightingale is also a bird-of.paradise."

He listened to her voice with a thorough appreciation of
its quality and technique.

"She has the making in her of a very great artist," he said
to Mrs. Marshbanks afterwards.

"Oh! I don't know about that," she demurred, womanlike,
to his amusement.

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. 103

" But she has. Don't be provincial, Aunt Sophie. I sup-
pose she is poor and proud ? "

" Yes ; both to an unusual degree."

Desmond, who was bored by life, set his wits to work. He
remembered that he knew the director of the College of
Music of St. Botolph, and wrote him with the enthusiasm
of a man who has made a discovery. But he found that he
had to do battle with Mme. Bonnemorte, who had been con-
vent-bred.

" Well," said Cyril, feeling quicksand, " the modern up-to-
date college leaves its pupils to do as they please that is,
religiously. They make a good deal of their chapel services at
St. Botolph, and clerics of every shade of sectarianism deliver
addresses on every conceivable subject to those who attend."

" But the Catholics, Mr. Desmond ? "

" No provision is made for them, but they are not burned
at the stake. The Church of the Assumption is very near the
college."

Madame felt a contraction of the heart.

" It sounds terribly unprotected to me," she said, " but I
am old-fashioned, I know. Still, I do not like this ultra-modern
idea of woman. Constance has been my companion. Oh, if
I could only go with her!"

" I am glad you cannot," said Desmond coolly. " You can-
not be always with her, and, believe me, it is a mistake to
coddle the girl of the period. She must be independent espe-
cially if she is to lead a public life."

" A public life, Mr. Desmond ? "

" You are not provincial, madame. You know as well as I
do that a woman can be a good woman and a great singer at
the same time."

Madame allowed herself to be persuaded, but she was not
convinced. By the first of September Constance was ready
for St. Botolph, with a meagre wardrobe and a heart as light
as air. Her father was jubilant, her mother proud in her
peculiar silent way ; but her grandmother trembled. Only the
Blessed Mother knew the tears that were shed and the prayers
that were offered at her gracious feet.

When the day of departure came, madame, who had been
to a very early Mass, went into Constance's room. The girl
awoke, remembered, then nestled her head in her grandmo-
ther's lap.

" Dearest, I will not go if it makes you so very unhappy."

104

WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go.

[Oct.,

" I would not keep you,
my child. But, my sweet
daughter, listen. You have
always lived in this poor
little town. You know no-
thing of a great city. You
will be thrown on your own
resources. You will hear,
will see, will learn so
much, I am afraid,
that will startle you,
shock you, or worse
tempt you. I have
been remiss. . . .
Yes ; I never dream-
ed that you would
go far away from
me, and alone. I
should have allowed
you more freedom.
I should have been
more frank with you.
But I could not.
Your innocence was
my temptation, and
now it is too late.
I can only offer you
to our Blessed Mo-
ther. I can only
beg you to promise
me never to give up
the practice of your

"FOUND SOLID PLEASURE IN PALESTRINA AND THE MADRIGALS OF FESTA.'

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. 105

religion. It will be your safeguard. If I cannot be with you,
I must know that you are with our Blessed Mother."

" Ah, ma mere, how could you think I would ever forget?"

" My darling, my child, you do not realize what the world
is. It is very beautiful to those who please it, as you will do.
See, my dearest, you are so anxious to be loved. You yield to
a sweet importunity. You are easily moved by an appeal to
your heart."

"Am I, then, so inconstant?"

"No, no; you are my Constance. But you must learn to
be a little cold, a little reluctant, even a tiny bit suspicious
and proud. Not that I want my child to have the pride of
the heart, but the pride of bearing, of that noblesse oblige that
distinguishes the woman of birth from the woman of coarse fibre.
Make a pedestal of your pride ; put it under your feet be
elevated by it. Others will like you all the better for it."

" Oh ! my wise dear mother, I will remember."

The two clasped each other tenderly, exchanged kisses,
mingled their tears. Constance felt that she could never be
happy again ; yet when the wheels of the train for the North
began to revolve, and the flat country about the town slipped
away, giving place to soft hills and unfamiliar prospects, her
spirits rose again. She gave Desmond, to whose care she was
confided, an eloquent look.

"You are going to enjoy yourself, I think," he said, wish-
ing he could subtract fifteen from his forty years.

"Yes indeed," replied seventeen cheerfully, "I am."

But the immense city, and the immense college with its
hundreds of pupils, bewildered her. She even felt afraid of the
great church, with its dazzling altars, its noble statues, its
superb choir. The confessionals of carved marble with iron
gratings made her feel still more afraid. She could not sum-
mon up courage to tell the shadowy shape within that she felt
frightened, friendless.

For a week or so she was alone in her room in the college
dormitory; but miserable as her loneliness made her, she pre-
ferred solitude to sharing the space with an utter stranger,
with this girl who walked in unceremoniously one evening,
saying without prelude:

"You're a Catholic, I see?"

"And you?" was the timid counter-question.

"I ?" taking an airy pose and swinging a foot "I am a
Buddhist an Esoteric Theosophist."

io6 WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

Constance looked at her doubtfully. The Theosophist
smiled.

" Sometimes," she continued, " I am rather inclined to
Shintoism especially when I gaze into the Symbol of Eter-
nity." She picked up a hand-mirror and looked pensively at
her reflection, a charming one, if the hair about the irregular
features was decidedly red, and the green-gray eyes artistically
darkened with a Kohl-pencil.

This apparition was an astonishment to Constance, who had
never had an intimate of her own age.

She found Madalen at once puzzling, attractive, and repul-
sive. At first it seemed impossible to share not only the small
space but the bed with the new-comer ; but youth quickly ac-
customs itself to change, and Constance was by circumstances
compelled to make a friend of her companion.

Madalen, who was a year or so her senior in point of age
and a dozen in point of experience, soon turned her trans-
parent mind inside out and laughed to herself at the innocent
revelation of the life in Riverton. But she was also amazed at
the musical training Constance had received :

" Mon dieu ! I wish I had been as well taught. You are
grounded, without doubt. All you need, my love, is experi-
ence and practice. Your voice has been placed to perfection."

Then one morning, when the two heads were on one pillow :
" Why should you drudge so, donna mia ? Why not go out
with me sometimes and enjoy life a bit ? "

Constance colored deeply. " I came to study " and she
began to dress.

" Well," said Madalen, " you 'd much better go on a lark
now and then, and brighten yourself up, than run the risk of
ruining your voice by going to early Mass as you do."

When Constance did take cold through imprudence, Madalen
joyfully haled her to the doctor's sanctum.

The doctor proved to be a handsome, keen young woman,
professional in every respect ; what she would herself have
designated as "without any nonsense."

"What are you studying, Miss Bonnemorte?"

" Voice and piano."

"With Rossetti?"

"Yes."

"You must not go out early these bitter mornings or you
will ruin your voice. You are not accustomed to the climate
and you will make yourself seriously ill. You room with Miss

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. 107

Van Baal?" The physician and Madalen exchanged glances of
mutual understanding.

"She tells me you mope too much and work too hard;
that you deny yourself all pleasure. Now, that is simple non-
sense. If you expect to be a successful singer you must keep
your beauty as well as your voice. You cannot make a cloister
of the stage."

" But I am not going on the stage," expostulated Constance.

" Why not ? Go less to church and oftener to the theatre,
and you will change your mind. And when people offer you
concert tickets they cannot use themselves, do not refuse them.
Here are two now. I turn you over to Madalen. Remember,
what I prescribe is, less Mass and more matinee. Just keep
your mouth shut when you are out of doors, and do not stay
up too late at night."

" I could not if I wanted to. The lights go out at ten."

The others laughed, and Madalen hooked herself under
Constance's arm and carried her off.

But Constance refused the concert tickets, as her throat was
indeed sore, and spent a wretched day or two in silence and
semi-solitude.

An evening or so after this she sat disconsolate, look-
ing out of the one window at the wintry streets far below,
when Madalen entered, violin in hand.

" Beloved owl ! " she exclaimed, running scales with fairy-
like rapidity on muted strings, " if you will persist in reflecting,
do so in correct Shinto." She put the mirror into Constance's
hand.

" My gracious, Constance, I wish I were as beautiful as you
are ! I would "

"Would what?" asked Constance, at once " reflecting."

" Why, I would put my foot on the neck of the world, just
as Bernhardt does."

" That woman ! "

For Constance had been taken to see " La Tosca " and
" Camille," and had filled Madalen's soul with green envy over
her proficiency in French.

But the consummate actress had disturbed and agitated the
soul of innocence.

" Ha, ha!" laughed Madalen, capering about the room, for
her violin-practice always excited her; "hear her, O Buddha!
Yes, Bernhardt, or Patti, or Langtry, or any woman who has
the world at her feet. This weapon is not bad " she held up

io8 WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

the violin " and Max says my arms are beautiful. But if I
had your face and your voice, . . . well, the others would
have to look to their laurels."

"But they are not good women, not one of them," faltered
Constance.?-

Madalen -gave her an oblique green glance, then sat down
on the bed like Buddha in his ebony shrine opposite her, and
observed trie sole of a foot from which she had kicked the
slipper :

'* Two holes, and no time for darning ! Say, St. Con-
stance, I always imagined you Catholics were less given to
sins against charity than a good many others."

"Yes; but charity pities sin; it does not condone it."

"Well, what do you expect to do with your voice when
you've trained it to suit the critical public ear ? "

" I expect to use it."

"Where?"

" I haven't thought much about it."

" I'll warrant Rossetti has. Oh, goose, goose ! Do you
expect to go back to that moss-covered hamlet and sing Ave
Marias once a week in the village choir ? "

" No I suppose not."

" Do you expect to wear your lovely voice to frazzles teach-
ing do, re, mi to idiots who can't breathe?"

" No, no ; never."

" Do you, then, expect to adorn some cloister with it, and
warble matins at 4 A. M. and what-) ou-may-call ems at 6 P. M.
in a nun's choir, eh? "

"No, indeed; I am not fit."

" I should say not. Destiny, my beloved child, has marked
you for the stage. Don't fly in the face of a smiling Provi-
dence. Fix your future in your eye and keep it there. Keep
on saying Europe, stage, fame, money, and you'll get 'em ;
provided " here the speaker relinquished the stocking and
gazed penetratingly at Constance, " provided you take care of
your good looks and of your health. Keep up your spirits,
attend the gym, and do not go trotting out into twenty de-
grees below zero these frizzling mornings, uhen you've lived
all your life in the tierra caliente ! '" She snapped her fingers
like castanets, hopped off the bed, and executed a pas seiil in
stockinged feet that set Constance to laughing aloud.

It was impossible to resist her contagious gayety. Then
she flew to the piano, which she played almost as brilliantly

1 899.]

WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go.

109

as she did the violin, and sang a la Guilbert with almost as
much elan and suggestion as that disreputable genius herself.

"Oh! do not sing such things," cried Constance, \vho had
also been taken to hear Yvette. But luckily the idiom of the
last cry of art and
filth was quite be-
yond the French
of madame's con-
vent days. Yet
she laughed again,
for Madalen was
clever and pro-
voking.

During the win-
ter Constance was
induced to accept
' i n vi t at ions for
matinees at differ-
ent theatres, fol-
lowed by dinner
at cafes under the
college ban. Ros-
setti now and then
sent tickets for
philharmonic and
symphony c o n-
certs, and himself
took Constance to
her first grand
opera. Mme. Ros-
setti was much
taken by the girl's
clear-cut beauty
and Southern en-
thusiasm, and pat-
ted her glowing
cheek approving-
ly, with: "Ah,
who knows? Some day, perhaps, you will be there yourself,"
with a shrug of the shoulders stageward. After this, when
Madalen exhibited grand opera tickets, choice seats at pro-
hibitive prices, with childlike abandon, Constance only feebly
expostulated :

TAKING AN AIRY POSE AND SWINGING A FOOT."

no WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

"But how can we take them? I know what they cost."

" Pouf ! " exclaimed Madalen, "between you and me and
the bedpost yonder they cost not a sou. One of my friends
is a newspaper man. There is the secret."

So they went out evening after evening, Madalen evading
college rules with a diplomacy worthy of a better cause ; in-
venting situations, visiting " relations," and lying with a wide-
eyed childishness that would have provoked admiration for its per-
fection. She became an adept in deception, if not in Theosophy,
and drew Constance by imperceptible degrees along with her.

Of a luxurious temperament, and an artist to her finger-tips,
she decided in very early youth to "go in for a good time,"
and her constitution, as is usual with women of her type, was
of steel and whalebone.

At St. Botolph she made herself the soul of a clique of
young women who called themselves "The Ghouls" all tal-
ented, all unscrupulous, all thorough-going Bohemians, appar-
ently held in check by college regulations, but infinite in ex-
pedients for circumventing them. It did not take them long
to make acquaintance among the men whom they met in class;
these in turn introduced outsiders to them, and in a short
while they had the run of various studios, club-rooms, concert-
halls, cafs, and hotels.

Some of the girls were poor, others were well-to-do. The
latter paid their own way, and those of the men who had
money paid for the others. It was a camaraderie more or
less equivocal. The girls soon became worldly wise, "able to
hold their own," as they expressed it; and what with familiarity
with green-rooms of nearly every theatre in town, their "slum-
ming" expeditions with university students and college men,
there was very little of what they considered "life" that they
did not know.

To this brilliant and doubtful clique Madalen was deter-
mined to introduce her room-mate. She had decided Con-
stance's destiny in her own mind, and the future prima donna
should first of all be her friend and accomplice in the world
of art, and perhaps in society also.

So she said to one of the most cynical of her admirers,
Max St. Quentin, on his return from Europe:

"Now, do be nice. I want you to meet Constance Bonne-
morte. And don't shock her St. Agnes' sensibility into fits the
very first time you do. We are not going to rush at once to-
Quong Sing's, but will begin with Beeth's."

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. in

"I understand," said Max; "the degeneration is to be grad-
ual. But wait; did you not say she was a Catholic?"

" I did. She has given up going to early Mass, however,
at my insistence. It really wasn't good for her. Now she says
her little beads in her little bed, and not quite as often as of
yore. You know I can sympathize with her, for I am a Catho-
lic myself."

"Oh, are you? Then so am I."

Madalen stared at him in amusement, but for once he was
in earnest.

"Hum!" she murmured, "some things are thereby ex-
plained. Say, I'll wager your dear mother intended you origi-
nally for the priesthood ? "

" What ? Is there something of the soutane in the cut of
this coat? But I believe she did once upon a time."

"Glad she changed her mind. Wouldn't have met you.
You are, then, just the man I want. Pray resurrect a bit of
your early training for Constance's benefit. She is still inno-
cence itself."

" Play Faust to her Marguerite ? "

"Oh dear, no! The other role will suit you far better."

She laughed at him and ran away, promising to bring Con-
stance in a moment.

Max walked over to a bit of statuary and stood before it
apparently lost in admiration in reality revolving many other
things in mind.

He was a sculptor of much originality, young, alone in the
city, of foreign birth, without home-ties, craving success, hard-
working, careless about his pleasures, yet in a way fastidious.
He had been attracted the year before by Madalen, and on
her account had " gone in with her set," and it was owing to
his influence that they had admittance to the most exclusive
ateliers of the city.

He was, however, dissatisfied with life. He had thrown his
religion disdainfully overboard, as being an anachronism in a
republic, and had made up his mind to marry Madalen, piqued
by her wit and knowing that her talents and unscrupulousness
would make her a valuable yoke-fellow. Otherwise, matrimo-
nial cares would sit lightly on either. Yet his finest piece of
modelling was a pathetic figure of St. Aloysius, at which Madalen
had laughed heartily. When the sound of her returning voice
at the door made him remember his manners, the first sight
of her companion gave him an unexpected sensation. If his

ii2 WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

hat had been on his head, he would have instantly removed it.
If it had been the sixteenth and not the nineteenth century,
he would have bent a knee at this shrine of chivalry. The
moment of exaltation of soul past, his sculptor's eye seized
upon Constance's beauty of face and nobility of figure, thrown
into full relief by the severe yet unaffected simplicity, almost
poverty, of her dress. He admired her childlike self-possession,
for she had the unconsciousness of a fawn, and he saw at once
that she was not of his world, nor yet of society's.

There was no premeditation in the frank and timid interro-
gation of her scrutiny of his dark face.

" She has always lived outside," he said to himself. " She
is just a ' simple maiden in her flower'; Timonetta at Fiesole
she looks as if she had a * hundred coat-of-arms ' herself."

Still, despite her innocent pride of bearing, which touched
and amused him, he could see from the sensitive lips and wist-
ful eyes that she was young enough to be influenced, to be
spoiled, to be irredeemably smirched in imagination ; inex-
perienced enough to mistake gilding for gold, and proud enough
to become hopelessly hard when disenchanted.

She would never die of a broken heart. A sudden anger
with her and with Madalen, who was watching him, seized him ;
but he hid it and said carelessly :

" So Miss Van Baal has persuaded you to go with us, Miss
Bonnemorte ? "

" Since when ' Van Baal ' ? " exclaimed Madalen. " Would
not the others laugh ? "

" I dare say. Have your family always lived up to the
name ? " he asked Constance, with amusement.

" Undoubtedly," she returned, " since they all die well."

He smiled into her heaven-colored eyes, pleased with the
depth and purity of her voice.

" Have you never been to Beeth's ? "

" Sh ! not so loud," warned Madalen, finger to lip ; " the
House-Dragon might hear, and the jig would be up."

"Then where are we going?" Max inquired impatiently.

Madalen scanned his face narrowly.

" To Steinway Hall, to hear the popular idol "; then laughed
at his expression. " Oh, yes we are ! But we won't stay long,"
she added in an undertone.

" You see," said Constance timidly, " this is to be a lark.
I am so anxious to see Beeth's at night. Madalen says the
very best Botolphians go there."

1 899.]

WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go.

"SPENT A WRETCHED DAY IN SILENCE."

This a little doubtfully, as if to sustain a possibly disputed
point.

" So they do the best of their kind," replied Max cyni-
cally.

One or two of the Ghouls joined them.

" Who chaperons to-night ?" asked Madalen, conscious that
Max was looking at her speculatively ; also conscious that she
was at her best in a brown velvet coat that made her hair
flame and her eyes jewels.

" I do," said a massive, dark-browed young woman in a pro-
found voice. She was dressed in pronounced masculine style,
VOL. LXX - 8

ii4 WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

and carried a cane under her arm. The others laughed de-
risively ; even Max's lips twitched.

" You flatter me/' replied the chaperon suavely ; " the Dra-
gon appointed me herself ' on my own recognizances.' But come
on, or we '11 not be in at the death. You know," she continued
as they passed the smiling Dragon in the hall, " he plays that
' Song of the Exile ' so divinely."

They left cards at the door and filed out decorously. Max,
recalling a speech of Madalen's about Southern gallantry, has-
tened to Constance's side and offered an arm which was ac-
cepted with a sigh of relief, for Constance was feeling rather
out of her element, notwithstanding her acquaintance with
the Ghouls. As yet they puzzled her, and she delighted
them.

Madalen, with a curious glance at the two, hesitated, then
took the arm of the chaperon, said something in her ear that
made her laugh aloud, and they walked rapidly ahead.

They were joined by several men a few squares from the
college.

" Say," said Madalen, " where is Frederick the Great to-
night ? "

" Oh ! he sends regrets," said one of the men ; " he 's peg-
ging at some beastly composition for the Competitive. We
told him he was an ass but he lighted the fire of genius just
as we left."

" We '11 go and put it out," was the immediate chorus, with
a recitative from Madalen of, " Oh, if we only had a hand-
organ ! "

Constance was more bewildered than entertained.

" Say," cried another, " let's stop at the Med. and rout out
Fremont. He's gloating over some hideous specimen up in
the dissecting-room. You ought to see it."

" Good ! " said one of the girls, a slip of a thing with soft
brown eyes; "I've always wanted to go there."

" Where are you going, my pretty Ghoul ? " began her
escort, when Max called out impatiently :

" Not to-night ; we are late as it is. It is nearly eight."

" What 's on at Beeth's at eight, anyhow ? " inquired the
chaperon.

" Been napping, Susan ? " said the young fellow with her.
" Why, it's Agnes Daily's turn about in ' Orange Blossoms.' '

" The one they call Agnus Dei because " the rest of the
sentence was drowned in the shriek of laughter that followed.

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. 115

Constance gripped Max by the arm and stopped short. He
faced about.

"Well," he said coolly, "what is it?"

" I do not like this. What is Beeth's, Mr. St. Quentin ? "

" A very beautiful place where the very best people go to
see, hear, and enjoy the very worst things."

" And you want to take me there ? " Her voice descending
struck a scale of emotion and indignation. Something seemed
to stifle her.

Max looked at her satirically, for he was vexed with him-
self.

" I never said so. You wanted to go, and I am perfectly
willing to take you."

" Perfectly willing ? " she said, aghast.

He hesitated, then added :

" It is absurd to take such high moral grounds at this age
of the world. Beeth's is not the pit of perdition by any means.
There are other places. You are out of your century, Una."

The Ghouls had disappeared around the corner. The sound
of their jeering laughter floated back.

A woman, tall, clothed in black, passed the two and as-
cended the flight of stone steps at whose foot they stood.
The electric light fell upon her face as she went up.

"Oh, Mr. St. Quentin," whispered Constance sharply, "look,
look ! There goes Mme. Bonnemorte, my grandmother. What
on earth is she doing here ? I do not understand."

She gazed, seized with a trembling. Suddenly through the
brilliant windows of the cathedral a flood of harmony rushed
upon the night, then ceased.

" Come," said Constance, ascending the steps also ; " come."

She beckoned her companion, who hesitated an instant, then
followed, dipping his ringer mechanically in the font at the
door.

Constance advanced up the aisle oblivious of those about
her, still in pursuit of the black-robed figure who knelt at the
very feet of the Blessed Mother.

Constance knelt in the pew behind her with violently beat-
ing heart, then turned her head to see if Max was with her.
As he bent his knee beside her she again averted her eyes.
The figure was gone.

Max gazed at her pure profile, the shadowy lashes brushing
her cheek, and his heart swelled with an emotion so violent, so
overpowering, the tears enlarged his eyes. The meaning of

n6 WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. [Oct.,

art, of life, of death of all that was glorious and wonderful
in the world expanded within him.

The voice from the altar ceased, the splendid diapason of
the organ rolled through aisle and columned arch. The many-
voiced choir chanted triumphantly, " Magnificat anima mea,
Dominum"; his spirit cried out in jubilant response.

Far different was Constance's feeling. Max had followed
her, but she had followed the shadow to him invisible ; and
when she found that it had vanished, a cold sense of the
supernatural chilled her blood. She left the church as in a
dream, trembling as with an ague.

Max observed her with deep concern as they regained the
street, and took her hand with the eager questions : " What is
it ? Are you ill ? What do you see ? " For her expanded
eyes were fixed upon the space before them.

" Did you not see her ? " she replied " Mme. Bonnemorte ?
I followed her to the very foot of the altar and she was not
there."

" Constance," said St. Quentin sharply, " you are dreaming,
child. I saw no one."

" Let us go at once to the college," she exclaimed; "come,
come!"

She put a hand upon his arm and they hastened away.

She left him at the college entrance and went to the general
office, walking in upon a group with pale faces over a tele-
gram. She took it from the preceptress.

" It is mine, I know," she said quietly. Only a line :

" Your grandmother very ill. Come at once."

In an hour's time she was on the train^ for the South. She
roused herself as the coach began to move, and held out a
hand :

" Thank you, Mr. St. Quentin, and good-by."

" Do you think I could let you go alone ? " he said quietly.
" I shall not annoy you with my presence, but I shall be
near if you want anything."

It was too late to object. At Riverton her father met her.
"I know," she said wanly, "she is dead."

" No, she is not," he answered quickly ; " she wants to see
you."

And the sick woman held out her yearning arms, into
which her darling crept, with " Constance, my Constance ! " in
her ears.

Max saw her once only before his going back. She seemed

1899-] WHITHER THOU GOEST I WILL Go. 117

suddenly remote. He could find nothing to say to her. He
would have given much to remain in Riverton for awhile,
but his work recalled him imperiously.

" You are not coming back ? " he asked bluntly. She shook
her head.

" Never, never ! "

" What then ? "

" I do not know just yet. . . . Good-by." When he
reached St. Botolph he went to see Madalen. She looked
curiously at him.

" Hast seen ghosts ? "

-Perhaps."

" They say the South is full of them."

"With truth. But better ghosts than ghouls."

" We can change the name."

"Not on my account."

"Which means?"

" That I am going to Paris."

"When and why?"

" At once, and because I am wasting my time and talent
here."

" Ah your talent ? "

" I did not say genius."

Madalen turned her piquant face aside suddenly. She
understood at once, and realized at the same time that she
loved him and had lost him for ever.

In another moment she was smiling brightly.

" I think you are wise," she said, holding out a hand.
"Good-by." Then maliciously:

" I have forgotten my geography. How far is Riverton
from the Rue St. Genevieve?"

" As far as the North Pole is from the South."

"Ah ! but that is fortunate. We know how often extremes
meet in this world."

And she flashed her sly green eyes at him, showed her
rows of pretty teeth, and was gone. He looked down at his
hand.

" I feel as if she had bitten me," he thought, biting his
own lip.

iiS "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:' [Oct.,

FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY."

^ACING the Twentieth Century is the title of a
large work, the author of which describes him-
self as James M. King, General Secretary
National League for the Protection of Ameri-
can Institutions, and its object is to show " the
peril of our country, manifest in the claims of politico-ecclesi-
astical Romanism to universal dominion, and in its relations to
political parties, politicians, platforms, legislation, schools, chari-
ties, labor, and war." Politico-Romanism is the Catholic Church,
and that church does not permit a child of hers to act rightly
in any relation of life. The "peril" to the institutions of the
country does not arise from any political opinion, social theory,
or philosophical principle, but from the whole being, the very
life and nature of the Catholic. There is " peril " from him in
war : therefore he must be a traitor ; in active service he must
perforce side with the enemy of the country, therefore a spy, un-
til he has the chance to fire at the soldier by his side when the
enemy advances. There is "peril" from him in labor: there-
fore he must destroy whatever work he is engaged upon, and, as
a corollary to this, he has no alternative but to kill or other-
wise remove from his way the workmen not of his way of
thinking, the superintendent, the employer who should be an ob-
stacle to his will or rather, because he has no will of his own,
to the will of a man in Rome whom he has never seen, whose
language he does not understand, who lives thousands of miles
from him, but who by virtue of some occult, miraculous, poly-
glottic, and irresistible power of thought-transmission coerces
him. There is a "peril" to the institutions of the country
from the Catholic in the charities, because the relief of the
sick, the destitute, the maimed, the orphaned, the widowed
draws from non-Catholic, and therefore American, taxes what
should be employed in other channels of expenditure.

We take the words as we find them on the title-page, the
place where the statements made in over six hundred pages
are focused, the very point which they were set down to
establish, the thesis into which the historical research, intern-

1899-] "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENIURY" 119

perate language, defamation of the dead and libel of the
living are concentrated. It is the issue upon which the public
are to judge. We shall not permit him to explain, to palliate,
to deny ; he shall not say we have misunderstood him, that
we have misconstrued him, that the words were only a rhetori-
cal flourish a gloss on the words "politico-ecclesiastical Ro-
manism." The words are there for good and all upon which
he has demanded the verdict of the jury. It is true the
Catholic soldier may receive a desperate wound, but he shall not
be treated ; the bullet shall not be probed for, the limb shall
not be amputated "tush! food for powder." It has been
said that Catholic soldiers in the Civil War attacked batteries
that it was impossible to take ; that they covered with their
dead and dying slopes to the very mouth of the Confederate
guns ; we ask, Is it just that the wounded among those who
so fought for American institutiors should be excluded frcm
the charity extended to the foe by the usages of civilized
mankind, that the widows of those men should starve, their
children be devoted to a fate worse than death?

There is a "peril" in the schools to the institutions of the
country because Catholics have no God, no conscience, but the
fetich of a politico-ecclesiastical Romanism, to which they
yield a blind obedience and for whose mandates they violate
all laws, human and divine. We have this church, this organ-
ization presented as something so appalling in its craft, so
merciless in the pursuit of its ends, that the poor will is its
plaything. It wants the control of the schools Mr. King does
not clearly tell us why ; if he stated that it had such control,
his own book and the facts of ordinary life would refute him,
but it wants this control, that also is contrary to the facts of
every-day knowledge ; this terrible shadow, this gigantic evil
in the midst of us, only desires that religion shall not be
divorced from education where pupils are Catholics. The
general proposition that secular and religious instruction should
go hand-in-hand is the opinion of the majority of the English
people. It has the unquestionable support of the present
ministry ; it has support from the Dissenting churches to an
extent influential in numbers and character; it has, to our
own personal knowledge, the support of men who are not be-
lievers, but who, at least, stand foremost in ability and learning.
It will, then, be admitted that this politico-ecclesiastical tyrant
is in good company; its opinion in this matter may not be
altogether a " peril " to the country.

120 "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY" [Oct.,

CHURCH'S HAND ON WASHINGTON.

Even legislation does not escape this sinister and all-pervad-
ing influence. The President and his cabinet, the Senate and
the Representatives, the governors and the legislatures of the
States, all the officials in all their classes through the whole
federal and local system of administration in a word, the
entire government from the centre to the remotest part is filled,
or about to be filled, by Jesuits in disguise. It cannot be main-
tained that Mr. McKinley attends divine worship even in a
Jesuit oratory in the White House it would be too " bold,
brazen, and blasphemous " * an exhibition of hatred of American
institutions even for him to go in state to a Jesuit church but
our author has not proved that he has Mass celebrated private-
ly, or that a chaplain from Georgetown visits him in the disguise
of a footman or in any other of the disguises so constantly
resorted to by those intriguing priests. It seems rather clear,
if politico-ecclesiastical Romanism be a "peril" to legislation,
it should be by carrying the country and the States election
after election. But it happens that Congress and the State
legislatures have hardly a Catholic among their members at
least it seems so ; it can hardly be possible that the many
eminent men among Mr. King's acquaintance have been be-
guiling him all this time with the pretence that they were
worthy descendants of the Huguenot, the Pilgrim, the Puritan,
the Hollander, and so forth, while they were slaves of the
Pope blinded by fear or blinded by fanaticism.

There was a gentleman some years ago who sat for Peter-
borough in the Imperial Parliament. He had a great fear of
the Jesuits and attributed the calamities of the time to their
baleful influence. Insensible to ridicule, he was for e\er moving
some resolution against them; and )et he was not aware, or
seemed not to be aware, that they were an illegal society,
tolerated indeed by the good sense of Englishmen, but in spite
of laws which denied them even the ordinary rights of a club or
other voluntary association. Arnid the laughter of the house,
Mr. Disraeli suggested that the honorable member was himself
a Jesuit in disguise ; and if Jesuitical be an epithet for dis-
honesty, for craft, for every species of unfairness, we must
conclude that Mr. King is not the least apt of their pupils.

* We intend to put in inverted commas some flowers of rhetoric scattered through this
volume.

1899-] "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:' 121

HOW ROMANISM MANAGES POLITICAL PARTIES.

There is a " peril" to the institutions of the country from
politico-ecclesiastical Romanism's relations to the platforms.
The claims of this Romanism of his to universal dominion can-
not be of very much power over American institutions when they
are unable to command a single daily paper in all the great city
of New York. The Catholics of America have no choice but to
go to non-Catholic papers for their information, and if they desire
to send their views abroad it is to non-Catholic papers they must
apply for the means. The speeches of Catholics, their public
utterances of any kind, are at the mercy of men who, apart
from some spirit of fair play, are not interested in publishing
them. One would think that the dependence of the Catholic
body, numbering so many millions, on the justice or compas-
sion of others, is the most piteous instance of sccial and
political helplessness that can be imagined. On the contrary,
by some wonderful dispensation, though they have no press,
they rule " political parties " and " platforms," " legislation,"
"schools," "charities," "labor," and " war." Without a press
they possess such an extraordinary agent in their politico-eccle-
siastical organization that the news which each one reads in
the organ he takes up undergoes a miraculous transformation
while passing to his mind. The thought of the country is col-
ored with Romanism and its claims to universal dominion.
Strong Protestant sentiment becomes papal infallibility in the
process. Even the Sunday sermons of the Herald, which Mr.
King would have us believe is a Catholic journal, must be
dogmatic utterances transfused into his brain through a myste-
rious hypnotism exercised by popish emissaries.

KING'S FOLLIES AND FOIBLES.

Notwithstanding all this Mr. King publishes his book, and
we must believe him when he insists he is not under the spell
of politico-ecclesiastical Romanism. We do not object to a
good deal of irrelevant introductory matter, for there is some
amusement in trying to analyze some mental processes ; as,
for instance, that by which he connects the reign of Charles
V. with Tammany Hall. But we have a right to protest
against the natural or deliberate confusion of thought which
blends into one action incidents separated by difference .of
time and of moral and religious aspect. He talks of the
" spirit of free inquiry " in England as existing long before

122 "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY" [Oct.,

Wyckliffe for men " suffered for their repudiation of the
claims of priestly authority," though it was " in the beginning of
the fifteenth century they were burned for their religious opin-
ions," and he then jumps to " the little congregation at Scroo-
by." This was a congregation of Puritans in England which
used to meet at the manor-house of Scrooby in the beginning
of the reign of James I. To say that this is offered in an un-
candid manner, is to say the least of it. James I. had been a
Scotch Presbyterian. His early training was more likely to
make him a friend than an enemy of the Puritans. There is
one thing very certain, he was no friend of the Catholics.
There was scarcely a Catholic gentleman whose estate was not
burdened by fines for recusancy. They had not been at first
enforced by the king, and were accumulating from month to
month. Harassed by the importunities of his needy followers
from Scotland, James assigned to many of them these fines. The
only way for the astounded owners of the estates to avoid
utter ruin was to compound with the Scotchmen. A composi-
tion to the extent of ^"10,000, an immense sum at the time,
was obtained from one Catholic.

But James, notwithstanding that he had been brought up
in a religious system and doctrine very nearly approaching the
form and teaching of the Puritans, looked upon their views
with regard to civil government as a danger to the throne and
to the Established Church which was its strong support. They
had been members of that church, and he could not under-
stand why they had separated from her;* but there was one
thing he could understand, and that was, that men who found
in the Old Testament their ideas of rule in church and state,
who looked upon the backsliding of kings as the calling down
a woe on Israel, who regarded the royal favorites as standing
with those against whom judgments had been denounced by
prophets, and who lifted up their testimony against the loyal
prelates of the Establishment as priests of Baal, were to be
dealt with according to the rigor of the law. Even in the
reign of Elizabeth the Puritans had obtained an unenviable
notoriety. Penal acts had been passed against them, and all
that was needed by her successor was to enforce these enact-
ments ; but neither for the acts of Elizabeth nor for the policy
of James were the plundered, imprisoned, banished, or murdered
Catholics responsible.f

* They were called Separatists.

t Whatever qualities may be praised by admirers of the Puritans, and that they possessed
courage and endurance no one can question, they were harsh and intolerant to the last degree.

1899.] "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURA" 123

KING'S INSOLENT MANNERS.

We have hitherto confined ourselves to a criticism of the
methods of Mr. King; we shall now invite our readers to form
an opinion of his manners. With reference to a letter of his
Grace of New York to be read to the people, and which is
given in this work, Mr. King begins a comment as follows :
" Come, Michael Augustine, be honest ! When you quote from
an opponent, quote literally, and do not deceive your followers
by directing to be read, from the altars where you control the
teachings, distorted passages, intentionally omitting an impor-
tant statement of historical fact." His Grace, of course, gave
all that was material to his purpose in a passage which was
in the highest degree offensive to his people. He is outraged
by Mr. King for the omission because he does not " quote
literally" we presume the meaning is quote verbatim an
omission of no import.

The passage, which reads like the ravings of insanity, ap-
peared, Mr. King tells us, in an anonymous circular sent to
people in New York. One copy reached the Archbishop. We
give the entire passage as we have it from Mr. King: " Politi-
co-ecclesiasticism, with its sweeping claims over the morals of
men, reaching every rational or intentional act, including the
act of voting, and which in foreign countries constitutes the
basis for a distinct political party, must not be allowed to
undermine the great Republic, whose perpetuity depends upon
individual voting." From the pastoral the clause 4< and which
in foreign countries constitutes the basis for a distinct political
party," was omitted, the omission being marked by three as-
terisks. Mr. King asks : " Why keep from the ears of your

Edmund Burke, in his work An Account of the European Settlements in America, says of the
Puritans : " The truth is, they had no idea at all of freedom. The very doctrine of any sort
of toleration was so odious to the greater part, that one of the first persecutions set up was
against a small party which arose amongst themselves. The persecution which drove the
Puritans out of England might be considered as great lenity and indulgence in the compari-
son." It may be safely said that a universal terror reigned among those who might in any
way become obnoxious to the ruling influence in New England. If the ex-Anglican ministers
who happened to control opinion could find no fault in their rivals which could be expressed
in intelligible language, they accused them of witchcraft. The effect of that was as if one
were accused of being a Christian in the paroxysm of a Roman persecution, a Catholic in the
frenzy of the Popish Plot, an aristocrat in the Reign of Terror. Many instances could be
mentioned. A magistrate had committed forty persons for sorcery ; but getting disgusted
with the task refused to go on Immediately he himself was accused of sorcery, "and
thought himself happy in leaving his family and fortune and escaping with his life out of the
province." Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead. " Multitudes appear 10
have accused others merely to save themselves," says Dr. Dwight in his Travels in Ntiv Eng-
land. Every one knows this gentleman is a staunch friend of the Pilgrims and their de-
scendants.

124 "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY." [Oct.,

people this statement of fact : ' and which in foreign countries
constitutes the basis for a distinct political party'? Why put
in three little innocent stars in the place of this statement of
great historic import ? " The italics are Mr. King's. What he
means by describing the omitted clause as a statement of
great historic import we are unable to think, but we know the
Archbishop described all the statements as wild ; and we our-
selves say they read like the ravings of insanity.

The suggestion made by the question asked by Mr. King
is that his Grace garbled a statement of great historic import
for a corrupt purpose. What was the purpose ? In what does
the great historic import consist ? Something called politico-
ecclesiasticism possesses claims which in foreign countries con-
stitute the basis for a distinct political party. Suppose so ;
what about it ? Whatever politico-ecclesiasticism is, if it have
claims, is it not as well entitled to assert them as, say, the
successors of Carbonari ? the assassins and revolutionists of
Europe ? or as the insolent busy-bodies of New York who
send an insulting circular to a high dignitary of the church ?
His Grace is known as a man who has not written or said any-
thing offensive to any one, as one who offers no directions to
people outside his own flock, who has no connection with
party politics, and to whom for the exercise of friendly offices
Protestants even more than Catholics are indebted. If Mr. King
can prove to us that he has ever served a Catholic in a political
way, that he has ever used a particle of influence in favor of a
Catholic, though he has no right to fling insult and contumely on
millions of his fellow-citizens, he will still appear with some re-
deeming trait, and possibly as a man led astray by a too fervid
imagination and actuated by a too headlong disposition. We
shall think that his familiarity is only due to the aberrations of
a mind without equipoise. Though Mr. King is wrong in criticis-
ing his Grace for "recommending" and not " commanding " his
priests to vote on a particular occasion ; if he himself can
point out one act of kindness towards a Catholic performed by
him or the body which he pretends to guide ; if he can tell
of a single instance in which he has borne testimony to the
labors of priests for the social amelioration of their people, to
their readiness to obey the call of duty at whatever hour of
the day or night, without regard to the inclemency of seasons ;
if he shows that he has publicly recognized the self-devotion
of nuns who are at the bedsides of the poor, fearless of in-
fection, heedless of comfort, insensible to so much that must

1899-] " FACING THE 1 WENTIETH CENTURY" 125

offend the senses of delicate and refinedly nurtured women,
we shall not quarrel as to whether "recommend" is the
equivalent for " command/' or point out that the " unit " of
the Catholic vote for Tammany candidates must include in
New York ten thousand Catholic Republicans. We believe he
can boast that he has never done a good act for, has never
expressed a just sentiment about, a Catholic. If he has praised
a Catholic, he has done so because he thought him a renegade.
Indeed, if the Republican party relies for its influence on books
of the kind before us, we can only say that the ten thousand
Catholic Republicans are men of edifying patience.*

HIS SUSPICIONS.

Mr. King seems, unfortunately, to be of a suspicious nature.
He gives some sentences from a lecture of his Grace of St. Paul.
He admits it has a patriotic ring, but then the " source " is
so suspicious that the words are to Mr. King as the sounding
brass and the tinkling cymbal. We learn from him that the
politico-ecclesiastical organization is the cause of the abstention
of the respectable classes from the ballot-boxes. Yet as these
men are Protestants, or at least non-Catholics, it seems hard
to understand the connection of the alleged cause and the
effect, unless through some such occult force as we have
alluded to above. Altogether one cannot help thinking as he
reads this work that the sequences resemble those which take
place in dreams. The imagination is awake, the materials from
the various sources which supply the furniture of the mind are
present ; the reason is asleep, and strange, weird, startling, and
incomprehensible associations of ideas succeed each other as at
the prompting of some spirit of wickedness and folly.

CATHOLICISM RATED WITH MOHAMMEDANISM.
And yet in all this, to do the writer justice, he seems seri-
ous. No doubt he is at times betrayed into something which
reads like humor, as when he speaks of the "intolerant clutch"
of the ecclesiastical oppressor in the South American republics ;
or when, referring to the Dreyfus case, he informs us that
" the poor Jew was exiled to Devil's Isle, but the Devil had
free range in Paris." It is usual to regard the Catholic Church
as a Christian church. Most Protestant writers of weight now
speak of her as the principal branch of the Church of Christ
in authority, in continuous history and homogeneous belief
and ritual. Even those who have least sympathy with certain

* There are 70,000 Catholic Republicans in New York State.

126 " FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:' [Oct.,

of her doctrines and her ceremonial admit the vitality of faith
among her children of all classes and conditions of life. Take
our word for it, in the United Kingdom, as well as in the United
States, a priest of this dreadful politico-ecclesiastical Romanism
is acknowledged by Protestants to have an authority which they
will not concede to their own minister. It is immaterial from
what principle of human nature, from what impression of life and
conduct, from what instinct or influence the idea proceeds, but
it is there a moral and intellectual conviction among Protest-
ants of all kinds within the wide realms that lie between ex-
treme ritualism and extreme rationalism. A religion believed
by all men of sense outside the church to be as much the
religion of Christ as any form called Christian, and whose
ministers are known by Protestants high and low as not respec-
ters of persons, are known to be fearless in rebuke and instant
in advice among their own people, who are estimable in the
relations of life, in the opinion of all people, we say that a
religion regarded by Protestants as Christian in its origin, be-
lief, and influence on conduct would not be compared with
Mohammedanism by any Protestant of sense and feeling.
There is a passage at page 169 of this work which presents
the astounding comparison. We have read many very shame-
ful, very libellous statements, or at least heard of their publi-
cation in pamphlets, fly-sheets, and placards. The ardent
Protestant who pushed himself into new notice recently in
England for " brawling " in a church of the Establishment
sold in his little shop in London publications of an obscene
and revolting character about the confessional. It was pointed
out by Protestants that this should be stopped, but because a
sort of Protestant revival had at the moment risen he was safe
from prosecution. For many years the literature of Holywell
Street has been under the notice of the police, and for a book
which drew to their legitimate conclusion certain dicta of
economic and physiological science Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs.
Besant were tried at the bar of the Queen's Bench. Public
morality was deemed deserving of protection then because
there was no furore of Reformation principles in conflict with a
tendency to Catholicism in the Established Church ; so deserv-
ing, indeed, that nothing less than the dignified proceedings of a
trial at bar seemed fitting to the occasion. But now the Catholic
religion may be libelled with impunity. The wholesale perjury
of the Popish Plot witnesses is another instance of the blind-
ness which settles upon men when some unscrupulous person

1899-] "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY." 127

sounds the Protestant alarm bell. The well-born, the edu-
cated, the reputable were then slain on the Evangelists as
Gates and his imitators poured forth their constantly amended
tales. Of course after blood had been shed in rivers, and a
terror like that which will fall on men before the signs of the
coming of the Last Day had withered the hearts of man,
woman, and child of the old religion, the people recovered
from their frenzy, and, as usual in such cases, inflicted on the
baser instruments of the conspiracy the punishment more justly
due to others.

4 MALIGNANT STATEMENT.

It is hard to find anything in the perjuries of the witnesses
of the Popish Plot as malignant as the statement which we
now quote from Mr. King : " The religion of the Philippines
is what might be looked for when Roman Catholics and Mus-
sulmans have for centuries vied with one another for the spir-
itual domination over an idolatrous and barbarous people."*
There is here at least no qualification. Elsewhere, as though
he had some idea that he might defeat his purpose by attri-
buting to the Catholic religion as the necessary effects of its
influence, foulness, lying, cruelty, a corruption of the entire
moral nature, he made a distinction between the Catholic
Church or, as he calls it, " religious Romanism " and politi-
co-ecclesiastical Romanism. Nor is this comparison with Mo-
hammedanism a reckless flash of polemics. It is cool and cal-
culating. He speaks of the toleration by the United States of
all forms of religion, including that of the Mussulmans ; but
he adds a limitation, namely, that some practices may be ob-
jected to. This is immediately in point to his argument all
along. If he can show there are practices arising, as of neces-
sity, from Catholic doctrine that are incompatible with the
very existence of social and moral obligations, he asks, and
rightly asks, that such practices should be put down. We
shall go farther, and say that any theological system which
rendered society impossible for this is the meaning of his
point should be interdicted. We are not going to prove that
moral and social obligations can be observed by Catholics con-
sistently with the teachings of their church. To a very large
extent, if not altogether, England acted on the opinion that
Catholic doctrine was destructive of civil society when she
would not allow a Catholic to be even a tide-waiter or a pri-

k *Page 249.

128 " FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY" [Oct.,

vate soldier.* She has changed all that. Catholics are high
in the army and in offices of state. Only a few years ago the
keeper of the Queen's conscience in Ireland was a Catholic.
A few years ago the viceroy of the vast dependency of India
was a Catholic. To-day one of the most distinguished of her
ambassadors is a Catholic, and the Lord Chief-Justice, who has
just concluded his labors as one of the tribunal dealing with a
matter of high policy in which this country is interested, is a
Catholic.

Such facts prove that the old prejudices, based on hatred
and long kept alive by unscrupulous greed.f are dying out.
We do not fear the effects of such prejudices will enter into
the law of the United States, for all this writer urges. There
can be no solid ground for believing that the only church
which insists on the indissolubility of marriage favors polygamy
in any sense, or in a Mussulman sense. Purity of thought is
an essential characteristic of the Christian dispensation, but no
pretence to this morality is put forward by any body of Chris-
tians except the Catholic body.J What is the result of such
far-reaching mental uncleanness but the legislation which
makes marriage a tie as temporary as concubinage, and which
looks upon the gratification of unlawful passion as not merely
the natural but necessary condition of human life. In this prin-
ciple we have nothing short of the dissolution of the family
and the decomposition of the state ; for we have the philoso-
phy of naturalism, the religion which makes an idol of the in-
dividual in a sense subversive of all the principles which hold
the moral elements of the world together. There is no re-
straint on acquisition, the man himself is the object of his sole
interest we allow for casual preferences, but these do not
touch the point and so fraud sits over all exchanges, over
every contract, and oppression extinguishes the very life of
labor, the workingman's sense of self-respect.

It is somewhat hardy, even for Mr. King, to arraign the
Church as the enemy of labor ; hardy even for a man who
puts the religion of Christ on a par with Mohammedanism.
It is true that the church has continued from the time of the

* As a matter of fact she was never without Catholics in her army, but the theoretical
disqualification certainly existed.

f Edmund Burke, who is frequently quoted by Mr. King, declared that Irish Protestants
did not desire the conversion of the Catholics. It was their interest that the Catholics should
remain subject to fines, confiscations, every species of spoliation.

I It is right to except English High-Churchmen from this statement, but after all they
are the Protestants who are charged with the Romanizing of the church.

1899-] "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY." 129

Apostles, thinking with the same mind as when her sacra-
mental system was in unceasing activity to prepare the martyrs
for the tortures pronounced against them, or which they ex-
pected to be pronounced against them ; true that she won to
her authority all that was civilized and vast territories beyond
the boundaries of civilization ; true, she vivified a moribund
world with a new spirit, restrained by her benign rule the fiery
passions of the northern Barbarian and infused a spirit of
justice and dignity into the crafty and servile Asiatic ; true it
is that she fought for the wife and the virgin against the
armies of Islam, fought century after century until at length
her sacrifices secured the civilization which enables Mr. King,
and persons like him, to use its benefits in the same way as
Titus Gates did, as Bedloe did, as Dangerfield and the rest of
the appalling rout who made life in England a tragedy pite-
ous, grotesque, horrible as was ever enacted in Roman amphi-
theatres or Parisian shambles ; but notwithstanding all this she
is the ally of the Moslem, his copartner in the debasement of
human nature !

And Mr. King, who professes such deep solicitude for the
laborer, tells us not of the Pope's appeals to those who have
chained them to an iron rule. Wages are not all ; the laboring
man has a soul, has his aspirations, his preferences his pre-
judices, if you will. What independence of spirit is to be found
in a factory or shop where the superintendent rules over the
conscience more certainly than an oriental despot ? The move-
ment of an eyelid by the employee, if harsh words have galled
him, means instant dismissal. In the old world talk was made
in verse and economic prose about " the tyrant of the fields."
In England Liberal politicians were eloquent over the farm-
laborer "sat upon" by the parson and the squire.* We have
heard of the peasants before the French Revolution, we are
aware that the intendant of the manor was often tyrannical
enough ; but neither in France nor in England was there any-
thing like the paralysis which smites mind and heart when a
manager in an American mill or workshop looks darkly at a
laborer. Contrast with this result of the economic ethics of
the individual's unaccountableness for acts that are not legally
cognizable with the check imposed by the guilds of the Middle
Ages under the guidance of the church. If ever she possessed
a powerful influence on civil society it was when those guilds

* " Sat upon by the parson and the squire " was the phrase used by Mr. Bright in one of
his speeches.

VOL. LXX. 9

130 "FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY." [Oct.,

were in their most palmy state. The worker was protected
absolutely against injustice of any kind or from any source.
The guild was a religious fraternity under the patronage of
the saint of the craft. Every member was bound by rule to
approach . the sacraments at stated intervals throughout the
year. An act of immoral conduct entailed expulsion, so did
drunkenness in public, so did theft, so did malicious injury to the
employer's materials, so did conviction for a crime. The master
belonged to the same guild, sat in the same council and filled
the guild offices, as his workmen did. There was a real equal-
ity without confounding ranks or effacing dignity. So high
was the sense of honor among those mediaeval workingmen they
would not admit a royal bastard to their fraternities. The
Bastard of Orleans or of Alengon might lead the armies of
France, take precedence of other great nobles, go on high
embassies, entertain royalty in his castle ; but these working-
men would not admit him to an equality with them. This is
how the politico-ecclesiastical organization which Mr. King
looks upon as a "peril" to labor shaped the soul of the work-
ingman when her sway over the mind of Europe stood highest.
The feeling for him which the church manifested then has
been displayed by our Holy Father since his accession, as one
would expect from a man so eminently gifted with the sense
of her profound and elevating policy. We have not a shadow
of doubt if at this moment a controversy between workingmen
and masters were to arise there is not an honest workingman
on the Continent of Europe, in Britain or in America, who
would not readily submit his fortunes to his arbitration. As
surely as a few years ago Cardinal Manning would be the
chosen judge of the Protestant workingmen of London, so sure-
ly, if the case could arise, Leo XIII. would be the arbiter pre-
ferred by the workingmen of the world. We can, therefore,
resignedly dismiss Mr. King's question : " Is it not true that
apparent personal sincerity and honesty on the one hand, and
pronounced adherence to a system which, wearing a triple
crown of tyranny, enforces disgusting arrogance, blasphemous
claims, refined perfidy, compelled ignorance and assassinated
individuality, etc." by asking him these questions : How may
a system wear a crown ? enforce arrogance, whether disgust-
ing or not ? how can a system enforce blasphemous claims, en-
force refined perfidy, enforce compelled ignorance, and enforce
assassinated individuality with or without a triple crown of
tyranny ? The truth is this vicious rhodomontade has a mean-

1899-] " FACING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:' 131

ing amid the confusion of thought under which the writer
labored. It means that His Holiness is, by virtue of the
system of which he is the head, a tyrant, is arrogant to a dis-
gusting degree, asserts blasphemous claims, whatever these may
be, acts with refined perfidy, like the Jesuits whose pupil he is.
We are in a difficulty as to the "compelled ignorance" which
the system enforces upon the Pope even Mr. King knows that
his reputation as a scholar is wide-spread ; but if so, how can
he be the victim of compelled or any other kind of ignorance?
With all our desire to interpret Mr. King as he would wish,
we fail with the " assassinated individuality." If the Pope be
a tyrant and arrogant, an asserter of blasphemous claims, a
man of refined perfidy, his individuality can hardly be said to
have been assassinated. He must have as much individuality
about him, with all the qualities mentioned, as any man in
history; he almost surpasses anti-Christ. But if we look at
him as the head of the politico-ecclesiastical conspiracy against
American institutions, we wonder in what way his compelled
ignorance can be a valuable agent in controlling those institu-
tions. Fluency, recklessness, want of scruple, or fluency with
the opinion that " Romanists " are no* entitled to common
justice, carries Mr. King too far. He proves too much.

Yet we are thankful to him. He is not civil, but we
can overlook his want of politeness for the service he has
rendered us. It is not so bloody as that afforded to our ances-
tors by Lord George Gordon and his followers, when in their
zeal they almost wrecked London ; but as sensible men saw
in their methods, so sensible men will see in Mr. King's the
value to religion of that fervor which shows itself by setting
fellow-citizens against each other ; will see the quality of the
charity which is so like hatred that it recalls Tertullian's sen-
tence crystallizing pagan detestation of the Christian name.*

* " If the Tiber overflow its banks, if the Nile do not spread its water through the fields,
if the heavens refuse rain, if a famine arise, or pestilence, at once the hue and cry is heard :
The Christians to the lions ! " Tert. Apol.

UNLIKE many books which have had a great
run, Richard Carvel* has real worth. Wholly sweet
and clean, it is masterly in its delineation of colo-
nial times, in its portrayal of life here and in Eng-
land a hundred years ago. Suggesting and blend-
ing the excellences of both Thackeray and Robert Louis
Stevenson, it is a companion picture to Dr. Weir Mitchell's
Hugh Wynne. It is high but merited praise to say that both
Mr. Churchill and Dr. Mitchell have reached and realized all
the possibilities of Colonial and Revolutionary life in the novel.

The Kings Mother^ is a memoir of Margaret Beaufort,
Countess of Richmond and Derby, and is a very beautiful pic-
ture of life in the ages of faith. They were days of internecine
and international strife, but souls blossomed in them with a
fragrance which no one can appreciate to-day unless the spirit
of the Middle Ages has fallen upon him within the Catholic
Church. People outside the church have caught something of
that spirit, no doubt ; the architecture, the music, the ceremo-
nial have appealed to the romantic side of character, but this
attraction, which belongs to the faculty of taste, is not the
same as a mental hold of the thought and impulse, the fire
and energy, the devotion and self-sacrifice of those days. It is
doubtful if Scott with all the romance of his nature possessed
this perception in its fulness. If any one not a Catholic
realized it, it was Edmund Burke. But even in his case we
are not sure that it was an insight deeper than the vividness
of a wonderful imagination which saw its images in all the
vitality of intense passion. There was a religious life, from the
throne to the laborer's cottage, which made society one in a
sense not to be found in northern and western Europe since
the sixteenth century ; not to be found anywhere, for that

* Richard Carvel. By Winston Churchill. New York : The Macmillan Company.

f The King's Mother. By Lady Margaret Domville. London : Burns & Gates, limited.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 133

matter, except in parts of Bavaria and the Tyrol, in parts of
Italy and parts of Spain. Now, we have that very oneness of
society in the pages of Lady Margaret Domville, that inter-
penetrating spirit which passed through all classes like light
on the groups painted on a cathedral window, which while vivi-
fying unites them by one purpose.

The life of Margaret Beaufort was passed in a time of
great mutations at home and abroad, of great intellectual
activity and discovery. Richard of York claimed the throne
and died the death of a traitor. His son Edward wrested the
sceptre from the feeble hand of Henry; and in the change
noble heads that had not fallen in the field fell beneath the
axe. Great men and their children begged their bread, and
petty men became great by confiscations. Again Edward fled
and the meek Henry mounted the throne. Again the heads-
man was busy, estates changed owners or went back to the
old owners. The parvenu of yesterday, who had played the
great baron on the spoils of an Exeter or Oxford, a Pembroke
or a Clifford, was an adventurer once more. And the great
Yorkist nobles in their turn were wanderers on the earth, as
those of Lancaster had been. Another swing of the urn, and
Edward is king, Henry and his heir sleep in bloody graves,
and with them, to all appearance, the last hope of Lancaster.
But a new element enters into the dynastic quarrel. The de-
scendants of the men who in one generation signed Magna
Charta, in another overawed the greatest Plantagenets, whose
lives were part of the story of England, who fought in Pales-
tine with Richard and Edward, who conquered at Crecy, at
Poitiers, and Agincourt these could not tamely see the
honors of their old nobility bestowed on the kinsfolk of the
queen, on Rivers and on Grey, born to be their lackeys. It
was this feeling which rendered it possible for Gloucester to
brush aside the royal princes, as Gloucester's crimes upon the
throne opened a way for Henry Tudor, the son of the subject
of this memoir.

Nor is it only in the vicissitudes of civil war, of carnage on
the field and vindictive justice afterwards, of confiscation which
in a moment reduced families from princely wealth and luxury
and power to seek alms at the cot, the convent, the farm-house
or monastery in their own land, or to beg in the streets of
Burgundy and France, that the era in which our heroine lived
wrote lessons on her mind and heart. She could remember the
capture of Constantinople, which took place while she was

134 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

spending her early and studious days at Bletsoe. Printing was
discovered and the system of the heavens explained. Later on,
when her son was seated on a throne made safe by his craft,
policy, and the memory of the disastrous days of the Roses, the
genius of Columbus opened a new world, the tales of which
surpassed all that had been told of the wealth of Ormus and
of Ind, the vastness of far Cathay, the might of the empire of
Prester John, the wonders of the hidden lands beyond the
African desert.

In the middle of the fifteenth century Lady Margaret
Domville is safe in saying that " the state of education was
fairly good." A young woman of good family was taught
French, and possibly Latin. With regard to the latter, it was
not so rare an accomplishment but that the Latin of the Mass
and of the psalms could be intelligently followed on one of
those illuminated rolls of finely written manuscript which
formed an item of domestic wealth. A very little later with
printing came a diffusion of those curious pages which are the
delight of the collector. No grown-up person above the labor-
ing classes was wholly illiterate. Nor is this statement affected
by the gibe that a certain strong thief could not read his neck-
verse on Harrowby Heath. There was a decay of this rudi-
mentary learning owing to the wars of the Roses, and again to
the condition of insecurity and neglect which followed the
breaking up of the religious houses, and we are confirmed in this
opinion by Fuller, writing about the middle of the sixteenth
century, who laments the loss of " the schools " of the nuns,
where the pupils were taught reading, needle-work, French, and
the rudiments of Latin. It was in these schools the girls of
the lower and more wealthy middle classes, and of the lesser
gentry, received their education. Among women, at least, it
seems beyond all dispute that a very fair reach of instruction
was arrived at, so generally that even domestic servants could
carry on a clear and well-expressed correspondence. Nor is
there any reason to suppose that their brothers were with-
out equal advantages, for the conditions of life in peaceful
times did not press on boys so severely as in the last and the
present century. During a part of this period a curious cir-
cumstance is observable, that education was more generally
diffused, and possibly of a better kind, among the classes we
have mentioned than among the very highest class. The sons
and daughters of great nobles could not mix in the common
schools; so that they had to depend upon such instruction as

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 135

they might receive at home from the chaplain or the parish
priest.*

The clearness with which Margaret Beaufort wrote her views
on all the important affairs she had in charge as a great land-
holder, and as one to whom great interests were entrusted for
judgment, shows she had the advantage of the best training
from her earliest childhood. She was eminently a peace-maker,
to whose counsel disputes were submitted when no other arbi-
trator could have obtained a result satisfactory to litigants.
One instance of this is the settlement of the contest between
the town and university of Cambridge on a matter of jurisdic-
tion. But it was the same throughout all matters which lay or
came within her influence or authority. Precision ma'rked the
regulations framed for the government of her castles and man-
ors, for the execution of her charities, for the securing the
splendor of public worship over her vast estates, for the reli-
gious and secular teaching of her tenants and laborers, for the
rule of the colleges founded and endowed, or partly founded
and endowed, by her.f Amid the claims of so many duties she
gave hours of each day for the practice of devotion. Her con-
fessors bear testimony, among them the Blessed Fisher, to the
influence of her life upon themselves. Fasting and other prac-
tices of mortification were with her a reality; the humility and
love with which she cared for her poor realized in a high de-
gree the spirit of the Gospel. She was a great patron of
literature, and contributed to its advancement by her talents as
well as by her purse. Among the works from her own pen is
a translation of Speculum Aureum Peccatorum and the fourth
book of the Following of Christ, the first three having been
translated by her direction. This was the first edition in Eng-
lish, and we can readily conceive the delight of the great and
gentle scholar who edited the reprint for the Early English Text
Society that one so highly placed as Margaret Beaufort should,
in an age of war and pride, desire to bring within reach of the
poor man a work which lifts him above the fears and miseries
of life, which in the church makes the docile reader a saint,
which inspires the mere altruist to the effort of self-sacrifice,
instead of the talk of it, and in which the Positivist has found,
as Comte himself had found, the road to self-culture laid down

* A law prohibiting the employment of private tutors was enacted when the doctrines
of Wyckliffe began to disturb society. The private tutor may have been too often a discon-
tented individual.

f She re-founded God's House in Cambridge under the title of Christ's College, allotting
twelve manors and their lands for maintaining that foundation.

136 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.,

in a way that may be trod alike by the simple and the wise.

We close this memoir with the opinion that no one can
rise from the perusal of it without some feeling of moral ele-
vation, a clearer conception of the quality which separates
the ages of faith from our age, and a regret for much that
has passed with them from the world.

This lady, after the death of her daughter-in-law the queen,
was received to fraternity with the religious house of Durham.
She never became actually a nun, though her portrait in the
front of this book represents her in a nun's dress. It is all
characteristic of the spirit of detachment which ruled her life.
Her last husband that Earl of Derby so familiar to the
readers of Richard III. idolized her ; her son, the most astute
and austere sovereign of his time, shows in his letters his ap-
preciation of the tenderness, devotion, and wisdom displayed
in her relations with him through his puny childhood, his
threatened boyhood, and his manhood weighted with the cares
of state. Indeed, those cares so marked their lines upon his
face that ambassadors judged him to be for ever under the in-
fluence of some secret fear. We think that this could not
have been the cause of the look which has been described
as apologetic a king always successful could hardly wear such
a look as that but rather it was the look of self-effacement
arising from the modest view of himself instilled by his
mother, and confirmed by the sense of the great responsibilities
of his position when, in the earliest prime, he succeeded to a
kingdom from the government of which, as Philip de Comines
said, an older man might shrink.

I. THE TOURNAY BREVIARY.*

Practical usefulness is the first note of excellence which
one should look for in the breviary of to-day, which is intended
for the constant use of the clergy in general. The volume
should be of a handy size, suitable for carrying about on jour-
neys ; the paper not so thin as to be transparent, nor so thick
as to make the book bulky. Distinctness and uniformity of
type are also most desirable qualities in such a work as this,
which the priest must read for almost an hour every day. For
these reasons we most willingly commend the latest edition of
the breviary from the press of the Society of St. John. Not

* Breviarium Romanum. Editio Tornaci, 1899. Societas S. foannis. Desclee, Lefebvre
et Sociorum.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 137

only is usefulness to be commended as an attractive quality
in a good breviary, but excellence and a certain sort of luxury
may be legitimately cultivated. This for the reasons that the
"art preservative " ought to be itself always artistic, and within
the covers of this book are enclosed much of the word of God
and the life stories of the world's noblest and truest heroes.
For this also the work of Descle"e, Lefebvre & Co. may be
again commended. Their latest breviary is not only a pleasure
to the hand but also a delight to the eye, and altogether an
admirable presentation of the priest's daily prayer-book.

2. SERMONS ON CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.*

The Sermons on Christian Education contained in this vol-
ume were preached some years ago in St. Mary's Church,
Cleveland, and published in German in 1893. A second edition
has been called for, and of it the present volume is a transla-
tion. We are greatly indebted to the translator for the work
he has done and the benefit he has conferred upon English-
speaking Catholics, for Father Becker's work will form a valua-
ble addition to the priest's library, and could it be widely cir-
culated among the laity a great boon would also be conferred
on them. The work is so permeated with the true spirit of
the good priest and father that it wins hearts to the service
of the children for God's sake. It is, too, the outcome of so
wide, long, and varied an experience that all may profit, even
though they may not, perhaps, see their way to perfect agree-
ment upon every point. Moreover good sense and moderation,
the characteristic of full knowledge and mature judgment, ren-
der the work one of the best and safest of guides. It is also
very complete, so that there are very few points which are not
treated. It is, in short, one of the wisest and most judicious
of books, excellent both in the spirit in which it is written
and in the character of the advice and teaching given. Worthy
of particular commendation is the insistence on the duty of
providing for the temporal well-being of the family by the
cultivation of the virtues of industry and frugality, and the
acquisition by the young of these virtues in anticipation of the
future.

The spirit of moderation and of adaptation to the actual

* Christian Education; or, The Duties of Parents. By the Rev. William Becker, S.J.
Rendered from the German into English by a Priest of the Diocese of Cleveland. St. Louis:
B. Herder.

138 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct.

needs of the faithful which characterizes Father Becker's work
is shown, too, by the way in which he deals with the ques-
tion of vocation. Some writers, even moral theologians, leave
the impression that not to enter the state of perfection is
presumptively not to do God's will fully and heartily. Father
Becker expresses the truth more clearly and more satisfactorily
for the spiritual well-being of the vast mass of Christians when
he says : " God desires to lead the majority of people to
heaven by the way of the commandments, and directs them to
it through interior dispositions and exterior circumstances, with-
out even so much as addressing to them the invitation to the
state of perfection " (page 98).

Again, many a young man who gives way to idleness, drink,
and sensuality is advised to marry as a remedy, in the hope
that he will be saved. Harder to him but wiser, and in the
end kinder and certainly productive of less evil to others, is
Father Becker's advice : " Every Christian young man ought
to consider it a sacred duty before God and men, and a real
point of honor, that, through industry and frugality, he should
not only lay by something, but also work ahead to such a
degree that, relying on what he was able to do in early man-
hood and trusting in God, of course, he may say to himself,
quietly and confidently : I hope I shall advance and be able
to support a family. If he is not willing and cannot do this;
if he has frittered away the precious time of youth in idleness
and sloth, or even poisoned and squandered it in sinful sensu-
ality, and fettered himself with the enslaving shackles of drink
and gambling, and, alas ! impurity, often so expensive, and of
which, perhaps, he will never more rid himself ; then it would
be a hundred times better for himself to drag along his wretched
existence until his premature death singly, than to draw wife
and children into life-long misery " (page 41).

We heartily recommend the book to the attentive study of
priests, fathers and mothers, and the young men and women
who are to become the fathers and mothers of the next
generation. All will profit by it. We cannot, however, with-
out failing in duty, refrain from expressing regret at the un-
idiomatic character of the translation. To the " Priest of the
Diocese of Cleveland " English is either a language acquired by
study, or the aim of the translator has been to make the trans-
lation as literal as possible.

THERE may be various demurrers offered in
reply to the charge of church-looting in the
Philippines, but the facts are that not a little of
it has been done, and the results have been that instead of
having a mere handful of insurgents arrayed against us, we
have the whole Tagal race. It may be said that the Filipinos
used the churches as fortresses, and in attacking them the
soldiers were but reducing fortresses ; or it may be said that
the Spaniards desecrated the churches before we did. Grant-
ing all this, still, just for the lack of a little foresight in appoint-
ing the personnel of the Philippine Commission, as well as in
forestalling this seeming desecration, we have turned friends into
enemies, and we bid fair to antagonize a large portion of the
American people here at home.

The Dreyfus Case has the world "by the ears." It is
credibly reported that very nearly $100,000 were spent to
send out the telegraphic accounts of the trial at Rennes. All
these newspaper stories were tinctured with a pro-Dreyfus flavor.
Every little fact or sentiment that was calculated to stir up a
feeling of pity for an injured man was made much of. Of
course we are not prepared to prove that there was a moneyed
conspiracy in all this. But it is well not to allow ourselves to
be carried away by an enthusiasm which may after all be
founded on what is not so. We are bound to the French
people by many ties of gratitude. This matter of justice is a
household affair with them, and will be righted in the Courts
of Appeal without our intervention.

Any counter-currents in our American life are always sure
to show themselves in or about Chicago. The latest 'manifes-
tation is an abnormal increase of juvenile crime. Of the
77,441 arrests during the fiscal year, 10,000 were of children
under sixteen years and 508 of children under ten years. This
Chicago manifestation is but a local symptom of what is fast
becoming a constitutional disease in these United States. Sta-

140 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Oct.,

tistics of juvenile delinquencies are abundant, and they may
be found everywhere.

A keen observer of the ways of men has said that we must
probably lose a generation of children before the American
people will give up their foolish shibboleth of an irreligious
education and become impressed with the necessity of infusing
a strong element of religious training into the common-school

education.

Some religious papers continue to rant against "Imperialism."
It would be a curious study to find just what they understand
by the high-sounding word. Is it merely acquiring new terri-
tory ? Most of the territory that now constitutes the United
States was acquired by conquest or purchase, and by men who
of all Americans were lovers of republican institutions. What
is more, on the acquisition of this territory they never thought
to hold a plebiscite and ask the favor of sovereignty from the
people of the acquired territories. The American principle of
a government by the people can be easily affirmed in the
Philippines after we have pacified the islands.

The Transvaal imbroglio bears on the face of it evidence
of only one more instance of unwarranted intrusion on Eng-
land's part into the private affairs of another nation. It cer-
tainly constitutes a part of a nation's self-government to be
able to say who shall and who shall not possess the right of
citizenship. When we found the Chinese an undesirable ele-
ment we excluded them, and we would not tolerate any as-
sumption on the part of China of an authority to impose her
people on us. So the Boers emphatically resent an attempt
on England's part to control their autonomy. They are within
their just right. So Chamberlain thought and said fifteen
years ago when it was a question of routing the Gladstone
ministry. But to-day, when other ends are to be attained, the
fundamental and eternal laws of international comity as well
as of right and wrong are all changed.

1899-] WHAT THE THINKERS SAY. 141

WHAT THE THINKERS SAY.

AN OPEN LETTER.

To the President, to the Secretary of War, and to the General Commanding in

the Philippines :

The conduct of the Manilan War presents an aspect to which I beg to call
your earnest attention, an aspect of astounding barbarity, in that individual
members of the army have profaned Christian temples and stolen and bartered
away the sacrificial vestments and sacred vessels. Witness the circumstantial
accounts everywhere given ; witness the articles themselves publicly exposed
in our Western cities and shamelessly advertised ; witness your own eyes.

This is a matter that immediately concerns every Catholic of our own
America. Is this to be a war on millions of American citizens, whose religion
is as a pericardium ? Is this war to be an assault and outrage on our tender-
est feelings ?

It is as a plain American citizen that I address you. I hope you will not
consider it a presumption. I am one of the people ; to them you owe your pres-
ent authority. And I can say I stand now not for myself alone but for the
many millions of my co-religionists, for I can hear their voices and feel their sup-
port. My address, too, is consonant with the spirit of the Constitution, which
cherishes the right of petition.

I have indicated the subject of this petition. If you have a single thought
for us, let these offences be stopped. Let the offenders be punished, through the
departments of War and Justice, under such military and civilians as suit the
case, whatever they may be. One procedure that suggests itself is the charge
of " conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman," but, where the offence is so
fundamental, this characterization seems pitiably insufficient. Let the stolen
treasures, now publicly exposed, be recovered by the application of caveat
emptor, and let them be restored to their parochial homes, or handed in trust
for this purpose to the Archbishop of Manila ; till this be done, the desecration
and the wrong are continuing.

These are our petitions: First, that the desecration and pillaging be in-
stantly stopped ; Second, that the offenders be swiftly punished ; Third, that
stolen articles of religion be diligently restored.

My tone is measured and moderate, though I might well be stirred and be
excused; and allow me to remark that for the offences a slight nominal punish-
ment is to give countenance and to condone ; justice calls for something fitting;
and furthermore, even though the principal in this case repudiates its agents'
infamy, justice demands that it shoulder its responsibility of reparation. The
government recognizes no temporal superior, but it bows to the claims of justice.
It seems right that you should be particularly eager to do this, for the honor of
the country is in a particular way in your keeping.

Tell me how I shall appeal to you. Shall I appeal to your chivalry ? Shall
I appeal to your sense of what is decent ? Shall I appeal to your love of our
brotherhood of country ? Shall I appeal to your abhorrence of vile deeds ?
Tell me what virtue or noble feeling most potently moves you and I will put my
entreaty in its name.

I speak of our present Manilan war. It is told that two thousand years
ago, when a great man had prosecuted the Asian war with Manilian author-
ity and had taken Jerusalem and the Temple, he pushed and gazed into the
Holy of Holies, despite the pleadings and the tears of God's ancient priests and
people; and afterward it was repeated how in Pharsalia he felt God's punish-
ing hand. And yet even this man refrained from impious plundering. It was
the sacker Crassus that died of molten gold poured down his throat.

President, Secretary, General, we ask you, listen and heed; move on the
quickest avenue to executive action and you shall have our heartfelt thanks.

NEAL H. EWING.

New York, September 20,

H2 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Oct.,

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

77 VERY Catholic Reading Circle should have a copy of the list of thirty-five
\_j books by Catholic authors selected from the catalogue of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., New York and Boston. By special arrangement with the Colum-
bian Reading Union a liberal discount will be allowed for a limited time. To
secure the reduction the official order-blank must be used, which is appended to
the published list of works. Copies of the list may be obtained by remitting ten
cents in postage to the Columbian Reading Union, 415 West Fifty-ninth Street,
New York City. No attention will be given to postal cards.

Among the authors represented in this new list are Brother Azarias, James
Jeffrey Roche, George Parsons Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Agnes
Repplier, Miriam Coles Harris, Emma Forbes Cary, Katharine E. Conway,
Louise Imogen Guiney, Mary Agnes Tincker, and Adelaide Procter. The
works of these authors should have a wider circulation. Catholic readers,
whether members of Reading Circles or patrons of public libraries, can assist
the good work by active personal co-operation. Send at once for the list with
critical reviews of each book.

* * *

The Champlain Summer-School afforded many opportunities to discuss
plans for extending Reading Circles. At one of the conferences a most delight-
ful talk was given by S. M. C., who is well known to our readers. It is here
reproduced in part from notes taken at Cliff Haven.

As to the novelty of the Reading Circle venture, that can be easily decided
upon. When one recalls the Symposia of the ancients, the gay courts presided
over by the ladies in the pleasant days of trouveres and troubadours, the min-
strel part of the menu in those old dining-halls of England, the dignified salons
of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France, with their imitations
in England in Queen Anne's time, the motive, and even some of the methods,
of our Reading Circle may be easily traced back to all these forms of culture
and recreation. So no plea need be made to save our endeavor from the charge
of new-fangledness. But we may, indeed, help one another to a solution of
the maintenance of our laudable endeavors, by exchange of opinion, etc. ; and
since Father McMillan, the chairman of the Board of Studies, favors me with
the request to say my little say, I am happy to comply, leaving him to answer
for the consequent weariness the little say may cause. I would, first, beg leave
to speak as if I had carte-blanche as to the formation of a Reading Circle, and
as if I had the most sympathetic co-workers. Then I would put myself on
guard against the desire to square that circle, and I would not eat my heart out
if its dimensions were not, at once, the same as the earth's circumference ; on
the contrary, I would prefer a small circle, and the conditions for admission
would be clearly enunciated and printed: a determined will to distinguish be-
tween an association and a " smart set " ; entertainment in the shape of musicales
and of At Homes and dramatic readings would be limited to one or two a year.
Our other meetings would be weekly and for work. We would agree upon a
plan of studious reading, and we would have been so fortunate as to have one
authority to whom we surrendered our wills in the choice of the year's study ; of
course, allowing ourselves a wide margin for individual research and correlathe

1899-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 143

studies, and going as we please, in our general reading. But in the matter of
the year's work we would allow the most autocratic decision of the director or
directress, or better still, of the Board of Direction, to prevail as to the special
work to be done. That would limit us to a few books, but to much reading and
considerable writing ; for Dr. Johnson is right, and we all know it : "Reading
makes the full man, and writing makes the sure man." Now, what should we
write ? Well, that depends on our arrangements as to that one authority, could
he or she at the weekly meeting give a course of lectures or talks on the pre-
scribed subjects, indicate the books that are of a nature to help us, answer the
questions bearing on the difficulties, section off the amount of matter to be read
till the next meeting; in a word, do pretty much what a professor of literature
does for a regular class in those schools where literature does not mean simply
rhetoric. To the members who from the opening of the meeting have been
convinced that they have come together not for gossip, nor tea, nor cake, nor
elocution, but for work, the hour or hour and a half will seem all too short to
listen and take notes. Now, what shall be done with the notes? We might
see the wisdom of developing them into so-called essays. These essays would
not be inflicted on the body at large, except at great intervals, and as the auto-
crat of the Round Table would decide. But the writing of the essays might
prove of real value to the owner and even, when properly put together, form a
sort of guide-book as to future reading. The subject-matter to be thus treated
would be agreed upon at the beginning of the course. Would it not be well to
have a very definite programme drawn ? How would this one suit, for instance :
A study of the great world poems, following the order of time, grouping them
under the two great sections of ancient and modern classics ? Let the earlier
meetings be devoted by the lecturer to the comparative merits of Homer and
Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Cervantes, Shakspere, Goethe, and Tennyson.
The comparative study would compel much reading, and the first part of the
term would be devoted to general considerations. The second part might be
devoted to some two of these great poems in particular; for instance, Shak-
spere's plays from English history, and Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Just
think of all the interest these ^hemes must awaken, besides the purely literary !
The many authorities who have given us help on all these subjects would fill a
good-sized library. There could be no difficulty as to finding subject-matter on
these books. Indeed, the greatest difficulty attending such work as a well-
organized Reading Circle suggests is the knowing what to discard, in the way
of help. This programme would stand for one year's course. Another year, it
might be the history of literature, devoting the first half to the literature of the
world in a very general manner ; the second half to a more special study of all
that has been written in the English language, since there has been an English
language, /. e., since the great Elizabethan era. The autocrat would, of course,
name the special works to be more particularly read. Say, for instance, the
best of the great essayists of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries versus the
best of the nineteenth century, and, to be still more definite as to the study
course proper, two of Bacon's, two of Addison's, two of Charles Lamb's, and
two of Newman's ; the choice of these to be agreed upon by the members and
the genial autocrat, and so on for years, and for the rest of one's life, a course
of studious and delightful reading would be secured.

The entertainments to be given once or twice a year could be made to illus-
trate what has been done under this discipline. All judicious reading should
enlarge and iUumine ; in a word, help us grasp the meaning of creation, and

144 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Oct., 1899.

when we shall have grasped that, all eternity will not be too long to exhaust the
joy of the discovery ; and even if we do not get a tangible hold of all the threads
that make out the mystic tapestry spread out to our gaze, we shall, by persever-
ing and concentrated effort, escape the curse of ennui. We know how depress-
ing much of our contemporary literature is. Our course will guard us from de-
pression, though our themes are serious. The great epics, the great romances,
the great dramas, the great novels are not depressing. The Divina Commedia,
even in the Inferno, is not depressing. Nor are the Idylls of the King, though
the great Arthurian romance ends in seeming failure. Who has ever been de-
pressed by the Dies Irse ? One may be serious without depression. We
should then take the pledge of total abstinence from all that is not mentally and
spiritually stimulating, and our library shelves should find no room for the deca-
dents of any period, though we would not limit our shelves to the Catholic
writers. We would have them, the best of them ; but we must also find room
for the great works of all the great ones of the earth. The ideal librarian re-
mains, perhaps, to be found, but the Reading Circles should hasten the advent
of that ideal, and while waiting for him or her imagine our books be arranged
somewhat in this manner: All our great spiritual guides, theologians and philo-
sophers, who have brought as much of their knowledge as is good for us within
our reach, by means of modern English. The historians and philosophers of
history, and by all means let us make sure of the Formation of Christendom, by
Allies, and Ozanam's Sorbonne lectures. Then our poets, all of them, but in
congenial groups. For instance, Tennyson, Browning, and Coventry Patmore go
together, and should be read in the order here marked. Not perforce all of
Tennyson nor of Browning, but every line of Patmore; this reading should not
be prescribed for the regular course, and perhaps the members would get the
most benefit from this crowned mystic by taking private lessons from one who
has the rare grace of reading between the lines of Patmore's revelations. Would
not such a library be good enough for our little span of life ? The books on
books are so very plentiful that with them, as with novels, the " embarras de
richesses " is truly embarrassing. The selections had better perhaps be most
severe in this line ; we want all that Wiseman and Newman have written on
mental and spiritual culture. Brother Azarias does not need to beg admission,
and there are ever so many others who have the right of entry: Walter Pater,
Gilbert Hamerton, Hamilton Mabie, Augustine Birrell, Alice Meynell. We
may not go all the way with all of these, but they have much to teach, and one
thing they will teach, in harmony with our great infallibles, is that " Right life is
glad life," and if literature is on the whole the most complete expression of the
spiritual nature of man, then we must, first of all, cultivate and cherish a love
for books, persevere in our loving use of them. We must not be afraid of the
efforts a course of studious reading demands, for " All great work demands
always great self-restraint and continuity of effort, and general healthfulness of
nature ; the kind of half-education which so many mistake for education is very
barren of results and substitutes a cheap imitation of culture for culture itself."
It is Hamilton Mabie who has been speaking in the last few lines. Now, what
we want is culture, and that does not mean merely refinement of taste or exten-
sive familiarity with books and art, but emancipation from provincialism, open-
ness to the truth from all quarters, Tightness of spirit and sanity of nature, and,
let me add, the grace to know when to stop our academic theorizing and hold
the truth when we see it. So, " Here's to the greater to-morrow that is born of
a great to-day "!

"DE PROKUNDIS CI.AMAVI AD TK, DOMINE."

Psalm cxxix. i.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LXX. NOVEMBER, 1899. No. 416.

vocem meflm."

re tDe stained cover of mp soul fee stript
find tDat immortal part, bewildered, see
CDe fearful dawn of CDP eternitp,
CoucD CDou mp Deart, and reillumine it
CeacD me tDe narrow wap and Delp me lift
CDis wearping life to rest, tDat unto me
Ro more map come a passion's agonp,
But perfect peace witD pardon infinite.

flnd in tDat Dour wDen deatD sDall crusD tDe
map all tDe past entangled as a dream,
Sink in tDe witDering gloom, and leave no trace.
jUnd wDen mp soul begins tDe last great figDt
Should I to CDee call out across tDe stream,
Curn not ord ! an unremembering face.

The month of November is devoted to the Holy Souls.

STATE OF NEW YORK. 1899.
VOL. LXX. 10

146 " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION" [Nov.,
"THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION."

BY REV. WILLIAM L. SULLIVAN, C.S.P.

HIS is the heading of an article in the Septem-
ber number of the Nineteenth Century Magazine,
by the Rev. Dr. Percival, a presbyter of the
Episcopalian diocese of Pennsylvania. The posi-
tions there taken are briefly these :

1. There is a wide-spread tendency in Protestant Christianity
to-day toward Catholic doctrine and ceremonial, and it promises
to become so universal as to annul the Reformation.

2. The Church of Rome is everywhere stagnant or retro-
grading, and cannot hope to benefit by this religious reawak-
ening.

3. The church which will alone profit by the new movement,
and emerge from it the home and hope of the Christian reli-
gion of the future, is the Anglo-Catholic Church ; or, if we
may reduce the terms of the reverend doctor's thesis to a some-
what more exact expression, that one among the several and
inharmonious systems within the religious establishment of the
English realm which is styled Ritualistic or High-Church Episco-
palianism.

Of these propositions we wish to consider simply the third.
Not, as is obvious, that the remaining two do not offer abun-
dant scope for investigation. Indeed, in his development of
them, Dr. Percival hints at several matters wherein he might
be subjected to examination to the great advantage of truth ;
such, for example, are the number and character of converts
to Roman Catholicism, and the few statements and fewer sta-
tistics he ventures in proof that the church is in irreparable
decay. But since the study of one of his grounds is ample for
the limits of a single article, it is best to consider that one
which expresses the main purpose of his essay and the central
point of his whole contention. Moreover, this gives us a chance
to do a little cross-questioning, examination of proofs, and case-
adjudication as rare an opportunity in these times as it is re-
freshing, when the Catholic apologist, nine times out of ten, is
compelled to give his whole attention to maintaining pleas of
Not guilty.

1899-] " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION" 147
A CATHOLIC REVIVAL WITH CATHOLICISM LEFT OUT.

But before entering upon the inquiry we have proposed to
ourselves, we must take note of one or two characteristics of
Dr. Percival's argument as a whole. It strikes us that he has
fallen into a strangely obvious paralogism in holding that a
Catholic revival is sweeping over all Protestant Christendom ;
not merely a setting of the tide towards ceremonial, but " like-
wise a great wave of doctrine," of "beliefs and practices of
the church which had been lost sight of at the Protestant
Reformation," and that as the great wave advances the Roman
Catholic Church, for all its universality, will not be so much
as dashed by the spray. If there is a Catholic movement at all,
and we possess the essentials of Catholicity some of them, at
least, Dr. Percival will not deny us why, we ask, are we ex-
cluded from a share in the Catholic renascence ? and why, to
use words that are doubtless dear to our author, is the largest
and most venerable of all the Catholic " branches," which has
stood firm amid the storms of ages of heresy, to fall prostrate
in decay when the storms have ceased, and when the fresh sap
of undivided Christianity is flowing through every fibre of the
Tree Universal? We should have thought that Mr. Percival's
logical sense perhaps it would be harsh to say his " common "
sense would discover the extreme discomfort of balancing be-
tween the two members of such a position, whatever be his
possible skill as a funambulist. Then there is the verdict of
history which might have enlightened him. Whatever of con-
solation a future Catholic movement may bring to Anglicans,
they certainly cannot regard the last one with much assurance.
Indeed, there are grave reasons for doubting whether, if the
new reaction is going to be at all like Tractarianism, Anglican-
ism can make shift to survive it.

HOLES IN THE ANGLICAN ARGUMENT.

Of course our author would strip the church of the reverence
the world pays it. He would turn history on end, and make
Canterbury instead of Rome the abode of whatever is primi-
tive and venerable in the designation "Catholic." He would
reverse the large historical judgment of mankind, which sees
every page of the annals of Christian Europe stamped as
plainly as is every product of Christian art with the spirit and
the faith of Rome, and of Catholicity as Rome understands it.
He would make the august dynasty of Peter but a shadow ;

148 " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION." [Nov.,

and the reality Tudor, Stuart, Hanover, Victoria that is, and
Albert Edward that is to be or such Privy Councils and
Courts of Arches as may be their delegates if another Gorham
should come to judgment. It is to be expected that he should
reproach the religious Pax Romana as stagnation of spirit, and
the church's Sacramentum unitatis as a Vatican and Tridentine
tyranny ; and should bid us come to Britain or to Anglican
America if we seek the true, soul-satisfying concord of the new
Christian commonwealth. But the world has eyes that see and
a mind that thinks, and before it heeds the pretensions or ac-
cepts the invitation of Anglicanism, it will require straightfor-
ward answers to one or two grave and far-reaching questions.
Why, for example, is the history of present-day Church-of-Eng-
landism, as written in almost every number of the great secular
reviews and by its most loyal adherents, a record of irrepressi-
ble anxiety, heartsickness, and protest ? And why does the
Establishment present to-day a spectacle so scandalously dis-
cordant that the dissenting sects in every one of their headless
fragments are rubbing their hands in gratulation thereat, when
they are not extending them in token of half-sincere and half-
mocking fellowship ? Let churchmen brush aside these, and
other questions like them, as they will, in the fond pursuit of
Anglican unity and Catholicity. Less easily satisfied religious
and inquiring minds, at any rate, will insist upon thorough an-
swers to them before they will dream of handing over the
pledge of their allegiance. Anglican appeals for converts then,
appeals like the one we are now reviewing, will fail of any
power to convince or move, and will be lacking in the very
essential of the argument they aim to construct, so long as
they prove not, I do not say the superiority of Anglicanism to
Rome by formal and fair comparison, but, at the very least,
that Episcopalianism is or can be securely safeguarded against
the very inconveniences the world is deserting Protestantism to
escape.

THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED.

But this brings us fairly in front of the chief question we
are to treat. It may be stated thus : What right has Angli-
canism to claim any share in the coming religious reaction ?
What are the credentials that justify its appeal to >the Catho-
lic-inclined dissenter and unbeliever? What rest of heart and
satisfaction of mind does it promise, and what immunity from
the vital weaknesses of rejected Protestantism ? The reasons

1899-] " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION'' 149

are obvious enough why Protestantism is rejected. Protestants
are sick of their incurable schisms. They want unity ; unity in
doctrine, in ritual, in government. They are starved for sacra-
mental sustenance. They crave the comfort of religious solidar-
ity. They long for the true communion of saints, fellowship
with the Christian past, a world-brotherhood in the present,
and, if they could but read the impulse, fraternity with the
church triumphant. And deeper than all these, indeed the
security and support of all these, they want a teaching church
whose voice shall be the unhesitating utterance of the -mind
and will of God. Dr. Percival himself says : " On every side
men are feeling the emptiness of a religion which rests upon
no external witness, and upon nothing more stable than the
shifting sands of private judgment."

What, to all these needs, is the relief brought by Anglican-
ism ? The question is of a fact and a principle. Does the
Anglican Church in reality satisfy these religious necessities ?
What is the principle on which it will and must continue to do
so ? Or if it does not satisfy them, why is this ? and to what
principle that gives certain promise of relief may it appeal?

THE TRUE CHURCH SELF-CONSCIOUS OF ITS TRUTH.

Converts to the Catholic Church tell us often that next td
the feeling of " reality and certainty " which Cardinal Manning
says is the chief joy of a new convert comes the broad and
deep delight of brotherhood with all times and with all the
world. Coming from the sects, which are so narrow in their
horizon, and so piteous in their eagerness to be recognized by
one another, and to hold hands now and then in a show of
ephemeral unity, their souls enjoy keenly the large pleasure
of fellowship in the Domus Dei. They see the world of the
faithful, not setting themselves up as lords of the church, but
flocking to her as children to be corrected, advised, and in-
structed. They see the world outside, however hostile, giving
unsought acknowledgment to her universality and unity and
age. But whether the faithful come to her, or the spirit of
the world oppress her, the church is for ever majestic in
the consciousness, the sublime egotism we may call it, that she
is of God. It cannot be denied that the church has suffered
much, in the estimation of human prudence, by her steadfast re-
fusal to share in any and all associations which would in the
smallest measure compromise her claims or lessen the least of
her prerogatives. This sovereign self-respect may not directly

150 " 7 'HE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION:' [Nov.,

be a proof of the divinity of the church, but it is exactly what
we should look for if she is divine, and it is certainly a dem-
onstration of her sincerity in making her exclusive claims.
And a self-consciousness and a sincerity of this kind are
precisely what the Catholic inclined seeker is in search of. He
looks for the very opposite of the sects he has abandoned,
and will not rest satisfied until he has found it God's imperial
witness to his independent truth.

Is such a satisfaction to be found in Anglicanism ? In
answer we think it not too much to say that nothing has sur-
passed the shame felt by High-Churchmen over their church's
practical plea for Protestant fellowship, except possibly it be
their chagrin at the regularity with which similar appeals for
Catholic friendship Roman, Russian, Greek, or Jansenistic
have been always sooner or later repudiated. The following
burning passage is taken from a work written as an apology
;lor the Church of England.* It is perhaps the last warning
uttered by its rarely-gifted author to the church he had long
and loyally served, before the mandate of his conscience com-
pelled him to leave it :

" Farewell indeed to any true defence of the Church of
England, any hope of her being built up once more to an
Apostolic beauty and glory, of recovering her lost discipline
and intercommunion with Christendom, if she is by any act of
her rulers to be mixed up with the followers of Luther, Calvin,
or Zwingli. . . .If the Jerusalem bishopric, the still-born
offspring of an illicit connection, ... be the commence-
ment of a course of amalgamation with the Lutheran or
Calvinistic heresy, who that values the authority of the ancient
undivided church will not feel his allegiance to our own branch
of it fearfully shaken?"

Need we recall other examples of the Church of Eng-
land's subservience and humiliation later than the Jerusalem
bishopric ? Need we more than allude to Dr. Creighton's readi-
ness to allow Calvinists and Lutherans to receive the Com-
munion in Anglican churches on the Continent ? to the rejection
of Anglican orders by the Old Catholics, on the ground of
Lutheranism-infected formularies and inadequate intention? to
a similar rejection by the Dutch Jansenists in 1873 and 1894?
and, finally, to the crushing " Apostolicse Curse" in 1896. Or
need we delay upon that other subservience which is big with
elements of destruction subservience to the state? It is the

* The Church of England cleared from Schism. By T. W. Allies.

1899-] " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION:' 151

confession of Anglicans themselves,* that the spirit of Erastian-
ism has been growing steadily in recent times, especially since
Archbishop Tait, and is to-day fastened firmly upon the whole
Establishment. Indeed, to one judging from without, nothing is
more natural than that a church which began with the Crown
conferring jurisdiction upon its proto-prelate, who could not
have received it from his consecrators since they had none
themselves ; with Queen Elizabeth suspending Bishop Grindal,
Parker's successor ; with the appeal to her majesty for his
restoration of twelve of his suffragans an appeal in which
we read: "Nos quos ecclesiae gubernationi praefecisti " "We
whom you have appointed to rule the church " ; with Charles
the First absolving from canonical suspension an archbishop
who had accidentally killed a man f ; with such beginnings,
nothing is more natural, we say, than that we should hear in
our own times an Earl of Selborne declare, in the House of
Lords, that gifts made to the English Church are presents to
the English state; or that there should be formed among
churchmen who are heartsick at such a condition of things an
association J " which aims at extirpating, cutting up, destroy-
ing, and annihilating the deadly plant of Erastianism* which
has for three centuries and a half well-nigh smothered the
spiritual life of the Church of England. " This is hardly the
portrayal of the world-church the Christianity of the future
will demand. Hardly the fulfilment of the conditions we have
sketched for the new Catholic consolidation, this dependent
church, that by her own acts implies fragmentariness, not only
numerical but doctrinal ; and betrays by her willingness to
consort with acknowledged heresy a fatal lack of conviction
that she herself is orthodox.

IS ANGLICANISM PROTESTANT OR CATHOLIC?

Still there is a graver question to consider. Is it the worst
fault of Anglicanism merely that it does not deport itself as a
divinely-commissioned guardian of religious truth and doctrinal
integrity should? or is it amenable to the charge of throwing
aside that truth and mutilating that integrity? If such a

- * F. G. Lee in Nineteenth Century for November, 1898.

t Although this decree of the king was through the medium of a commission of bishops,
nevertheless we read therein that the restoration of Archbishop Abbot was effected, "ex
auctoritate nostra regia suprema et ecclesiastica qua fungimur " " by virtue of our supreme
royal and ecclesiastical authority."

\ The Order of Corporate Reunion, founded September 8, 1877.

From The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, by J. W. Mossman.

152 " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION" [Nov.,

charge be proved, then does the future hold out to Episco-
palianism no more than it does to the other sects whose pro-
gress in rejecting supernatural truth has brought them in our
day to the very threshold of naturalism and infidelity. Whether
it can be proved, let us examine what has been and is now
taking place within the Establishment.

Let us imagine a convert to Anglicanism fresh from dissent
and under the spell of his first Catholic enthusiasm. Devoted
ardently to those " doctrines and practices of the church which
had been lost sight of at the Protestant Reformation " and
captivated by " the ceremonialism of a former age,'* toward
both of which Dr. Percival says the religious world is moving,
it will not be too much to conceive him as holding without a
suggestion of doubt the old orthodox doctrine as to baptism ;
as cherishing warmly a belief in the Real Presence and a love
for the solemn ritual that naturally follows from such a faith ;
as strongly inclined toward confession and trust in the efficacy
of absolution ; as never dreaming that on such a matter as
matrimony the very respectability of the Establishment would
tolerate any but the most rigid Roman views ; and finally, as
resting in the secure confidence that his new religion is the
temple of primitive purity, unassailable apostolicity, and a unity
beyond human power to infringe.

Now what, we wish some Anglican apologist would answer,
will be the feelings of such a man, and how will he derive from
his neo-Catholicism the peace that Dr. Percival and others pro-
mise him, when within, let us say, a week of his conversion
he hears a Broad-Churchman deny that by virtue of baptism
there is any new birth from sin to grace ; from nature fallen
in Adam to nature restored by Christ? And what, pray, will
avert his consternation when he learns that in a solemn ad-
judication of the question in 1850 it was decided against the
Bishop of Exeter that a beneficed clergyman of the Church of
England might, if it so pleased him, reject the Catholic position ?
Or our convert has taken up a secular review and read therein
with sympathy Lord Halifax's urging of Reservation of the
Sacrament and his plea for prayers for the dead as practices
conformable to antiquity.* And behold in the very next
number of the same magazine appears a violent improbation
of the Mass and everything Roman by a fellow-churchman who
attacks violently those who are made conspicuous by " their
postures, their vestments, and their priestly pretensions " ; the

* Nineteenth Century, February, 1899.

1899-] " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 153

whole thing ending up with the bewildering : " (The English
Church) is Catholic because she is so truly Protestant ; she is
Protestant because she is so truly Catholic."* Or let him read,
in a charge of Archbishop Temple regarding the Eucharist,
that Anglicans may hold Consubstantiation but by no means
Transubstantiation ; and then chance upon a fraternal critic
of his grace who will inform him that " the doctrine of the
Anglican articles has not only no affinity with, but stands
in direct and formal opposition to that of the Greek and
Roman churches while if anything can be affirmed with cer-
tainty regarding the Anglican articles on the Supper, it is that
they stand in the closest relation to the Reformed or Calvinistic
view and were shaped under its direct influence"; concluding
with : " If the literal sense of the words of institution be
pressed, we are bound to say that it is the Romanist, not the
archbishop who has the balance of reason on his side." This
after Dr. Pusey's assertion that fundamentally the Roman and
Anglican faith in the Eucharist is one and the same, and that
" no words could express more exactly the faith of those who
believe in the Real Presence than the language of the Council
of Trent." f

Need we follow our neophyte further in the perplexity that
at every step more hopelessly involves him? Need we try to
portray his stupefaction at the almost daily letters in the
Times during the past six months or a year? Or imagine him
in St. Ethelburga's Church with a " mass " celebrating at the
altar and John Kensit, a devout parishioner, protesting in the
arms of a policeman, by Luther's sacred name, against this
Papal worship in the Church of England? Why need we
speak of orthodoxy and unity with the great Lightfoot of
Durham holding the episcopal office to be a human growth of
the second century and with Bishop Wordsworth of St.
Andrew's vigorously remonstrating; \ with Pusey warmly advo-
cating confession ; with Gladstone's famous tribute to the
practice in his review of Lady Fullerton's Ellen Middleton ;
with a well-known Ritualist's defiance: " So long as there re-
mains a priest and a penitent, and the two are not imprisoned
under Privy Council Order in separate cells, so long sin will be
acknowledged and forgiveness obtained "; and, on the other

* Idem, March, 1899. The author of this article is one R. Bosworth Smith.

f Professor James Orr, Contemporary Review, December, 1898.

\ Is Healthful Reunion Possible ? pp. 78-90.

F. G. Lee, Nineteenth Century, November, 1898.

"THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION'' [Nov.,

hand, with a coarse Broad-Churchman styling the confessional
"the most insidious and the most deleterious and the most
emasculating of all Roman ordinances " ; * with Archbishop
Tait proclaiming in Convocation : " We do not there is not
a soul in this room who does take the concluding clauses of
the Athanasian creed in their plain and literal sense " ; f with
King, Bishop of Lincoln, saying : " I am unable to accept the
conclusions of those who would make marriage absolutely indis-
soluble";:}: with Lord Halifax complaining: "In theory, the
appeal which the Church of England makes to primitive be-
lief and Apostolic practice may no doubt be sustained; in
fact, nothing can be less like primitive belief and Apostolic
practice than the whole religious attitude of a very large pro-
portion of her members an attitude, be it noted, which is not
merely unwillingly acquiesced in, but is complacently accepted
as the normal state of things by the ecclesiastical authorities
themselves," (Nineteenth Century, February, 1899); and finally,
with Dr. Percival himself confessing: "Who but a handful
among old-fashioned Tractarians considers himself bound to
accept the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England"?

Surely after this it is superfluous to speak of disciplinary
unity or lack of it; to recall how Church Defence Societies
are springing up all over England, with Kensit and Harcourt
to .vociferate them into anti-Roman passion ; and, on the other
side, how an Order of Corporate Reunion daily recites the
prayer of Pope Gregory XVI. for Christian Unity, and recom-
mends to Anglicans the use of the crucifix, the sign of the
cross, and daily suffrages for departed souls. Neither need we
delay upon the two hundred and twenty recalcitrant clergymen
who met at Holborn on the occasion of an anti-Ritualistic pro-
nouncement by the bishops and resolved " faithfully to dis-
obey " their lordships' legislation. All point in the same direc-
tion, to hopeless diversity and incurable schism. Incurable,
that is to say, unless some such measure be put in operation
as has been suggested by a namesake of the writer we are now
reviewing ; namely, that a " carefully regulated local option "
be introduced whereby a majority vote of every Anglican con-
gregation shall decide on the manner of ritual to be there ob-
served the doctrine preached to be in harmony, of course
the " result of the ballot to hold for at least one calendar
month."

* R. Bosworth Smith, Idem, March, 1899.
f Quoted in The Guardian, February 14, 1872. \ Guardian, November 27, 1895.

1899-] " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION" 155

Will a church like this make men believe that it is the
abode of Catholic unity, the house of religious peace, and
the sole legatee of the austere orthodoxy of primitive Chris-
tendom ? And we submit that in our inquiry we have not been
unfair or finical. We have neither exaggerated accidental into
essential differences, nor placed ourselves while examining dis-
puted articles in a false and distorting view-point. Our con-
sideration has been of no doctrines save those that lie at the
very root of revealed religion or are associated inseparably with
the name of Catholic ; and the strongest expressions we have
permitted ourselves to use have been borrowed from loyal
Anglicans themselves.

Now, if we do not mistake the value of what these latter
have confessed rather than we have demonstrated, these con-
elusions are not unwarrantably drawn therefrom :

1. True Catholic unitj^, and that on essential matters if there
are any such, is as undiscoverable in Anglicanism as in the
Protestant sects themselves.

2. Doctrines which the whole world considers to be in-
separably Catholic seem hardly more safeguarded in Angli-
canism than in the formularies of half-Christian denominations.

3. The sacramental idea is so widely perverted and darkly
perceived by Anglican religious teachers, that those to whom
sacraments are administered cannot possibly derive from them
the certainty of grace and consolation which Catholic belief has
always associated with these sacred functions.

4. The schisms, the vagaries of doctrine and worship, and
even the un-Christian opinions which exist in Anglicanism, are
known and tolerated and often approved in one or another
way by the appointed guides and leaders of the Establishment.

THE QUESTION OF PRINCIPLE.

Our investigation here need not be long. If the divisions,
and, in Catholic judgment, the heretical errors, permitted in
Episcopalianism are so varied and so vital, any theory or prin-
ciple of that sect, for either securing unity or insuring doc-
trinal integrity, is antecedently discredited. Indeed, it takes
the hardihood of heroism itself for an Anglican serenely to set
before the world principles which will make unity a reality
and heresy impossible. In this connection we wonder whether
we are harsh in recollecting certain phrases applied by Dr.
Percival to Protestant teachers in our day : " Its (Protestant-
ism's) professors are for the most part able to continue in its

156 " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION:' [Nov.,

ministry only through some device of casuistry, which in any
other matter would be considered by themselves, as in their
case it is by almost every one except themselves, dishonest and
dishonorable."

Still, such principles are proposed, and we must cast at least
a glance at them. The great thing to reach, says Dr. Percival,
is the " Catholicism of primitive prelacy." But surely the
burning question is, not who can praise the primitive church
loudest, but how to be sure that we have gotten, and how to
be certain that we can retain the Apostolic purity of doctrine.
Private judgment is already out of court. What, then, shall be
the means? " Keep on appealing," Dr. Percival would seem to
say, for he urges "our spiritual rulers boldly to claim all this
(i.e., primitive truth) for the English Church, and all the Eng-
lish-speaking peoples will flock to her. The one weak point,
the one thing that hinders them from doing so now, is the
uncertainty of the voice of those who are orthodox." But we
may be permitted to doubt whether vociferation will ever endure
for long as a rule of faith proximate or remote. Besides,
what of those churchmen who see no special sanctity in the
church of the second century over that of the nineteenth ?
Dr. Percival may advise return " to the Church of the Ecu-
menical Councils," but Dean Farrar would tell him : " Our own
church expressly warns us that general councils may err and
have erred even in things pertaining to God."* Alas! there
are only thorns and boulders in the way of the heartsick
churchman in his weary trudge for something truly and ad-
mittedly Catholic within his essentially un-Catholic domain.

Dean Farrar himself, in the work just quoted, lends a hand
to the difficulty. Unity requires belief in essentials. Those
doctrines must be held as essential to Christianity, he says in
substance, which the great divisions of the Christian family
are unanimous in admitting. But if, in the development of be-
lief, one or more of these great religious teachers were to
reject an article previously held by all, by that very fact this
article, once essential, would cease to be any longer so. Ac-
cordingly, what is to be believed in tc-day as essential Chris-
tianity, may not have been believed yesterday, and may cease
to be believed to-morrow. In other words, we may find

" To-day's eternal truth to-morrow proved
Frail as frost landscapes on a window-pane "; f

* The Bible, by Dean Farrar, p. 33.

f " The Cathedral," James Russell Lowell.

1899-] " THE FUTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION'' 157

and we might venture the definition : The essential doctrines
of Christianity are those which have been, which are, which
will be held and taught by the great Christian churches, or
which might, could, should, or would have been so held and
taught ! Well may the keen sarcasm of Mr. Mallock suggest
to the dean the question : Why then, on your grounds, is Mr.
Taylor of Norwich to be in the leastwise blamed or ridiculed
for professing himself a neo-Platonist, and sacrificing an ox to
great Jove?

How long will the world be detained by a Catholicism and
by Catholic principles like these ? How long before it discov-
ers that, save for the name, it will find there the Protestantism
it is ready to desert ? And how long before it will follow the
very cream of Episcopalianism itself and flock to the unchang-
ing and unshifting church which is not afraid to proclaim its
exclusive truth and its inerrant magisterium in proposing God's
word to men ? Not long, we cannot doubt. The world will
soon perceive the luminous truth, spoken by the acute mind we
have just now named, that it is impossible to imagine a more
complete reductio ad absurdum than such rules of faith as Dean
Farrar proposes, once the fundamental postulate of Roman
Catholicism has been removed from them.

158 " BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL:' [Nov.,

' BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL."

'S the train began to pull out of the station an old,
white-haired negro hurried across the platform
and swung himself on the rear car. He was very
black and very dusty, and the individual occu-
pants of seats looked a little apprehensive as he
shuffled diffidently through the car. But he did not offer to
sit down. When he reached the opposite end he took hold of
a seat to steady himself and gazed around curiously /his big,
wondering eyes roving from face to face with the eager intent-
ness of a child. Evidently he was tired, very tired> for his
shoulders began to slope and every few minutes he shifted his
feet as though they hurt him.

At last a young man lowered his newspaper.

"Here is a seat, uncle," he called. "You look tired."

The negro shuffled forward eagerly.

"Yes, sah ; t'ank yo', sah ! " he, said gratefully as he sank
down. " I 'se plumb beat. Done walk mons'rous long way dis
yer mawnin'. Yo' see," as the young man folded his paper
and slipped it into his pocket, " Marse Henery an* me lib ober
in Prince George County, an* larst week Marse Henery he up
an' die. Dat lef me by myse'f."

"I see. And you are going South to look for work."

"No, sah! Coin' back home goin' back ter ole Georgy."
Into his eyes came a look of eager expectation, and he stroked
the back of the seat softly, as though it was his old home in
far-away Georgia.

"I ain't been dar in mos' thutty year," he went on, slowly;
" not sense de Linkum men tuk we all's niggers. Dar war a
whole passle ob 'em, but dey all done bruk away. Den de
sheriff sol' de plantation, an* dar wa'n't nutten lef we all but
de Norf. We bleeged ter hab money ter lib."

"And you stuck by Marse Henery?"

The old negro looked at him in surprise.

" Ob co'se," he answered, simply. " I 'se de body sarbent,
an' Marse Henery couldn* git 'long 'thout me. He 's a gen'le-
man, an' 'pended on bein' tuk car* ob. But I 'se bleeged ter
be 'way in de day-time, ca'se I 'se a cyarpenter an' stone-mason,
an' allers hab plenty wuk."

1899-] "BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL" 159

"What did Marse Henery do?"

" Marse Henery?" indignantly. "Why, he's gen'leman, I
tells yo' ! He ain't do nutten ! He ain't nebber learn do
t'ings like common w'ite fo'ks. He hab niggers for dat."

"You don't mean to say that you have supported him ever
since the war? "

The old negro drew himself up with unconscious dignity.

"Yo' goin' talk like dat I ain't nutten mo' t' say."

" I beg your pardon," said the young man hastily. " Please
go on." The black face relaxed.

" Yo' ain't know Marse Henery," commiseratingly, "so yo'
don' un'stan*. Ob co'se I wuk for him ! Ain't he car' for me
befo' de wah? What niggers good for but work, I like know."

A boy came through the car with a basket of sandwiches.
The young man bought two and handed them to his com-
panion. The old negro's eyes glistened.

"T'ank yo', massa ! t'ank yo', sah ! " he said gratefully. "I
didn' hab no breakfas', an' money 's too skase ter buy t'ings
on de road. I war 'lowin' ter fill up arter I done reach Georgy."

A few minutes later there was a slight ripple through the
car. The conductor had entered and was calling for tickets.

The young man produced his and held it in readiness. The
negro fumbled anxiously through several pockets, and finally
remembered that he had pinned his to his hat-lining.

" Done tuk ebery cent I could scrape up ter buy dat," he
said, triumphantly, as he produced it. "But das all right! I
kin wuk, an' fo'ks don' need money w'en dey 's home. Money's
for trabblin'."

In the seat behind them was a shabbily dressed woman
whose face had an anxious, frightened expression. Crowded on
the seat beside her were several bundles, and in her arms was
a white-faced, big-eyed baby. When the conductor touched
her shoulder she started uneasily. " Ticket, please."

A red flush of shame spread over her face ; then it disap-
peared, leaving her white and dogged. " I haven't any."

The conductor grew stern. " Very well. If you get off at
the next station it will save us the trouble of putting you off,"
and he turned to the opposite seat.

The woman's eyes grew big with terror as she sprang up
and caught him by the arm.

"Don't do that, sir! For God's sake don't put me off!"
she implored, hoarsely. " I've got to go ! My husband has
written for me to come. If there was time I would walk ; but

160 "BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL" [Nov.,

he's he's dying"; and a great sob rose to her white lips, but
was resolutely choked back. " I tried to raise money," lower-
ing her voice so the other passengers could not hear, " but I
couldn't. 'We sold everything we had so he could go South,
as the doctor ordered. And now he 's he 's oh, my God ! my
God ! " She raised her arms despairingly and sank weakly
back into her seat.

" Where do you wish to go?" asked the conductor, kindly.

" Thomasville, Georgia." The old negro started.

"Why, dat 's my place, and this ticket will take her," he
whispered to the young man.

" I 'm sorry, madam," the conductor said, after a slight hesi-
tation, "but I can do nothing. We have but one rule. You
must pay or get off. I 'm a poor man myself, and can't risk
breaking the rules. I might lose my situation. Ticket, please."

The negro hung his head.

" I'se 'feared yo '11 hab ter put me off too, boss," he said,
humbly. "I'se got sebenty-two cents. If dat '11 count for any-
t'ing- "

" Off at the next station ! " broke in the conductor, harshly.
"We'll be there in a couple of minutes now. If it wasn't so
near I 'd stop the train and put you off. This poor woman has
some excuse, but you bah ! " The young man was about to
make a protest, but something in his companion's face re-
strained him.

Before the conductor reached the end of the car the speed
began to slacken. The old negro arose.

" Reckon I 'd better be leabin'," he said to the young man.
" T'ank yo' ag'in for de san'wiches, an' I hopes yo '11 'member
me kin'ly. Here, missy," turning to the woman, who was gaz-
ing stonily from the window, and dropping his ticket into her
lap, "here 's yo' ticket. I reckon yo' done drap hit " ; and be-
fore she could realize the meaning of his action he had shuffled
half way to the door.

The young man rose as though he would call him back ;
then he seemed to think better of it, for he sat down and
gazed moodily from the window. Perhaps he was thinking of
his long journey and the dear ones depending on him. Possi-
bly he remembered that his own pocket-book was in nearly as
bad condition as the negro's. When the train began to move
slowly from the station he once more unfolded his newspaper,
but the woman behind him noticed that he was holding it
upside down.

MILITARY ROAD BETWEEN SAN JUAN AND PONCE.

PORTO RICO AND THE PORTORICANS.

BY MARK W. HARRINGTON.

fHE sunny seas that lie between our ports and
those of Porto Rico are much more peaceful
than the stormy ocean which lies between
America and the Old World. The writer's
voyage took him last October, just before the
transfer from Spanish to American hands, to the southern
port of Ponce, a busy, open roadstead, one of the poorest,
though perhaps the busiest, of the island. The town is thor-
oughly tropical in appearance, with low, open houses, abun-
dance of gardens, and moist, shaded streets. The capital, San
Juan, next in size to Ponce and on the other side of the
island, has distinctly the appearance of a south- European city,
with high walls and buildings tall and compact. Indeed, the
appearance is almost Syrian, for the roofs rise tier above tier
and are flat and much used by the inhabitants. The distance
between the two principal towns by the fine military road is
about eighty miles, and this distance we travelled a few days
VOL. LXX. ii

162

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICAKS.

[Nov.,

later by carriage in sixteen hours. The ride was a most charm-
ing one, and left the impression of both the picturesqueness of
nature and the gentleness of human kind which a journey
through Japan would give twenty years ago. But this is not
so much a journal of a six months' residence in Porto Rico
as it is. a summary view of the island and its inhabitants,
taken from personal observation and experience; with reference
to giving some idea of the character of the island as a possible
territory of the United States, and of the Portoricans as citizens.
This island is now American and it must remain American
for ever, and its history will make the first effective test of
the capacity of tlie United States to absorb other states or
races without harm to itself and with benefit to the state ab-
sorbed. The experiment has been tried several times already,
but the territories absorbed heretofore have in no case carried
a heavy population, while Porto Rico is the most densely

THE STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE IN PORTO Rico.

populated rural area in the two Americas, and one of the
densest in the world. Over an area of forty miles or so in
breadth by about one hundred in length there are distributed
nearly a million people, generally in the rural districts, never

1 8 9 9-]

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

163

in towns of more than forty thousand people, giving a density
of about two hundred and twenty-five to the square mile.
This very dense population, consisting of Spanish, Indians,
and negroes descendants respectively of the invaders, aborigi-
nes, and slaves are now to be made good citizens of the

STREET SCENE IN PONCE.

United States, for under no other condition can we hold them.
The island itself offers a splendid opportunity for high
prosperity for a people as bright, expansive, and genial as are
the Portoricans of the present day. The West Indies are the
higher parts, exposed above water, of a submerged mountain
range, forked toward the west, and extensively volcanic in
character except precisely in Porto Rico, where the fork
begins. This island has the deepest known waters of the At-
lantic just to the north, and very deep waters for the Carib-
bean to the south. It is an enormous mountain, massive in
character, entirely under water except for the uppermost fif-
teen hundred feet or so, with an expanded, flattened top,
which has been cut down to near sea-level by innumerable
streams, leaving the surface in small table-lands and ridges,
separated from each other by narrow, deep valleys, and from
the sea by relatively small alluvial plains. This complex of

164

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

[Nov.,

hills and low mountains is freshened and kept wholesome by
the perpetual eastern trade-wind and is bathed by abundant
rains, except in certain sheltered areas lying to the windward
of the elevations, where the rains are scanty, and may from
time to time cease for a year or more.

Within this area, smaller than any State of the Union ex-
cept Rhode Island, there is every possible variation of tropical
climate from very wet to very dry, and from sea-level to an

CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF MONTSERRAT.

elevation of three thousand feet or more. The climate is as
favorable a one as the tropics afford, for the island lies just
within the tropic, and being at the outermost bend or knee of
the chain of the West Indies, it offers free and uninterrupted
access to the refreshing trade-wind ; but it has the serious
drawbacks of a tropical climate ; always unfavorable for people
from the temperate zone, and especially unfavorable, as history
shows, to the great race called Anglo-Saxon, to which Ameri-
cans generally belong. It has no endemic yellow fever, but it

1 899.]

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

165

has serious malarias of its own, and the much-feared fever of
the West Indies may on favorable opportunity gain a foot-
hold there when it rages as a serious plague, extending its

1 66

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

[Nov.,

ravages to the highest and most temperate parts of the island.
White frost is a sharp and summary cure for yellow fever, but
this elegant form of crystallized dew never occurs on this
great island, so mild are its lowest temperatures. The winters
are almost perfection in climate, though a little dry, for the

INTERIOR DECORATIONS OF A CHURCH.

winter is the principal dry season of the island ; but the sum-
mers are hot and enervating, and the heats in the more arid
southern and western slopes in summer can probably not be
surpassed in the United States except in the terrible Mojave
desert in Southern California. The endemic diseases of the
island are numerous, but not especially serious. The chief
disease for the immigrant is the relaxation and enervation
caused by the continued hot weather of summer, when the
night temperatures under cover may not for weeks together fall
five degrees below those of the day in the shade, nor lower
than eighty degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. This uninter-
rupted high temperature tends to moral disease in indolence
and self-indulgence, and to physical disease in disorders of the
excretory organs, or the liver and the kidneys, and to the
lowering of the nervous tone until the resident becomes very

1899-] PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

167

:^jjm M^

CHURCH OF ST. JOSEPH, SAN JUAN, HIT BY SAMPSON'S GUNS. THE REMAINS OF PONCE
DE LEON ARE SAID, BY WASHINGTON IRVING, TO REST HERE.

delicate and easily rendered ill by things which in the tonic
temperate zone would not affect him. A slight indiscretion in
food, drink, or exposure, entirely without significance in higher
latitudes, may cause illness in the tropics, occasioning an access
of catarrh or attack of pneumonia, or a general form of low
fever attributed to malaria.

The island is perpetually clothed with vivid green, and is
the truest emerald isle that the United States possesses. Rocks

1 68

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

[Nov.,

are rarely visible, for a rich and luxurant vegetation covers the
face of nature and the frequent washings by the rains keeps the
green fresh and bright. The ancient wild nature has perhaps
completely disappeared, for the island has been densely popu-
lated for at least four hundred years, and probably longer by
some centuries. The largest wild quadruped which I saw in
my six months of residence there was a ground squirrel. Re-
ports of larger animals, as wild rabbits and hogs, are sometimes
made, but they probably refer simply to refugees from civil-
ization. One would think that the magnificent cattle of Spanish
breeds or the small ponies of native race would sometimes take
the same course to escape the cruelties of their masters, for
they are treated with greater lack of consideration than are
our own beasts of burden in the great North in that they are
driven almost to collapse, and prodded with iron goads until

THE ARECIBO WATER SUPPLY.

the surface of the haunches is a mass of abscesses ; but as a
matter of fact no wild cattle or horses are reported.

Nor is there room for bands of wild creatures of any size,
for the island's surface has been cultivated to the last cultiva-

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

169

ble inch over and over again, and genuine wild tracts of any
magnitude are unknown. Even the steep slopes are often cul-
tivated, and men are seen hoeing where the plough could not

CHURCH OF OUR LADY OF GUADELOUPE ; ABOUT THREE HUNDRED YEARS OLD.

run and where a loosened rock rolls down the declivity hun-
dreds of feet, and the hoeing goes on at the level of the head.
In the roughest regions one comes unexpectedly on houses
and huts perched in every nook and at spots apparently inac-
cessible, and the places which at a distance appear to be
virgin forest are found on near approach to be ploughed fields
relapsed, with perhaps the marks of the furrows still under the
trees, or to be in actual high cultivation, for several of the
crops in Porto Rico, as coffee and cacao, are grown under
the shade of forest trees. There are no dangerous land ani-
mals in the country greater than a large spider or .a small
scorpion.

It is a garden spot for the cultivator who understands
tropical agriculture. The soil is not of superior quality, but
the sunshine and the frequent brief showers would bring crops

I/O

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

[Nov.,

on the most barren soil with slight care. Though there are
several wet and dry seasons through the year, some of which
are more favorable than others each for its own crop, there is
no time or season when a crop cannot be planted or harvested.
There are few if any crops that have but one harvest a year,
most have two, some three, four, or even more, and there is a
series of cuarentanas, or forty-day crops, which can be har-
vested at short intervals throughout the year. By the methods

AT THE MARKET OF SAN JUAN.

of the market-gardener most products could be made to give
a continuous crop from one end of the year to the other. The
island could be made, with very srrall effort, the market-gar-
den for the cities of the great North, for there lie between
San Juan and New York only five days of ocean travel, and
to Baltimore or Wilmington, North Carolina, only four, and
during this transit the products remain undisturbed in the
steamer's hold, where cold storage or other arts of conservation
can be easily applied. The whole series of tropical and sub-
tropical products could thus be delivered at Northern ports at
any season of the year, and in a condition almost as fresh as
in the markets of Porto Rico.

1 8 9 9-]

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

171

The cheapest contribution which Porto Rico could make to
the food of our poor in the great cities of the North is its
tubers and other root crops. The whole series of underground
crops, as potatoes, yams, batatas, and many others not less
important but unfamiliar, with names often of Indian origin
and changing from district to district, are produced there in
the greatest abundance and at a cost so insignificant as to be
fairly incredible. A cent could feed a man a day on these
not-to-be despised sources of nourishment, as they are sold in
the markets of the island. The cost would be enhanced in
New York, but even there it would probably cost not a third

A STREET IN GUANICA.

what the cheapest day's nourishment now costs. This is the
opportunity God gives us to alleviate the poverty of cur great
Northern cities, and to contribute greatly to a wholesome
prosperity in our new possession, as yet not happily situated
economically.

The chief exports from this island are sugar, coffee, and
tobacco, and the United States is the chief customer, as heavy
import duties have been imposed cutting off the former large
Spanish trade. Nor is the trade with the United States im-
proved or favored ; for, though Porto Rico is now our own,
the bar of our import duties is still up for her, and she has
not yet been admitted to the unrestricted trade with us on

172

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

[Nov.,

CHURCH AT GUAYAMA.

which she counted to gain some prosperity when she gave her-
self into our hands. Cut off from the old commerce and not
yet admitted to the new, she is in far worse commercial con-
dition than before, and her whole series of industries suffers,
but chiefly the staples. Tobacco suffers less because of almost
universal local consumption which gives it a large market at
home, but the sugar and coffee industries, not very profitable
there at the best, are now threatened with bankruptcy and ruin.
Spain has never been much given to publishing informa-
tion about her colonial possessions, nor have the Spanish pub-
lications, such as they were, been known to the makers of the
ordinary text-books and encyclopaedias in English. The result
is that Porto Rico and the Portoricans were almost unknown
to Americans until the war, and are still little known except
to those who have lived among them. They have developed a
certain line of cultivation of their own, strikingly Spanish and
Catholic in character, yet possessing some native features of its
own, with its own authors, artists, and traditions. Its literature
is small but characteristic, and its own local development of the
arts and sciences is very creditable. It is in all these respects

8 9 9-]

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

173

distinctly better off than Cuba or the other Great Antilles, of
which it is the smallest.

The Spanish element now, in small part of Peninsular birth,
is largely of Andalusian origin and has the same bright, genial,
expansive, staccato character. They are most hospitable and
courteous, religious to a degree among the women, but gay and
fond of much speech and bright colors, generally swarthy in com-
plexion, rather small in stature, and not possessing overmuch of
the thriftiness which is a special trait of the Spanish and their
neighbors. They are clannish to a degree, but their fealty is now
transferred from the Peninsulars to the Americans, and they are
proud of their new, great Metropoli. They are highly musical, and
I have heard as brilliant instrumentation in a Portorican hcme in
a small native town as I have ever heard elsewhere off the stage.
They are of the artistic temperament, and are cultured to

HIGHWAY OVER STONE BRIDGE AT BAYAMON.

the highest point of civilization. With them is a considerable
number of Frenchmen, generally occupied with the production
of coffee, and a much smaller number of Germans and other
Europeans, usually devoted to commercial pursuits.

These people are in the towns and in the better country

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

[Nov.,

places, and are the leading class of the population. They are
true Portoricans, and love to call themselves Borinqueftos, from
the aboriginal name, Borinquen of the island. They form the
overwhelmingly leading political factor, though there are two
other races represented in great numbers. The one of most
interest is the Indio, or that of the descendants of the inhabi-

LA BELLES BORINQUENOS.

tants found on the island at its discovery and settlement.
They form the great mass of the country laborers over the
island, especially in the centre and the northeastern section.
They have much of the serious appearance of the North
American Indian, with his high cheek bones, but their color
is less red and more swarthy. They are inclined to keep to
themselves and especially not to mingle with the blacks, but
with the Spanish they have mingled freely. Tradition gives
them the right to the soil, and they are said to still observe
certain clannish and fraternal rites inherited from their ances-
tors. They know little of education and are generally mere
day laborers. The Africans or descendants of slaves imported
chiefly from the Guinea coast are very numerous and are mul-
tiplying rapidly probably more rapidly than the other classes ;

1 8 9 9-]

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

175

and they mix freely with all. They are often very bright,
ambitious, and self-educating. They form the poorest and
most indigent class on the island, but they are coming
ahead both in numbers and in education, and with them
the American government will have -much to do, for they
have very generally the idea that the blacks have not been
well treated in the States. An element of interest to the new-
comer, though of little political importance, is the considerable
number of blacks from the British West Indies who are found
in the coast towns, where they are likely to become the ser-
vants of Americans, both because they speak English and be-

PACKING AND BAGGING COFFEE.

cause they are very serious and honest, though not always
particularly moral.

The social conditions of the people are not good in many
cases. The poorer classes live in dark and unwholesome quar-
ters in the towns, and even in the country they contrive to
give a certain unwholesomeness to their huts by crowding,
dirt, and absence of windows. Wages are very low and the
facilities for education are much less satisfactory than appear

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICARS. [Nov.,

A PEON CABIN, BAYAMON.

on paper. The school-houses are ill- contrived and are not
large enough to give school facilities to one-quarter of the
children of school age. The system is supported by the state ;
but with abundant guarantees of perfection in the law, which
is one of the most elaborate school laws in existence, the
operation is so imperfect that the great public, the unknown
majority, is almost entirely dissatisfied with it. Under this sys-
tem they often do not want to be educated ; for the law requires
pupils to either pay for tuition, which they cannot afford, or to
get from an alcalde, or judge, a certificate of poverty, a thing
disagreeable in itself and causing, as is currently believed, the
pupil who brings it to be neglected and subjected to indignities.
The experiments of the Spanish in governing the island
had brought it to a high degree of prosperity when American
ideals intervened and a spirit of unrest took possession of it.
This caused an early attempt at Americanization, which was
summarily extinguished by the Spanish by several executions
on a field near San Juan, pointed out yet to Americans, though
the event took place over half a century ago. When Cuba

PORTO Rico AND THE PORTORICANS.

177

revolted Porto Rico remained loyal because she had to, not
because she wanted to. This burdened her with expendi-
tures for a considerable body of soldiers and sailors, mostly
from the Peninsula, and this burden fairly made her writhe
until she paid upwards of half her taxation for her own servi-
tude. Then she insisted on autonomy, when her burden be-
came greater, because she then had to support an army of her
own official selection and lost not the Spanish army in the
slightest, but rather increased it for reasons of state. She
welcomed the Americans with open arms and gave them her-
self and all she had, and now she is not quite content with
the change.

A PUBLIC SCHOOL.

VOL. LXX - 12

178 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

THE EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE
EUCHARIST.

BY DR. A. A. MULLER.

HE Anglican archbishops have been sitting in
Lambeth Palace listening to arguments on the
question of reservation of the Sacrament this
being the term by which what formerly was
called the sacrament of the " Lord's Supper "
has now come to be designated. This conference has a special
interest in the light of a weighty encyclical recently issued by
the Archbishop of Canterbury. One is so accustomed to vague-
ness in deliverances emanating from high Episcopal sources
that the plainness of this particular utterance comes as a sur-
prise, almost as a shock. His grace gives no uncertain sound.
Also, the conciliatory, " Catholic " tone apparent in the joint-
letter addressed by their graces, the archbishops of Canterbury
and of Yrk, to our Holy Father, in reply to the rescript
of the Holy See condemnatory of Anglican orders, is con-
spicuously wanting in this document ; mayhap because the
audience to be addressed was somewhat non-Catholic indeed,
prevailingly anti-Catholic ; whereas the "joint-letter" was in-
tended, partly for our Holy Father, but, we suppose, more
particularly for the benefit of those schismatical Eastern
bishops who had been drawn into some sort of recognition of
Anglican orders under a variety of misunderstandings, the
most serious of which consists in their simple supposition that
the Ecclesia Anglicana (Church of England) and the Protestant
Church of England are two very different entities, they sup-
posing the latter to be made up of the Methodists, Baptists,
etc. However, the archbishop, to speak plainly, wears no
mask. His utterance is categorical to a nicety ; though, as we
shall have occasion to point out, not severely accurate from a
theological point of view.

SOME DEFINED TEACHING NOW.

Catholics who are in touch with Anglicanism in one or the
other of its pretentious phases will be truly grateful to his
grace for this candid committal of himself to the Protestant
view-points in his deliverance on this, the most vital doctrine

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 179

of revelation ; chiefly by reason of the deplorable aberrations
of the "Anglo-Catholic" party and the idolatrous practices to
which those aberrations have given rise. We ought to be glad
because the official head of Anglicanism, the lineal successor
of Cranmer and of Parker, has so clearly set forth what has
been, is now, and ever shall be, to the day of its final doom
and open apostasy, the teaching of Anglicanism on the Eu-
charist ; and because he has just as clearly insisted that the
Catholic doctrine cannot be held conscientiously by persons
belonging to that body. We are fully aware that "Anglo-
Catholics" will be found to set at naught the solemn utter-
ance of their chief pastor without scruple, because, being Prot-
estant, they are amenable to no authority whenever this au-
thority does not suit their own notions. Be that as it may,
those Anglicans who may have innocently brought themselves
to fancy that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist might
somehow be lawfully held within the pale of their communion
have now the proper corrective of their misapprehensions fur-
nished them in the sapient and, at any rate, authoritative,
though, perchance, unheeded, declaration of the " Primate of
all England." Henceforth they are without excuse, if they
continue their attempts to " say Mass " and their practices of
artolatry, bread-worship, because they are diligently taught and
carefully warned that, whereas any conceivable shade of opinion,
from Zwinglianism through Calvinism to Lutheranism may be
tolerated as being intentionally included by the Anglican
Church, the Catholic doctrine, together with the practices flow-
ing therefrom, can in nowise be tolerated. As for the arch-
bishop himself, he has now washed his hands in the face of
his diocese, of Anglicans generally and of all men, of even im-
plied complicity in the false and idolatrous cult of the Anglican
Eucharist. He has risen to the emergency with manly dignity
and has defined where the limits of Anglican inclusiveness be-
gin and where they end. They comprehend every conceivable
Protestant view. They exclude absolutely the Catholic doctrine.

THE ARCHBISHOP PROBABLY A ZWINGLIAN.

The archbishop defines Zwinglianism as the limit of tolera-
tion on the one hand. We let him speak for himself. " There
are," he says, " those who hold that no special gift is bestowed
by this sacrament, but that the value of it mainly, if not en-
tirely, resides in the effect produced on the soul of the receiver
by the commemoration of that wonderful act of love, our

i8o EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

Lord's sacrifice of Himself on the cross. Nothing more, they
think, is needed, and nothing more is given." This summary
is a correct exhibition of the Zwinglian view of the Eucharist,
and it reflects, no doubt correctly, the views of the Anglican
Zwinglians, who may be said to constitute the main body of
the Low-Church element in this wonderfully comprehensive
church. The archbishop is, of course, chary of saying any-
thing that might be supposed to wear the imprint of finality;
possibly he apprehends that there are various shades of Zwin-
glianism held among his constituency; hence he goes slowly;
he will not say that Anglican Zwinglians do hold that the
value of this sacrament resides entirely, but that they, or some
of them, may hold that it resides mainly in the effect produced
by the memorial of Christ's death on the soul of the receiver.
How very tender! What an indulgent "mother" the Anglican
Church is ! What wonder if her children are utterly spoiled !
But now see what follows. The archbishop goes on to expa-
tiate on the merits of this view of the Eucharist. If we mis-
take not, he actually delivers himself of a eulogy of the Zwin-
glian view, and, if so, we may properly infer that his grace
himself worships at the shrine of Zwingli. Here are his words :
" The spiritual effect, according to this view, is great ; the
memory of the cross works on all the being; it softens, puri-
fies, elevates, kindles; and this to such a degree that possibly
no other influence can be compared with that exercised by this
great sacrifice (italics ours). But there is no special (objective ?)
gift, no supernatural interposition, any more than in prayer."

A LACK OF POSITIVENESS.

This is quite plain. But why is he so afraid of being positive?
One comes to suspect that the Zwinglian sheep of the arch-
bishop's fold are his pets, and surely there can be among them
no goats. Yet how then account for the powwow at a mem-
orable Good-Friday service in a certain church, when a cer-
tain ultra-zealous Low-Church barn-stormer (Mr. Kensit), in
company with like-minded fellows, interrupted the High-Church
ceremony of the unveiling of the passion cross and, possessing
themselves of the latter, the intruders beat a hasty retreat
with noisy denunciations of the "abominable idolatry" in
which the High-Church brethren had been quietly engaging;
all of which formed but the prelude of the present violent
" no-iitualism " movement in the mother country? Does the
archbishop account those goats as sheep by the process of

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 181

imputed righteousness received by faith alone, or are they,
perchance, Calvinists and are omitted because these are not
the topic of discourse? Be this as it may, we must come back
to what gave rise to a slight departure from the subject under
consideration. We said there is in the above utterance a con-
spicuous lack of positiveness. Why say that "possibly there is
no other influence that can be compared with that exercised
by this great sacrifice"? Does his grace suspect that there
are among his Zwinglian sheep some who doubt that the in-
fluence of the cross is the most wonderful and powerful influ-
ence in all the universe ? Possibly the archbishop was thinking,
as he qualified his statement by the innocent-looking adverb
"possibly," of the growing number of Broad-Church Anglicans
who find the influence of the great modern German dogma-
ticians and critics more potent and charming than the influ-
ence of the crucified Nazarene. How hard it must be to think
of all those things and many more, as one is engaged in the
task of putting together a Canterbury ex-cathedra deliverance!

NO IDEA OF A PRESENT SACRIFICE.

Another matter ere we proceed. His Protestant grace
ascribes to the Anglo-Zwinglian Eucharist an influence so soften-
ing (though we would warn you, kind reader, that the proverbial
"soft spot" is here not to be thought of) that probably "no
other influence can be compared with that exercised by this
great sacrifice." His grace meant, of course, the influence ex-
ercised by the memory of that great sacrifice. For the Anglo-
Zwinglian, the sacrifice was offered once, and that exclusive 1 .
The sacrifice was once offered eighteen hundred odd years ago.
The Lord's table now is Christ-less. There is no Christian priest-
hood, z>., no Christian sacrificial priesthood, hence no sacrifice.
The priesthood of Anglicanism is evangelical, i.e., non-sacrificial,
as it is also non-sacramental ; it knows spiritual sacrifices only,
the sacrifice of "ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a rea-
sonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto God " ; but a present
sacrifice, never! Yet, there is, in the Catholic Church, a sacri-
fice : the extension and unbloody perpetuation of our Lord's
sacrifice on the cross. Of this sacrifice it is as true to-day as
it was true when first it was offered that it exerts the greatest
influence, a divine, never-ceasing influence for the healing and
purifying of the nations, even for as many as the Lord our
God shall call ; but this sacrifice the Protestant Archbishop of
Canterbury cannot discern because his eyes are holden.

182 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

FROM ZWINGLI TO LUTHER.

Furthermore, his grace having told us what is the limit of tole-
ration on the one hand, without saying a word about Calvinism
he goes on to tell what the limit is on the other hand : namely,
Lutheranism. But before quoting his language it may be well
to offer a few remarks on the subject of the Lutheran doctrine
of the Eucharist. And first, it is an enduring misstatement,
though Lutheran theologians are ever and again protesting
against it with much vehemence, that Lutherans believe in
" consubstantiation," i.e., the natural union of the Bcdy and the
Blood of our Lord with the substances of bread and wine re-
spectively through the words of consecration. Lutherans eschew
the expression " words of consecration " precisely because it
suggests either consubstantiation or transubstantiation, both of
which they reject with equal deliberateness. They say: "the
words of institution"; and they ascribe to them no effect on
the elements. The recitation of them is simply historical, the
rehearsal of the narrative of the institution of this "Supper"
by Christ ; and they merely signify that all those who are now
engaging in this performance, in obedience to the command of
Christ, " do this in remembrance of me," intending to do
what Christ then commanded : " take and eat" are minded to
look on the bread and wine there before them as solemnly set
apart for use in the sacrament, i.e., in the sacramental action
of eating and drinking.

PRECISE LUTHERAN TEACHING.

So much as regards the " words of institution." Further-
more, Lutherans hold, with the "unaltered Augsburg Confes-
sion " (which they receive alone as symbolical), and with their
theologians, that the presence of the Body of Christ with the
element of bread and of the Blood of Christ with the element
of wine happens by virtue of the institution and ordinance of
Christ precisely in the act of eating and of drinking ; so that,
according to them, the Body of Christ is with each wafer and
the Blood of Christ with each swallow of wine precisely at the
moment of their reception by a given communicant. Suppose
a wafer fell from the hand of the minister while he is attempt-
ing to impart the same to a communicant, and were left where
it fell, there would be no desecration, because there was as
yet no presence of the Body of Christ with that wafer, for it
had not been " taken and eaten " by the communicant, the

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 183

command " to take and eat " had not been carried out. Hence
the idea of Eucharistic adoration, or of the sacrifice of the
Eucharist, never even enters the mind of Lutherans. There is
no room for these in the Lutheran belief.

Nor is this all. The mode of the presence of the Body of
Christ with the wafer received actually by the communicant
is not that of natural union, not consubstantiation, not impana-
tion ; they assert that there is a supersensible, supernatural,
mysterious union of the Body of Christ with the wafer, and
that precisely in the act of eating, not apart from v it, neither
before nor after. Hence their shibboleth : Nihil extra usum (it
is nothing but mere bread apart from the eating). Lutheran
theologians insist that the descriptives in, cum et sub (Christ's
body is present in, with, and under the bread) must be under-
stood and interpreted in the light of the above expounded dog-
matic and practical belief of the Lutheran Church. Every
Lutheran youth who has been properly catechised fully under-
stands the trend of this teaching, even though he do not
comprehend it technically. Nor do Lutherans admit that
Christ, totiis Ckristus, is received in the sacrament, but the
Body and Blood only.

Accordingly, it will be readily seen that his grace of Can-
terbury has erred grievously in his ex-cathedra utterance about
the Lutheran view of the Eucharist, a thing quite unpardona-
ble when the person concerned is a Protestant dignitary, and
a doctor of divinity to boot. It will also appear that the
" Anglo-Catholics " can take little comfort to themselves from
the Lutheran view, which, as their primate tells them, is the
limit of toleration on the side of " high " sacramental teaching.
Hear him :

"And there are those," he says, "who hold that there is
something more, that the Lutheran doctrine is true, that in
some mysterious way, though the elements are not changed,
something supernatural has been added ; that, in fact, they are
natural things, yet .our Lord is actually present in them."

HOUSING UNDER THE CALVINISTIC ROOF.

Thus far the archbishop. It is certainly true that accord-
ing to Lutheran teaching the elements over which the "words
of institution " have been pronounced, whereby they have
been solemnly set apart by an ordained minister, are natural
things pure and simple, though natural things, creatures,
destined for Protestant sacramental uses, and it is just as

1 84 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

true that they are natural in fact, whether now those sacred
words have been pronounced by a Lutheran or by an Anglo-
Lutheran, alias Anglo-Catholic, priest. But it is positively
true also that, according to the Lutheran doctrine, the Body
and Blood of our Lord are actually present therein and there-
with, by virtue of a supersensible, mysterious union and identi-
fication, only in the act of eating and of drinking. The arch-
bishop's somewhat loose phraseology, however, is descriptive,
especially when read in the light of what follows and of his
manifest intention to afford ground whereon to stand to the
"Anglo-Catholic" sheep of his comprehensive fold, not of the
above-described and only Lutheran doctrine, but of a misstate-
ment and misunderstanding of that doctrine, namely, of con-
substantiation and impanation, which is positively un-Lutheran.
Unless, therefore, the " Anglo-Catholic " contingent will go on
record for devising and maintaining a brand-new and quite im-
possible view of the Real Presence which, as they are not
priests in the Catholic sense, would, anyhow, be the real ab-
sence, of Christ they must turn elsewhere for a foundation
and defence of their new-fangled practices. And, indeed, the one
and only plank within known reach is original Calvinism. Un-
der the Calvinistic roof they can with some degree of comfort
and, anyhow, of self-respect house their practices, if only they
will take the note for their guidance which was given by their
graces of Canterbury and of York in the "brotherly" letter
they addressed to our Holy Father in refutation (!) of the
grounds on which the Supreme Pontiff condemned Anglican
orders as invalid to wit: that the Eucharist is first, last, and
all the time the great mystery " of which we know so little."

THE CALVINISTIC VIEW MORE CONVENIENT.

But let them emphasize the pronoun we, the Anglicans, we
know so little of it, though this we do know of a surety, that
there is no transubstantiation. The Calvinistic view is, indeed,
quite mysterious and altogether inexplicable. It lends itself to
the wants of a people who have been so long cut off from the
Catholic Church, and who, therefore, remember so little what
is the sublime teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the
mystery of the Blessed Sacrament of the altar. If "Anglo-
Catholics" will take our advice and beat a decent retreat to the
Calvinistic view of the Eucharist, they will be better able to
respect themselves. They have doctrinal standards. The Cal-
vinistic is the natural and obvious interpretation of the articles

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 185

of religion and of the catechism, on the subject of the Lord's
Supper or Eucharist. Their " Order for the Administration of
the Lord's Supper, or Holy Communion," as found in the
Book of Common Prayer, is conceived and brought forth in
the spirit peculiar to the Calvinistic view of the Sacrament.
When they say, administering the bread : " The body of our
Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body
and soul unto everlasting life : take and eat this in remem-
brance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart
by faith, with thanksgiving," which is the form prescribed by
the above ''Order," they will then be at perfect ease. The
formula fits and covers the case, and the words need no longer
be twisted out of their obvious meaning into meanings which
are elsewhere condemned in the strongest and most abusive
terms in that very Book of Common Prayer. Also, they will
then be restrained from all of their idolatrous practices ; they
will be led to look on their " consecrated " elements at the ut-
most as charged with some mysterious virtue derived frcm the
risen and ascended Christ and by him somehow imparted to
them, while all the while in his humanity he sits at the right
hand of God in heaven, though, as they think, according to his
divinity and by virtue of it he is really but spiritually present
with them and approves of them in the rite they take it upon
themselves to perform. They will then see plainly why they
must not reverence their Eucharistic elements as though these
contained somehow the very Christ totum Christum with the
worship called latreutical ; but that they may, if they can see
their way clear, reverence them at best with a sort of dulia,
partly for the spiritual gift of the benefit of Christ's passion
wherewith they may have invested them, and partly for the
mystical character they may believe those elements to bear in
relation to Christ who is substantially present in heaven above,
and of whom "these gifts and creatures of bread and wine"
have become somehow the symbols. We realize that there is
difficulty for men's reason in this view ; we understand also
that the trade-mark of Calvin is not in favor with the 4< Anglo-
Catholics," but que voulez-vous ? and, as the Germans say: "In
an extremity the devil will content himself with a diet of flies."

TRANSUBSTANTIATION EXCLUDED.

One thing is certain : nothing may be conscientiously held
by Anglicans save what lies between Zwinglianism and Lutheran-
ism, and Calvinism is the happy mean, the very thing cherished

186 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

by Anglicanism and the most convenient term of compromise.
The priceless value of the Calvinistic view of the Eucharist as
a working theory for Anglicanism has, we may submit, been
clearly and prophetically discerned by men like the shrewd gen-
tleman who is at the head of Anglican things in New York.
Realizing, perchance, the unsatisfactory nature of the Lutheran
Eucharistic view for the uses of " high " Anglicans, the amiable
Bishop of New York took occasion to denounce the Lutheran
view as gross, carnal, materialistic, and what not ; and pro-
ceeded to eulogize the Calvinistic view in terms similar to
those with which his grace of Canterbury eulogizes the effects
of the Zwinglian memory of the great sacrifice. As Catholics
we realize that the change from the crypto-Catholic tenets un-
til now held by a certain class of " Anglo-Catholics " upon the
subject of the Eucharist, is not impossible. Their tenets are
voluntary, not based on assent to the infallible teaching au-
thority of the Catholic Church ; to say it plainly : they are in
the last resort but the tenets of private judgment, exercised on
Scripture and such fragments of Tradition as they are pleased
to accept ; and no more. Hence it will be possible for these
persons to reform and revise their views and to bring them-
selves to believe that Calvin was right, after all. The task im-
plied in such reformation of their present opinions is far lighter
than the herculean effort it needs must require to steady
themselves in their opinion that Anglican orders are valid when
the Catholic Church has rejected them absolutely and for
cause. We know that the Anglican Bishop of New York ap-
pealed against this utter rejection of those orders, some time
after publication of the rescript of our Holy Father, most sol-
emnly to the enlightened judgment of fin de siecle Episcopalian-
ism. But, shades of Barlow, Scorey, Coverdale, Hodgkin, and of
Parker, who of your seed could lean on such an arm? Verily
the effort is great, and not made lighter through the bishop's
charging the Supreme Pontiff " with a large measure of ignor-
ance of the facts."

OIL ON TROUBLED WATERS.

To proceed. It is plain thus far that his grace of Canter-
bury has shown a large measure of ignorance of the subject of
the Lutheran view on the Eucharist. However, he is loath to
dismiss the subject at this point. He must say something
definite on the " comprehensiveness " of the Anglican apostasy.
The times require it. War has broken out in the camp, and

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 187

brethren, unmindful of their sonship in the Anglican family of
faiths, are trying to cut one another's throats. This is the
archbishop's "oil on troubled waters": "The church permits
both views, the commemorative service and the actual presence
in the Lutheran sense, that is, as it is technically calhd, 'con-
substantiation.' ' Here his grace grows somewhat confused,
and we take it upon ourselves to rearrange his sentences where
they are surely out of order; so that all things may be said
decently and in order. Hence we add what really follows
later, but what the even flow of thought calls for now: "On
this point," his grace explains, "which is cardinal, the church
is intentionally comprehensive."

The " point " is the toleration of the twin-views expounded
by the archbishop. The toleration of those views is, as the
archbishop says with deliberate emphasis, the controlling prin-
ciple of Anglicanism. And we are inclined to think that the
archbishop's point is well taken. Indeed, this impression has
been upon us for some time. There are strong indications,
also, that this was the impression of those souls whom God has
by his grace called from out of the confusion and darkness
of Anglicanism, called euphemistically its "comprehensiveness,"
into the marvellous light that shines in the City of God, and
who are now praising the God of their salvation for that his
unspeakable gift ; some here below, some yonder. However,
when his grace says the church permits " both views," he does
not use the numeral adjective in the exclusive meaning of it.
He includes what lies between them, Calvinism, the happy mean.

THE CATHOLIC VIEW NOT TOLERABLE.

However, his grace does positively exclude the Catholic
doctrine of the Holy Eucharist from the list of tolerated views.
Anglicans may not indulge the luxury of holding the doctrine
of transubstantiation as a tolerated view. His words are:

" But it (the church of which he is the nominal head) will
not permit the latter (Lutheran) view to be pushed or exag-
gerated into the Romanist belief. It rejects no shade of opinion
on the Eucharist except that which is in the most distinctive
way openly Romanist."

And here endeth the lesson. We care not to concern our-
selves with more of his grace's utterance. Comment on this
last section of it is needless. The utterer of this " charge "
has boldly stepped forward, divested of every vestige of the
disguise or restraint forced on him by the claims put forth by

i88 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

the High-Church party in behalf of the Catholic character of
the church over which he presides ; he has stepped forward as
what he has been and is: a thorough-going Protestant, and de-
clares that every Protestant view on the Eucharist is lawful for
Anglicans, but the Catholic doctrine is the forbidden tree of
which they may not eat lest they die. This doctrine he de-
nounces, in another place of his " charge," as anti-scriptural
and as destroying the nature of a sacrament, because, he
alleges, whereas a sacrament must have an outward and visible
sign, the doctrine of transubstantiation destroys this sign !

A PRAYER-BOOK CHURCHMAN.

On this cardinal point his grace takes precisely the position
of the " Thirty-nine Articles of Religion," as contained in the
Book of Common Prayer. He is a " Prayer-Book Churchman,"
and he may be fitly understood as giving the signal: "retreat
to the Prayer Book." 'Tis well. The claim to valid orders re-
mains; how long it is destined to figure no man knows. Mean-
while the fact is patent that modern German theology has
made its way into the very walls and recesses of Pusey-House,
the original home of the Oxford Movement. Since, however,
the teachings of Anglicanism on the cardinal doctrine of the
Eucharist needs must be either Zwinglian, or Calvinistic, or
Lutheran, we should expect Anglicans to stop masquerading
under the Catholic name and to profess in the most distinctive
way openly: we are a conglomerate made up of Anglo-Zwing-
lians, Anglo-Calvinists, Anglo-Lutherans, and Anglo-Rationalists;
we be brethren, the one of the other, the lawful offspring of
the seed of Parker and of the principle of private judgment in
matters pertaining to faith and morals.

A MUCH NEEDED CONFESSION.

Again, since the head of Anglicanism has so frankly put
himself on record as to the essential Protestantism of Angli-
canism, we should expect from the " Anglo-Catholics," or
Anglo-Lutherans and Anglo-Calvinists, some such general con-
fession (private confession being wholly voluntary and not to
be insisted on as necessary, so as not to infringe on "that
blessed liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free "), we
should, be it said, expect some such confession as hereinafter
followeth, to wit : " We have played the fool and we are
minded to continue the fun. The more we are opposed, the
more we enjoy the sport. We will not cease, no not for a

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 189

moment, from seeking to induce all Anglicans, yea all English
Protestants, to hop about on our Anglo-Catholic crutches.
His grace of Canterbury is also simply playing the fool and
hopping about on * Anglo-Zvvinglian ' crutches. Let him hop
in the way he enjoys. He is our superior, but who cares?
Does not the Anglican Church, in one of her articles, behind
which we must all take shelter, declare that : ' As the Churches
of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred ; so also
the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and
manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith.' Since,
then, these ancient patriarchates have succumbed, one and all,
to the ravages of heresy though we confess we can find no
incontestable case of dogmatic error uttered ex cathedra by any
of the numerous Roman patriarchs, and, indeed, the prayer
offered by Jesus Christ in behalf of Peter would seem to point
to some certain gift of inerrancy bestowed on him upon his
conversion, yet, since, we say, they have erred in matters of
faith, is there any one in his sound senses who will suppose the
Church of Canterbury hath not erred ? Is there any one who
can fail to see that erring is one, and that the chief, of the
diversions of all patriarchates alike ? In fact, we may conclude
that erring is the chief mark of the true church, seeing that
she is declared to be the 'quicksand and quagmire of the
truth'; (though the authorized version says: * the pillar and
ground of the truth.')

A SUGGESTED COUNCIL.

11 True, the Church of England did not expressly mention
Canterbury in the body of this article of her religion, possibly
for reasons of modesty arising from its then extreme youth-
fulness and because the new scheme was then but in a ten-
tative stage, as it were in swaddling-clothes, though laid in
royal beds. For these very reasons its logical and historical
prius, the venerable see of Calvin at Geneva, was proba-
bly also omitted, and the adding of these twins to the list
of error-stricken patriarchates ought, really, to form the sub-
ject of discussion at the next Pan-Anglican Council. It will
be so nice to have the Old-Catholic Bishop of Switzerland
in attendance there, because he will then be useful as well as
ornamental, and will be able to shed abundance of light on
the stubborn rumors of the enthronement, in the venerable see
of Calvin, of the latest variety of German rationalism. How
sad it is that the scheme, said to have been on foot, to give
the Anglican succession to that Presbyterian see, miscarried ;

190 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

it could then boast of being Catholic in the teeth of its apos-
tasy ! But it is useless to cry over spilled milk, and we must
on, else our General Confession will be too lengthy and will
betray more than is expedient. But this we are clearly con-
scious of, that the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury
is, on his and our premises, not worth the uttering in this or
any other point wherein we do not happen to opine as he
does. And this is the very glory of our attempted Anglo-
Catholic Church, this church of the English-speaking peoples
wherever they may be under the canopy of heaven : its elasticity.

UP-TO-DATE ANGLO-CATHOLICISM.

" But one article, and one article alone, shall be funda-
mental and binding : ' I believe in the Anglo-Catholic and
Apostolic Church.' To believe this may require the sacrifice
of reason and common sense, but if men will only try hard,
they can make the sacrifice ; when they will find themselves
amply rewarded by the sweet joy of supposing themselves to
be Catholics when they are not, a joy the greater when they
realize that they are dispensed from all that strictness and
moral restraint inseparable from the ancient article which,
through our efforts, shall, ere long, have become a drug in
the market. Our patent-medicine preparation shall supplant and
push to the wall the pure and genuine remedies provided for
mankind. This, dearly beloved brethren, is our sanguine hope,
our cherished desire ; and to do what in us lies to bring to
pass the scheme we entertain, we are ready and willing to play
the fool first, last, and all the time, even to our dying breath;
for we do hope and pray that we may die in the confidence
of this our most uncertain faith and anywhere but in the com-
munion of the Catholic Church. As we are willing to counter-
feit that church, so we are willing, in a measure, to counterfeit
the heroism of her saints, her martyrs, and confessors. Their
spirit we will now show forth in our endurance (though with a
sort of sense of pang not unmixed with anxiety lest our scheme
miscarry) of the mistaken zeal of his grace of Canterbury and
of our poor, blind co-actors of other schools of thought. As
true Anglo-Catholics (stage-whispers : Anglo-Protestants, breth-
ren), as true Anglo-Catholics we will hold the fort, our arch-
bishop's utterances to the contrary notwithstanding ; for we
think we know and are somehow persuaded that the semblance
of truth is on our side, and thus we go on indefinitely playing
the fool, until, at the last, all our brethren shall be persuaded
to dance as we pipe." This is " up-to-date Anglo-Catholicism."

1899-] EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. 191

MANY PROTESTANTS IN GOOD FAITH.

Concluding, we affirm that we know no other feeling toward
sincere Protestants of every name save that of sympathy and
charity. We suppose that even many of them belong in reality
to the Roman Catholic Church, which is the true and only Spouse
of Christ, inwardly ; because they believe implicitly all that God
has made known, and their alienation from the Catholic Church
arises from traditional and invincible ignorance of the identity
of the Church founded by Christ. And it is just because we
are moved by such charity, which believeth all things, hopeth
all things, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth in good, that we un-
dertook to furnish the above comments on Anglicanism, as
thinking that thereby we might be instrumental in breaking
the spell which this most subtle, captivating, and arrogant
heresy casts upon the very sincerest souls. We aimed at show-
ing the essential Protestantism, the hopeless contradictori-
ness, the wantonness, the grossness, the positive hollowness of
Anglicanism, and of its so-called " Catholic claims." Nor do
we think that we have resortecj to the use of weapons not
justified and warranted by the state of things. For, reflect for
a moment on the grievous errors antagonistic to the last degree
to the cardinal doctrines of the church that are the quintessence
of " Anglo-Catholicism " ; on the fearful delusions it gives rise to
on the subject of the Eucharist, teaching its votaries to worship
and adore its " consecrated " wafers as though these were really
the very Christ ; and leading them on to put dependence in
the vain "absolutions" pronounced by Anglican ministers,
leaving them to imagine that those absolutions are the very
absolution of God himself given through the ministry of a duly
ordained and authorized priesthood. But, above all, reflect on
the nature of the attempt Anglicanism is deliberately making
to instal itself in the room of the Catholic Church, asserting
with a bold front that the " Roman Church " is an intruder, a
robber and a thief, the " Italian Heresy " or " Mission " claim-
ing jurisdiction where it has none; and that it is the true and
only legitimate ' American Catholic Church " ! What a mon-
strous paradox of fin de siecle heresies ! what a dark enigma !
And remember that the conversions from Anglicanism to the
church are quite beside and contrary to the spirit of the so-called
Anglo-Catholic movement, and that the number of them is re-
latively very small when we consider the greater number of
conversions from the Protestant churches we might have if

192 EPISCOPALIAN DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST. [Nov.,

Anglicanism did not stand between awakened souls and the
Catholic Church, advancing every argument in its power to
draw them over into its net, and thus thwart the workings of
divine grace, so far forth as that may be possible ; for, as pre-
sented by its notable writings and as appearing through the
ritual of many of its churches, it is captivating and presents to
the untaught, as it does to the frivolous, a picture which might
easily deceive the very elect.

ANGLICANISM WARNED.

Anglicanism was not left without signs and warnings. Per-
haps the conversion of Newman was the most notable sign
and warning ever vouchsafed to a Protestant church ; but it
has hardened itself and goes on still in its blindness with ever
growing pride. It has made up its mind to b'elittle the mean-
ing of conversions, and to stigmatize the passing of converts
from it to Catholicism as due to some secret taint, some lack
of stability, some defect of character, even to temporary aber-
ration. It has set aside the judgment of the Holy See itself,
though the action was invoked, more than merely indirectly,
by its own leaders, and, we fear, in the last resort with no
good purpose, though the accessories to the scheme may not
admit this, not even to themselves, except in lone hours when
the world rests and sleeps but the conscience wakes and judges,
and, perchance, not even then: that solemn judgment of our
Holy Father it has wantonly cast aside as so much rubbish,
and has hardened itself in no good way. May God make it
ashamed by granting its sincere professors the efficacious
illumination of his Holy Spirit and the strength of will to
embrace the truth! And we, Catholics, unworthy as we
are of any of God's special favors, unworthy both on ac-
count of what we were and of what we are : sinners by
nature and, alas ! sinners by choice, yet, somehow, still re-
membered in mercy and not cast out for our misdeeds, how
better shall we show forth our sense of gratitude for his un-
speakable mercies than by living the life of service and of
prayer; humbly, believingly, and lovingly interceding for those
who are away from the fold of the Good Shepherd through
no guilt of theirs, ay, for all infidels, heretics, and schismatics,
beseeching God that through the power of his grace he would
fetch them back, that they may come to the knowledge of the
truth and be saved among the remnant of the elect.

1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. 193

THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS.

BY P. G. SMYTH.

REAMY, languid tropical quiet had settled down
again over Madura. The whole place was as
quiet, as Orientally calm, as destructive of Cau-
casian energy and suggestive of lotus-eating and
the easy-going, evasive "mafiana" in regard to

everything under the sun, as it had been ere the sudden cyclo-
nic blast of war came to tear fissures in the ancient fortifica-
tions and play havoc with the houses. Most of the ruined
edifices had been rebuilt. The battered walls of the old
Spanish fortress had been repaired, the new masonry showing
in lighter spots against the old gray structure. The defences
had been strengthened by the addition of several new guns of
great range and calibre.

Business went on as before the war. The natives had re-
turned to a life of peace and cock-fighting and selling of farm
produce. From the market-place, dotted with white costumes,
rose a drowsy hum.

The yellow, crimson-barred flag had disappeared. Soldiers
in blue did proprietorial sentry duty under the stars and stripes.
Spanish rule was as obsolete, as seemingly forgotten, as in
some old adobe fort in Florida.

American national airs floated from the band playing on
the Esplanade, but almost as often floated those of another
and distinctive nationality, " Columbia " alternating with
" Garryowen," and " The Star-spangled Banner" with "The
Wearing of the Green " ; for Madura was garrisoned by the
famed fighting Irish-American regiment known as " Wogan's
Wolf dogs," which had had most active and honorable part in
the late storming.

The colonel of the Wolf-dogs was Nicholas Wogan, known
to his ruggedly affectionate command as " Cloosheen" (Little
Ear), from his having lost the lobe of his right ear by the
bullet of a Spanish marine. Needless to say he was a brave
and capable officer; otherwise he would not have lasted in his
position one week and it was now many months since the
Wolf-dogs had been sent to "the front," as military parlance
VOL. LXX. 13

194 THE REVOLT OF Woe AN? s WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

included sundry isolated posts and garrisons lying here and
there, thousands of leagues of sea from the United States.

General Hank J. Bennett, a veteran of the American Civil
War, was military governor of Madura. He and Colonel
Wogan were sitting together this morning the morning of a
day destined to be of strange and wonderful memory in
Madura sitting sipping their wine, smoking their cigars, gazing
out upon the blue harbor with its darting craft, exchanging
chance conjectures on the hypothetical current of outer events
and hearty grumblings at the delay in repairing the cable,
which left them cut off from all knowledge of the whole world
outside of Madura, save what was brought them by occasional
coaling cruisers and tramp steamers when there entered to
them hurriedly Harry Simpson, his face and manner showing
that he had some new and interesting information to com-
municate, as indeed he nearly always had, or professed to
have, such being his unhappy vocation.

Simpson was a newspaper correspondent who had been
marooned, so to speak, excommunicado at Madura, by the stern
commander of an American gunboat, on which, in despite of
orders, he had stowed himself away in his zeal for news-gather-
ing, thus leaving him where there was not anything of conse-
quence to transmit, and no means of transmitting it if there
was.

" Well," he said cheerily and breathlessly, "here's real news
at last. We have found a good friend, our troubles will soon
be over, and we '11 soon be back in our happy, happy homes,
wearing the victor's laurel. Hail Columbia, ditto Britannia.
It's signed!"

" Whatever is the matter with you what is signed ? "
growled the general.

"Why, that treaty, of course; and a mighty good thing,
too, I think."

" Do you mean the treaty of peace between us and Spain ? "

" Oh, dear no ! not a stale bagatelle of that kind. I mean
a treaty of strong and firm alliance between the United States
and England, a compact that will embrace in its wide, gener-
ous, protecting arms the whole noble Anglo-Saxon race, whose
members speak the same grand language, and whose blood is
thicker than water, and whose interests '

"Say, young man," interrupted Colonel Wogan, "this daily
round of fake-making may be useful to you, as the practising
of your profession. But you might husband your resources

1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. 195

and take a needful rest until such time as your return to
yellow journaldom. At least you might desist trying your in-
ventions on us, for we have long since failed to find them
amusing."

Wogan grew angry as he proceeded. He tossed his cigar
out the window and glared at the news-bearer as if he would
annihilate him.

"You're mighty hard on him, colonel," remarked x Governor
Bennett, languidly surveying the blue nicotian rings that aureoled
his white head. " Let him go ahead. Excellent story that
splendid joke nuptials of Mme. Columbia and Mr. John Bull.
Go to, friend Simpson, go to ! "

"But it's so, general ; it's the truth, colonel," declared Simp-
son with hurt expression of voice and manner. " The captains of
two trading vessels have just brought the news from different
ports. It is quite solid and authentic, and may be confirmed at
any hour by the arrival here of a United States man-of-war
with despatches."

" Strange if true," commented the governor. The colonel
nodded his head moodily.

" Why," continued Simpson, " the news is by this time all
over town. It has spread like wildfire, and one part of it
which may or may not be untrue is causing intense excite-
ment among the garrison. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if
it led to a revolt or riot or something of that kind before
nightfall."

"And what is the specially sensational item, pray, Mr.
Simpson? "

" It is this, governor : that America, as an article of the
treaty of alliance, has ceded Madura to England, and that an
English regiment is even now on its voyage hither to take
possession and to raise the union jack in lieu of the stars and
stripes."

Governor Bennett gasped and stared. " Cloosheen " uttered
something that sounded like a malediction.

"The report of the long-expected union of the Anglo-Saxon
race, by virtue of which the kindred banners of England and
America will flutter side by side in fraternal union and
triumph," went on the correspondent, as if producing copy for
his newspaper, " has been received here with varied feelings and
opinions. The views of the natives, so lately rescued from the
oppressive bondage of Spain, have not yet been ascertained ;
but it is already known beyond doubt that the treaty of alii-

196 THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

ance is regarded with the utmost disfavor and dissatisfaction
by the Irish regiment in garrison here, the famous ' Wolf-dogs,'
under Colonel Nicholas Wogan, who, however, states By
the way, colonel, what have you to say on the matter ? "

" Oh, nothing not a thing, thank you but if it has really
happened that those infernal dolts and traitors I mean those
able and patriotic statesmen who have had the engineering of
this confounded deal that is, this lofty diplomatic achievement,
have really succeeded in their miserable Hello, how 's this?"

A gun, answered by another, boomed at the entrance to
the harbor, and a large transport vessel, her decks crowded
with troops in scarlet uniforms and the British flag flying at
her masthead, came steaming in. She presently dropped
anchor, and soon came the message to the governor :

" The British transport Grampus, with troops under Major-
General Sir Melville Mowbray."

The governor looked gravely at the colonel, and the colonel
returned the look with great interest on the gravamen. Then
they both arose and bowed stiffly to the clipped-wing recording
angel, who was beginning:

" Ten to one there comes the future garrison of Madura ;
and now, gentlemen, in honor of the great Anglo-Saxon alliance,
-I would respectfully propose that

" Mr. Simpson, you will kindly excuse us ; we have some
urgent matters for private discussion."

The correspondent precipitately retired in the face of a
chilling frost. The governor and the colonel of the Wolf-dogs
drew their seats closer together.

" Somehow, Wogan, I have been expecting something like
this," said the governor, " yet I hardly thought it would come
so soon. Ever since such an influential section of our press
and such a large number of our preachers and public men took
up the advocacy of an Anglo-American alliance "

" Instigated by English interests and English secret service
money," indignantly snorted Wogan.

" Now, there you go again, colonel ! There are no proven
grounds for any such assumption. I say, ever since the initia-
tion of this blood-thicker-than-water racket I have felt in my
bones that this proposed alliance would become an ac-
complished fact. It seems it is one now. I am no more in
love with it than you are ; I dislike it> I deplore it. True, my
people came originally from England, good old Mayflower
stock. But my great-grandfather was hanged in Boston as a

1899-] THE REVOLT OF Woe AN' s WOLF-DOGS. 197

sequel to the Tea-party, and my granduncle fell at New Orleans
resisting English invasion, and the bullet I still carry in my
person as a relic of our Civil War was of lead that came from
England to the Confederacy, and, all personal and political
reasons considered, I don't see why in thunder we should need
hitch ourselves to John Bull. Ours is a big country, with
plenty of men and money, and in my mind we stand in no
pressing need of a foreign partner to help us run our business.
But these are only my private opinions, possibly my innate pre-
judices. If Uncle Samuel has decided in favor of a treaty with
old Bull, then, as loyal American citizens, we know our duty,
and treaty be it, for better or worse."

" The same here, governor," coincided the colonel, in the
tones of a sick enthusiast in a sepulchre.

" It is too bad, too bad," continued the governor medita-
tively. " My ambition was to see the splendid resources of
this country developed under the fostering stars and stripes,
to aid and witness its progress from poverty to prosperity;
but now my desire is proved the vainest dream that is, if this
blamed report is true and the greatest blessing that can befall
us is an immediate summons home. That summons will arrive,
I naturally suppose, simultaneously with our orders to deliver
this place into the keeping of the red-coat garrison that is
waiting yonder."

The governor sighed deeply as he lighted a fresh cigar.

" Nice prospect for the Wolf-dogs oh, charming, delightful
consideration for the Wolf-dogs ! " commented the colonel.
" How pleasant it will be to the Irish volunteer soldiers of
Columbia to learn that, with great loss of life and limb, they
have captured a fine fort, town and island, merely for the pur-
pose of delivering over the same as a generous diplomatic
present to their dear old friend England, who persecuted them,
starved and burned them out, exiled them from their native
land, hanged and imprisoned, and

" Oh, there, there, Wogan ! You make me nervous. Of
course I understand your intense Celtic feeling on the matter;
but you and your men will have to get over it and make the
best of it. And now I suppose I must pay a formal visit of
courtesy to this English Sir Somebody on board his ship. You
may as well accompany me ; we will get some news from what
is called civilization."

As they passed down towards the docks they were joined
by several other leading military magnates of the place, re-

198 THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

splendent as to uniform. Various knots and groups of soldiers,
who had been excitedly talking and gesticulating, paused to
look upon them as they went by, and few of the gazing faces
wore a pleased expression ; some were serious, some scowling,
some flushed as from the efforts of vehement argument.

Most flushed and vehement of all was Private Finnegan
Mullarkey, the wit, orator, and poet of Company C of the
Wolf-dogs. He was perched in an embrasure of the ramparts,
with one hand resting on a great gun and the other waving
and beating graceful emphasis to the sentiments he uttered.

" There they go, my brethren," he said, as the launch con-
taining the governor and his party skimmed towards the Gram-
pus ; "there they go to complete the disgraceful terms with
our ancient foe, the hated Sassenach. Soon, no doubt, the in-
famous compact will be fulfilled, and British bayonets will re-
place ours on those walls that have been baptized with Irish
blood and won by Irish valor. Soon, no doubt, the beloved
and honored flag of the Great Republic, which through shot
and shell we have borne to glorious victory, will be replaced
on these walls by the bloodstained rag of the notorious Pirate
of the Seas. Soon will the mangy British lion grab the spoil
won by the proud American eagle. Brethren, shall this be ?
Is it for this we abandoned our peaceful homes in Chicago
a,nd elsewhere? Is it to become jackals for the Sassenach
beast of prey that we bade tearful yet manly adieux to our
folks in the fiery Nineteenth ward and in the gory Seventeenth,
that we threw up our long-sought and hard-earned jobs in the
City Hall and elsewhere? I pause for a reply, but don't let
anybody interrupt me now, unless he wants trouble."

" Hurroo ! Bravo, Finnegan, give it to them hot, avic bad
luck to them ! " cried the military vox populi, and the excited
Wolf-dogs gave their charging yell, with variations.

"Yes, my grossly deceived and wronged brethren, my too
credulous and confiding children of the Green Isle, little we
thought when, in loyal obedience to Columbia's call, we girded
on our arms and made ready for the fray little we thought
that our business would be, not to relieve the oppressed and
down-trodden victims of effete European monarchy, but to add
to the spoil and plunder of that thief of the world, John Bull.
Yes, my gullible children of Mars, after proving our Irish valor
in a way that must have edified the spirit of every grand old
patriot, from Brian Boru to Shane the Proud, we are made the
unhappy victims of dark and infamous treachery, the worst

1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN' s WOLF-DOGS. 199

that ever happened since the delegations from the Tenth and
Twelfth swung against Tim Ryan in the fight for the assessor-
ship. As the immortal poet says :

" ' We are bought and sold
For English gold
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation !"

The stormy cheers of the Wolf-dogs floated out over the
harbor and brought a pallor to the rugged face of Colonel
Wogan as he comprehended the significance of that fierce,
menacing growl.

"Mutiny, as I'm a helpless and unhappy sinner!" he
gasped ; but he refrained from revealing his apprehensions to
General Bennett. "And here come some of the materials for
an awful shindig. There '11 be a big and bloody row in Madura
before one hour passes."

Several boats went by laden with scarlet-clad soldiers, laugh-
ing and singing at the prospect of a pleasant time ashore.

"This is hardly discreet," remarked Wogan; "it is like shak-
ing a red rag at a bull to let these fellows near ours. Some
proper precautions should have first been taken. As it is, there
is every chance of a bloody collision between the Wolf-dogs
and the bull-dogs."

"A doubtful opening chapter of the alliance," said General
Bennett uneasily. " I think we had better get back as soon as
possible."

On the deck of the British transport the party was received
with frigid and pompous courtesy by General Sir Melville
Mowbray, a haughty, old-port Tory type of commander, im-
perialism personified to the tips of the white "mutton chops"
that framed his florid face. Formal salutations over, he ex-
pressed annoyance at the non-repairing of the cable, as he had
expected to receive some important orders from his govern-
ment on his arrival at Madura. He had no definite news as to
the much-talked-of treaty of alliance, but he understood such
a treaty was imminent.

"Imminent, though I should think unnecessary and ridicu-
lous," he remarked; "the idea of over-anxious or over-senti-
mental statesmen. This blood-thicker-than- water talk may sound
nice after dinner, but you Yankee gentlemen mustn't suppose
that stout old Britannia is demmed hard up for an ally. We
are not dying for that alliance, I assure you."

"Neither, it seems, are we here," replied General Bennett.

2oo THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

< You see, sir, the garrison here is Irish Fenian Irish at that
and there may be trouble between them and your men who
have gone on shore-leave if - "

" Have no apprehension. Ours are Irish also, soldiers of the
famous Eighty-eighth, or Connaught Rangers. But hullo ! what
means all that whooping and yelling yonder? What is the
cause of the noisy celebration ?"

As a mighty peal of cheering rang out over the harbor an
American officer came hastily on board, looking the picture of
alarm,

" Governor," he said, " there is desperate work ashore. The
Wolf-dogs, mad at the idea of having to surrender the place to
England, have revolted. The Connaught Rangers have frater-
nized with them. They all declare that sooner than see the
union jack of England raised over Madura they will establish
what they call the Irish Antipodean Republic, with a govern-
ment and flag of their own. You cannot believe it well, look
there ! "

Amid another gust of cheers a large green flag, bearing a
harp, went soaring up the flagstaff of Madura fort, which hailed
it with a salute of twenty-one guns !

Dumb for some minutes with amazement and anger, the
party on the deck of the Grampus watched the emerald banner
of Ireland floating in the tropical breeze.

"The dolts! the idiots! the traitors!" exclaimed the gov-
ernor. " But I '11 soon find a means of bringing them back to
their allegiance."

" A mutiny, egad ! " commented Sir Melville ; " and these are
the troops that we are to have as allies ! "

" No, faith," said Colonel Wogan ; " it looks more like these
are the troops that you 're not going to have as allies. And it
looks, general, as if you '11 have a mighty hard job of it round-
ing up your Connaught Rangers."

The governor and his staff, accompanied by Sir Melville,
now proceeded ashore. At every step their anxiety and exas-
peration increased at sight of men in blue and red uniforms,
fraternizing Wolf-dogs and Rangers, dancing arm-in-arm along
the streets, lustily cheering for the Irish Antipodean Republic.
They were refused admission to the fort, but President Finne-
gan Mullarkey of the new government, late private of Com-
pany C, graciously parleyed with them through a loop-hole.

" What is the meaning, sir, of this shameful and outrageous
nonsense?" hotly demanded the governor.

1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. 201

" The president of the Irish Antipodean Republic must insist
upon being addressed with respect and courtesy becoming his
exalted office,'' was the grave reply.

" Don't you know, sir, that this is an act of mutiny that
your neck is in danger of the rope?"

"The president knows no considerations but those of duty
to his people."

" Come, come, Mullarkey," urged Colonel Wogan, " enough
of this nonsense. A lark is a lark, but this is carrying the
thing too far. As your superior officer I command you to
admit us at once and to return to your duty."

" The government of the Irish Antipodean Republic must
decline to recognize the authority of any officers save those
bearing its own commission."

" See here, my good fellow," said Sir Melville Mowbray,
" you will please inform those soldiers of the British army who
are now in the fort that their shore-leave is cancelled, and
that they are required to return immediately to the ship on
pain of being court-martialed."

" Until its diplomatic service is fully organized," said the
president, " the Irish Antipodean Republican government pre-
fers not to enter into any entangling arrangements or compli-
cations with a foreign power. And now, as the urgent and
important business of forming a cabinet demands his attention,
the president is compelled to close this interview." And he
withdrew his head from the loop-hole.

A period of doubt and dismay ensued, attended by volleys
of the most fancy invectives and imprecations known to Ameri-
can and English militaires. As the party, which was momen-
tarily swelled by alarmed-looking officers of both armies, moved
aimlessly towards the docks, the generals were accosted by the
war-correspondent Harry Simpson, pencil and paper wad in
hand. He gravely requested their views on the revolution.

"Oh, pshaw!" growled the governor, "call this confounded
prank a revolution ! We '11 soon quench the revolution and
make some remarkable examples of the revolutionists."

"I doubt it, governor," said Simpson. "You see we are
eight thousand miles from everywhere, the cable is cut, and it
may be weeks before the news of our changed condition reaches
the outer world. The fortifications are strong and armed with
splendid new rifles ; the harbor is sown with torpedoes ; the
soldiers of the new republic are brave and enthusiastic ; the
natives, of whom twenty-five thousand will be immediately

202 THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

armed from the fort arsenal, heartily sympathize with them,
saying they strongly prefer an Irish to an English govern-
ment."

" By Jove!" said General Mowbray, "it occurs to me,
although not certain as to international law in the case, that I
ought to open on the mutineers with the guns of the Gram-
pus."

" If you do," said Simpson, " it occurs to me that your
Grampus will be promptly distributed over sky and water by a
single shell from Fort Madura."

" Well, may I trouble you for your views on the revolu-
tion and the general bearing it may have on international
affairs ? "

"Oh, rot ! Anyhow, what use could you make of our views
as long as the cable is cut ? "

" Why, I want them for my own local paper, the Madura
Monitor, official organ of the Irish Antipodean Republic. It
will be issued immediately clean, wholesome, enterprising,
spicy, and devoted to the best interests of the republic. Here
are some of my opening grist of items " and he read from
his notes :

"Michael O'Houlihan, the popular improvisatore of Company
F, is in the field as candidate for city clerk of Madura. Mr.
O'Houlihan has already made a rapid but successful canvass
of the electors, who all recognize the fact that Mr. O'Houlihan's
long experience in the city hall of Chicago amply qualifies him
for the post."

" If the sincere expectations of his friends are fulfilled, we
shall have a most efficient chief of police in Mr. Martin Gil-
hooley. Mr. Gilhooley served on the Chicago police force be-
fore the war, and rendered excellent party services by clubbing
malcontents who created disturbance at the primaries."

" Several public-spirited citizens are caucusing energetically
to secure the nomination as commissioner of public works of
Phil Finnerty, who is such a favorite among the boys of Com-
pany G for his most enjoyable vocal imitation of a cat-fight.
If Phil's friends only rally around him his battle is as good
as won."

" Our amiable friend Billy Murphy, of Company A, whose
rattling Irish jig is such a pleasing feature of regimental cele-
brations, is out for the comptrollership."

"Tom Bourke, of the Connaught Rangers, is spoken of as
coming superintendent of streets."

1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN' s WOLF-DOGS. 203

" For the important office of consul at Ballyhooley no wor-
thier claimant has come forward than Mr. Mike Ryan, whose
ability as a performer on the bagpipes is so well

" Oh, there, that will do go to Jericho with your list of
irrepressible political, place-hunting fiends ! " roared the gov-
ernor, thrusting his fingers in his scanty gray locks. " The
fellows are mad stark, staring, hopelessly, diabolically mad ! "

" Yet admit the method in their madness. Well, governor,
if you intend to run for any office under the new regime re-
member that the power of the press is at your service."

And Simpson went whistling on his way.

A succession of bewildering sights now shook the senses of
the governor and the general, and their respective staffs. Round
a neighboring corner came a brass band playing " Garryowen,"
behind which marched a stout, red-faced Wolf-dog, flanked on
each side by merry and stalwart Connaught Rangers, who bore
aloft a banner with the sprawling inscription, " Vote for Mulli-
gan, the Friend of the People, as Alderman of the First Ward''
They were surrounded and followed by an excited, yelling,
yellow-skinned crowd of natives. To this succeeded another
and evidently opposing procession, headed by another burly
Irish soldier, beneath the motto: "'Down with Bulldozing!
Support Cassidy, the Man that Gets the Jobs ! "

" The hardest drinker and the greatest gambler in the regi-
ment ! " groaned Colonel Wogan, and he wrathfully shook his
fist at the aldermanic candidates as they went by.

" Aha, you rascals, I '11 settle with you for this ! "

As the dismayed and bewildered officers proceeded vaguely
on their way, their thoughts too confused for utterance, they
suddenly found themselves amid a crowd of men, soldiers and
natives, assembled in front of a house whose windows bore the
hastily painted inscription, " Registration and Polling Place."

" Get in line there, get in line ! " cried a man with an im-
provised helmet and club ; " you must registher if you want to
vote."

" Pinch me, Wogan," gasped Governor Bennett ; " I want
to find out if all this is real or merely an awful nightmare."

"Come on now; do ye want to registher or not?" de-
manded the "copper," fixing a stern eye on General Mowbray;
"do ye want to registher and take out your papers and come
under the laws and constitution of this grand republic ? If so,
just get in line and don't be obsthructin' public business."

" Register ! " exclaimed the amazed and indignant Sir Mel-

204 THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

ville, his shaggy eyebrows contracting fiercely over his glittering
monocle. " Egad, sir, do you know, demmit, that you have
the audacity of addressing a loyal British subject?"

" Oh, let him alone, Chief Gilhooley," said a man in the
crowd; "don't you see that the gintleman is an Englishman?"

" What business has the trampling Saxon here, then ? "
growled Gilhooley.

" Oh, that 's all right he 's out after a brewery syndicate
or maybe a street car franchise."

" Capital is what we want, sonny," continued the speaker,
patronizingly addressing Sir Melville; "capital is what we want
to develop the resources of this great country, and maybe you '11
be the right man in the right place. Just drop round to the
city hall afther election and I '11 talk business with you. In-
quire for Alderman Hooligan for I know the boys are with
me and that I 'm as good as elected."

" That 's what you are, Mike," cried several intending sup-
porters of the would-be alderman, heartily slapping him on the
back and raising a yell of endorsement.

" That 's what he 's not, thin, ye designing gang of ward
heelers ! " shouted an opposing candidate ; " that 's what he
never will be unless this lovely and delightful city is to be
given up to a reign of terror of ballot-box and pay-roll stuf-
fing. No, Hooligan, we know your terrible record in the
Twenty-eighth, and divil a seat ever you '11 warm in the Madura
council chamber, not while we have good men and true to
rally round Cassidy and prevent you."

" That 's the talk, Dinny," yelled several voices ; " hurroo for
Cassidy, reform, and civil service ! "

" No, faith, no civil service for Madura ; them cranks wouldn't
give a poor woman a scrubbing job under the city unless she
knew algebra and conic sections ! "

"Right you are, Mike down with civil service!" came the
opposing cry ; and the rapidly increasing crowd, cheering, gib-
ing, and laughing, surged to and fro round the entrance to the
" place of registration."

" Order, keep order," remonstrated " Chief " Gilhooley, " or
I '11 knock all your heads off first and throw ye in the patrol
wagon after."

A sudden rush carried the American and British officers,
entangled in the crowd, into the building so suddenly devoted
to political purposes.

" Egad, the Celt is in his element ! " exclaimed Governor

1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. 205

Bennett, and he laughed for the first time since the coup
d'etat.

Around a table, with books and papers in front of them,
sat several soldiers in blue and scarlet uniforms, the judges
and clerks of election, who, aided by native interpreters, were
engaged in the work of registering voters, both Madurese
and invaders. The former class of newly enrolled citizens of
the Irish Antipodean Republic were evidently causing much
trouble and embarrassment to the interrogating officer, a stal-
wart sergeant of the Wolf-dogs, who wiped his steaming brow
as he addressed a native whose name had just been entered on
the books.

" Well, my yellow-skinned child of darkness and ignorance,
you surely bang Banagher as the making of a free and inde-
pendent elector ! I 've acted as judge of election in the Tenth,
the Seventeenth, and even the heavenly Nineteenth wards of
the City of Chicago ; I Ve initiated Bohemians, Bulgarians,
Dutchies, sheenies, dagos, Greeks, and Polaks into the grand
mysteries of proud American citizenship ; but not in all that
trying experience, not even in drilling the awkward squad of
the Wolf-dogs, was my angelic patience tested so severely as is
being done this blessed day. Why, my saffron-faced son of
new-born freedom, you don't know nothing at all. You don't
know what precinct you live in. You don't know the duties
of an independent voter to the ward boss. You wouldn't know
a caucus or a primary from a hole in the wall."

" Oh, spare the poor fellow's feelin's, Sullivan," protested
another of the Wolf-dogs ; " remember 'tis mighty little you
knew of politics when you came over to the Seventeenth from
old Tralee very little indeed till we took you up and educated
you, showing you how to make an odd V peddling tickets at
the polls."

A yell of delighted derision arose. The judge of election
got very red in the face.

" Put out that disturber, Crowe," he roared ; " put him out
at once or he '11 be making off with the registration books and
the ballot-box, as he did out in the Twenty-fifth when Doherty
sold out to Fitzpatrick."

" Chief " Gilhooley made a rush at the contumacious Crowe
for the purpose of ejecting him into outer sunlight, but sev-
eral men interfered, and after some commotion, which raised
the temperature of the room several degrees, quiet was re-
stored.

206 THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

" Let us have peace and order, boys, and show ourselves
worthy citizens," one man expostulated. " Let us remember
that the eyes of the world are upon us and govern ourselves
accordingly."

" Very sensible advice," commented Sir Melville Mowbray ;
" under present circumstances it is consoling to know that the
demmed fellows will never be able to act on it. No, sir ; at
home or abroad those crazy, confounded, fire-brained Irish can
never govern themselves."

A well-known Depewism promptly arose to Governor Ben-
nett's lips, but he checked it and remarked : " Their race has
supplied some pretty good governors to several States in the
Union, and also to various British colonies."

" Shove on the registration business, judge," urged a perspir-
ing citizen ; " don't keep us roasting here all day for the sake
of the Republic although I don't begrudge my blood or my
sweat to the cause."

" Right, right, shove on the business ! " cried an impatient
chorus.

Another amazed-looking native gave down his name, but his
examination, from an Irish-American citizenship-conferring
point of view, was more unsatisfactory than that of his prede-
cessor.

" And this is the kind of stuff the American eagle was going
to take under his wing," commented the irrepressible judge of
election ; " this is the kind that was to have the right of bein'
United States senator and sittin' on the same bench with Billy
Mason and Mark Hanna!"

" Never mind, me benighted son," he continued, addressing
the elector, " with the help of public schools, potatoes, corned
beef and cabbage, we'll make you -a good, sturdy voter yet,
and if you manage to survive the enervating effects of trolley
cars, live wires, cracked boilers, sewer gas, gasoline stoves, and
other resources of civilization you '11 be a fit and proper candi-
date for the Union League Club. Otherwise, my sweet yellow
aster, you had better emigrate to America, tie a cheese-cloth
round your head, call yourself Swami something-or-other, talk
theosophy to them and claim that you have most intimate re-
lations with some queer folks called the Mahatmas, who live in
caves in Thibet. A blessed country Thibet, for whenever they
catch an Englishman there, looking maybe for the Mahatmas
or for an excuse to grab the country, they ride him on a
saddle stuck full of big, sharp spikes. Go to the States, my

.1899-] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. 207

son; the less they understand you the more they'll appreciate
you. But in the meantime go home, put Hooligan's lithograph
in the window, and come out after supper and carry a torch."

" Stop that right here, Sullivan," thundered aldermanic
candidate Cassidy ; "'tis just like your gall to barefacedly
take advantage of your position to influence illiterate voters.
I remember in the Nineteenth how you made Brizzolara believe
he 'd lose his peanut stand unless he brought in twenty votes
for Johnny Powers. Such tricks don't go in the Irish Anti-
podean Republic, and the sooner you know it the better."

At this point a number of the Connaught Rangers entered
the room, and their leader, tall Sergeant Dee, asked for in-
formation as to the system of voting to be adopted by the
Republic. He stated that his comrades being mostly sons of
small farmers and tradesmen in the " old country," whose
property valuation did not entitle them' to vote for members
of Parliament there being no "one man one vote" principle
there they were best acquainted with the open system of voting,
used in Ireland in minor elections.

" Is it possible," inquired a Wolf-dog in a tone of commis-
eration, " that in this late stage of the nineteenth century there
lives a man who does not know the nature and the beauties
of the Australian ballot ? "

" I know the nature of it well enough," said Sergeant Dee ;
" but what do you mean by the beauties ? "

" The beauties are these," explained a diminutive Wolf-dog,
late an efficient ward hustler, " that when you scratch a guy he
needn't know the ' con,' else when he gets at the milk in the
cocoa-nut he '11 throw you down and give you the marble
heart."

The tall sergeant stared in bewilderment.

" Be the elephant on my collar " alluding to the regimental
badge, the memorial of a victory in India " I believe there 's
an interpreter needed between the Irish Irish and the American
Irish. For the sake of your great-grandmother's soul tell me
what you mean."

"Oh! he means that the ballot is secret," said the judge,
" that you can vote for a man or not, as you please, without
his knowing anything about it. That 's the beauty of it."

" Then that 's the beauty I object to," vociferated the lofty
Ranger, thumping the table. He was eloquent and proceeded
to demonstrate the fact. " I 'd deeply regret any dissension in
our councils," he said. " I detest the cloven hoof of discord.

208 THE REVOLT OF WOGAN' s WOLF-DOGS. [Nov.,

But fair play for a Connaughtman as well as for a Christian.
The days of Irish faction-fighting are gone, thanks be to
Heaven and Jemmy Stephens. Limerick 'buttermilks ' and Tip-
perary ' stone-throwers/ Wexford ' yellow-bellies/ Kilkenny
' wet-the-guns,' Ulster ' far-downs,' and County Mayo ' God-
help-us ' people, all meet in fraternal harmony with no cause
of quarrel. The same red, warm Irish blood courses through
their veins. ' One in name, one in fame, are the sea-divided
Gaels,' as McGee says. But we don't want treachery. We
don't want deceit. We don't want the chance of cutting a
man's throat behind his back. We want everything fair, open,
and above-board. What do we care who knows how we vote?
Let every man show himself behind his vote as he 'd show him-
self behind his gun. Who's afraid?" And he lapsed into
song:

" My father cared little for shot and shell,

He laughed at death and dangers,

And he 'd storm the very gates of hell

With a company of the Rangers."

"Open vote! open vote!" "Ballot! ballot!" rose the op-
posing cries, each side striving to convince the other of the
superiority of the system of voting advocated by it.

While Madura labored in the throes of an excitement as
intense as was caused by the late siege, an American cruiser
entered the harbor and sent ashore an officer and a file of
marines.

"What is the cause of all this?" inquired the amazed
naval man of Governor Bennett.

" Simply that blamed Anglo-American treaty, that 's all."

" But there 's no such treaty. The attempt to carry it out
has failed. At Washington the proposition was almost unani-
mously rejected."

The tidings brought by the officer passed rapidly from
mouth to mouth. A murmur rose which presently increased
to a cheer. Then cheer succeeded cheer, climbing like echoes
up the streets to the fort, whose ramparts were soon crowded
with wildly applauding soldiers. When the governor's attention
was attracted by the shouts he noticed that the green flag had
disappeared and that the stars and stripes waved as serenely
as usual. Boys in blue were seen at their various posts. The
American military machine at Madura, stopped for the space of
a few hours, clicked on as regularly as ever. The Connaught

1899.] THE REVOLT OF WOGAN'S WOLF-DOGS. 209

Rangers, preserving long faces before the indignant glare of
General Mowbray, blandly announced themselves as ready to
return on board the Grampus.

Harry Simpson came sauntering from the fort. " I am re-
quested to inform you, governor," he said, " that the Irish
Antipodean Republic has gone out of business, it being sud-
denly learned that there was no very urgent reason for its
existence. I may also add that its proposed brilliant official
organ, the Madura Monitor, is not likely to reach publication."

"A little more of this shock and strain would have killed
me," said Governor Bennett, wiping his dewy brow. " Now
that it is over I suppose we shall be worn to death holding
court-martials."

" Pshaw ! " laughed the American naval officer, " we are near
the equator."

" Egad, sir, I think you 're right," coincided General Mow-
bray. " Sailors have their pranks and privileges when on or
near the line, and why not soldiers ? I certainly shall not
dignify the grotesque business with an official report."

" Neither, I think, on consideration, shall I," said the gov-
ernor. " But say, Simpson, you would-be cable fiend, may we
depend on you to keep this ridiculous affair out of the news-
papers ? "

"Unfortunately you may; it would make a splendid 'scoop,'
but I have no means of sending it."

Dreamy, lotus-eating, tropical quiet settled down once more
over sunny Madura, of whose three-hour revolution no account
ever reached either the public press or the war-offices of the
United States or England.

VOL. LXX. 14

GSTASY.

BY FRANK X. ENGLISH.

h! soon the Lake shall i]ush its floW,
o)oor\ all the mountain glory go,

<Ar|d Lfif e uplift to Maiden |)noW
The sigh of deathful fears!

[put ah! afar from tropic trees
(Some Wandering sWeet prophecies

f song, aqd all the rhapsodies
That burst With April's tears.

<And oft, Within the mystic land
1 feel the snoW upon, my h,and;

Yet Whilst 1 die at Leone's command,
Lfife silently appears.

last, front] )eat\\ for e\?er free,
till captive sh,all my spirit be

LjoVe's deep-anchored ecstasy
1 hrough glad eternal years.

St. Mary's of the Lake, September j, 7^99.

Oh ! soon the Lake shall hush its flow,
Soon all the mountain glory go."

212 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT.

BY REV. JOSEPH McSORLEY, C.S.P.

f OME years ago a famous English writer published
a charming and suggestive essay on the con-
trast between pagan and mediaeval religious sen-
timent. His statements were quite justifiable, no
doubt, and still it is not improbable that many
of his readers would be led to form an utterly false notion of
the Catholic sentiment about the material universe. So few,
indeed, even among ourselves, thoroughly appreciate the church's
teaching on this point that it may well be deemed a profitable
subject of consideration. True though it be, as Arnold says,*
that the Idyls of Theocritus and the literary gospel of the
Ages of Faith are inspired by an altogether different, nay,
an opposite view of the natural world, only a short-sighted
and narrow criticism can suppose the characteristic sentiment of
Christianity to be an exclusive supernaturalism, scornful and
intolerant of the worth and beauty of visible things.

NATURE WORSHIP THE OFFSPRING OF RELIGIOUS CON-
TEMPLATION.

And yet many, at different times, have been impressed by
the vivid contrast of the two views concerning the nature and
office of the material world. Generally speaking, undue exalta-
tion of the visible universe Nature-Worship is assumed to be
an essentially pagan characteristic ; and Christianity, on the
other hand, aiming at things that appear not, seems to centre
its efforts on drawing man away from the contact and tangle
of matter, that he may rise to a life supernal. Still, proper
appreciation of the world of Nature is no weak or uncertain
force in the religious development of a human soul, and that
church which is the accredited representative of formal religion
has recorded its faith in the real greatness of Nature, has safe-
guarded Nature's sanctity with protecting anathema, has pro-
claimed in all the solemnity of magisterial definition Nature's
winning power to influence and instruct the mind of man
unto godliness.

How meaningless, then we may fairly say stupid is any

* Essays in Criticism, by Matthew Arnold : Essay on Pagan and Mediaeval Religious
Sentiment.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 213

resumt of Christianity's Nature-doctrine, such as that given by
the distinguished geologist who declares that the outcome of
Christian teaching in centuries past has been to place man
in an attitude half of fear, and half of hostility toward the
material universe from which delusion he has been rescued
by the newer developments of science, teaching him that earth
is the surest pillar of Heaven, that Nature is worthy of man's
trust and reverence, and that in place of there being a super-
natural realm distinct from the lower world, only one order,
one kingdom, one control obtains in the universe.*

Need we proclaim that due appreciation of the real grandeur
of the universe, its exaltation to the uttermost limits of the
sublime, the setting of its every curve and color in composi-
tion most beauteous and impressive, is not the proper fruit of
recent discoveries in natural science, not the work of evolu-
tionist, materialist, and pantheist, but rather the offspring of
religious contemplation, whereby the sweet face of Nature,
even as God's gracious sunlight streaming through stained
cathedral windows, grows more thrilling in its glow, more mys-
tically fair ? It must be realized that in gaining the loftiest
conception of Nature's unity and dignity, men perforce hark
back to truths proclaimed by dogmatic Christianity, and strenu-
ously defended by the old church of the centuries. True, like
every good thing, this fact is slighted or forgotten, and its
power belittled there where it best might expect recognition
and honor; but that happens because men still will be deaf to
Wisdom crying aloud on every high hill and under every green
tree.

NATURE LEADS UP TO NATURE'S GOD.

Let us, however, profess our belief in the divinity of Nature,
that open book wherein God's mind is writ, that most learned
and most solicitous of mothers, who has both power and good-
ness to bestow some of the deepest, holiest joys that man can
experience. Readily enough,, we declare ourselves out of sym-
pathy and sickened with commonplace eulogy of " scenery "
and " beautiful sights " ; but those very objects which to the
shallow, or the frivolous, are but occasions for ecstatic out-
bursts of washy sentimentalism, have a native dignity and
significance ranking them with the highest, most sacred influ-
ences in a man's life, his love for his mother, his history of
grief, his hope of a hereafter.

What best serves at once to illustrate and enforce this state-

* N. S. Shaler : The Interpretation of Nature. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1893.

214 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

ment is the fact that the attitude of men's minds towards visi-
ble Nature always, and as of necessity, has been colored and
shaped by their religious belief. In appreciation of Nature, as
in spiritual life, men may rank as infidels, as lukewarm believ-
ers, or as fervent saints. We would insist on the truth that.
cceteris paribus, the more spiritual a man is, the deeper his love
of Nature and the firmer his touch upon the Universal Life
throbbing through all creation ; and that the principles of dog-
matic Christianity and approved mysticism supposedly hostile
to Nature do, in proportion as they are assimilated, lift man
more and more away from the commonplace, clothe him in the
thrill of eternal verities, and draw him deeper into the har-
mony of creation than do the wildest dreams of materialist,
pantheist, or humanitarian.

REVERENCE FOR NATURE INTERTWINED WITH EARLIEST RE-
LIGIOUS THOUGHTS.

In the oldest poetry of the world the early pagan mytho-
logywe see how to its first children Nature dawned as the
physical embodiment of Divine power and beauty.* Unguided
by higher teaching, men framed a religious creed, stamped, or
rather informed, by the awful presence of Nature; and her ap-
pearances so interwove themselves with ethical and metaphysi-
cal concepts as to become ultimate verities beyond which noth-
ing farther was to be sought. So the innocent brightness of
the dawn, the " clouds that gather round the setting sun," the
majesty of the storm, the flowing waters, the luminous firma-
ment, the roaring ocean, and the whole glorious round of never-
ending beauties, drew forth man's deepest sentiments of awe
and reverence, and he fell down to worship, imagining "either
the fire, or the wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars,
or the great water, or the sun, or the moon, to be the gods
that rule the world. "f Morn's sweet approach was the flashing
of the fiery chariot of the god of Day. Alternations of rain
and sunshine, the changing of the seasons, seed-time and har-
vest, these were the coming and going of unseen divinities.
And as man rose from this animistic interpretation of the phe-
nomenal world to a purer monotheism, he merely ranged the
subordinate intelligences, controlling particular events, into a
sort of hierarchy under the sovereignty of a Supreme Being,
whose manifestations they were. The loftiest expression of this
exaggerated Nature-worship we find at last in the refined Pan-

* Read Ruskin's lecture on Athena Chalinitis, in Queen of the Air.
t Wisdom xiii. 2.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 215

theism which conceives of life as God, and sees the divinity
pass under varied form into sunset cloud, and living water, and
evening star, and mountain daisy, into the whispering winds,
the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air.

THE PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC VIEW FROM THE GREEKS.

In evident contrast with this, which we may call the pseudo-
religious interpretation of the natural world, is what may be
termed the secular, or pseudo-scientific. The Greeks, from whom
is inherited the scientific spirit so dominant in our modern
world, seem to have been the first to frame a conception of a
universe excluding the constant personal interference of unseen
divinities. The Platonic theory of universal, and Aristotle's
further invention of utterly impersonal categories, are apparent
foreshadowings of that explanation by means of which modern
science interprets Nature as quite apart from any invisible or
supernatural influence. Its supreme exaggeration is found in
the doctrinaires who systematize and classify all natural beauties,
just as science has systematized the divers departments of the
visible world ; nor have these any patience with one who pro-
fesses to discern in Nature something more than can be seen
with the eye and touched with the hand.*

Quite a number there are, keenly sensitive to the physical
charms of natural beauty, who nevertheless blind themselves
to the perception of that which rounds out and exalts these
earthly graces. The gifted Morris, who can portray Nature
with the hand of a master-artist, professes himself without under-
standing of that which he paints. f An earnest and life-long
student of Milton, Mr. St. John, declares : " Landscapes are
only valuable as a background to human action ; they are noth-
ing in themselves. And the utter inability of mere brute mat-
ter to call forth the energies of poetry is evident from the
writings of those doctor es umbratici who in every age have
wooed the muse ; their representations, like nothing in the
heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under
the earth, being but so many wild dreams, and their sentiments
and language every way worthy of the matter." \ Similar, no
doubt, was the belief of the clever writer who said that " to
us the heavens reveal not the glory of God, but rather the
glory of Isaac Newton."

* See an article on " Nature and the Poets," Dublin Review, January, 1872.
t See The Earthly Paradise, by William Morris.
\ Preface to Milton's Prose Works.

216 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE GOLDEN MEAN.

We have dwelt upon two views of the world of Nature,
both of them extreme and therefore false. But between the
neo-Pagan, or Naturalist, and the Pantheist there is room for
a just mean, and therein we find that interpretation of the
glorious world about us, dear to the true mystic, based on an
accurate estimate of Nature's relationship to God on the one
hand, and to man on the other. Though the sympathy of
many may be withheld from us, we cannot but profess our
belief in the religious significance of Nature. Certainly the
conventional attitude of mind is one of scornful ridicule for
such an opinion, but it is an attitude as false as it is unjusti-
fiable. The everlasting and many-sided sympathy of man for
his environment should intimate to every one that Nature stands
for something undreamed of in a commonplace philosophy.
Here, as elsewhere, errors born of exaggeration will be found
concealing truths of startling import and deepest worth, for
the great mysteries of the visible world will yield golden fruit
to patient culture ; not to every one in equal measure indeed,
but still ample reward cannot be wanting

" To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms,"*

to him who, with Goethe, can say : " I pass whole days in the
open air and hold spiritual communion with the tendrils of the
vine, which say good things to me " ; or to him who will listen
to Wordsworth, advising his " dearest friend ":

" Let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee."f

AN AID TO GROWTH IN SPIRITUALS.

But this apparent concession to Nature is really, be it re-
membered, an aid to growth in the spiritual life, which thrives
best when order and proportion are conserved, and the whole
man is developed harmoniously and symmetrically. The time
is coming, said Claude Bernard, when the scientist, the philoso-
pher, and the poet will all understand one another. And, in-
deed, let us hope that the reign of narrow absolutism, whether
religious or scientific, is no more. If we would comprehend
the whole message revealed to man, we must glean from many

* Bryant's Thanatopsis. f Tintern Abbey.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 217

quarters; for man's inquiry embraces not only the world of
matter and the action of unseen intelligence, but further still,
the play of an infinite spiritual Force, to whose influence the
human world of mind and matter is sensitive, and who is in
some sense related to, though essentially beyond, these. The
failure of the pseudo-science which attempted to dethrone God
from the sovereignty of the physical universe has been re-
peated in the passing of that Naturalism which aspired to rule
the literary and artistic world. French literature, since the
triumph of the younger Dumas, has reacted from distorted
realism to at least a moderate idealism which aims at the per-
fecting of life ; and serious men will turn from the Rougon-
Macquart series to Paul Verlaine, the converted Huysmanns, or
even the older school of the Romanticists. Perhaps they may
not stop short of learning from Chateaubriand of " relationships
and correspondences, and secret affinities between nature and
man, and between nature and the Creator, and thus arrive at
a perception of the bond of union between the feeling for na-
ture and the religious sentiment." * The psychological fad,
and the popular manifestations, often ridiculous, of a craving
for the occult and the mystical, may be things of a day, but
can we not hope that with larger experience we are coming
to recognize that not only the human being and the social
organism are proper study for mankind, but that further and
beyond these a Divine control is running through all things,
shaping them into unity, and breathing a message through
every sensible manifestation that reaches us :

" A something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things."*

So that, in fact, both physical and psychical worlds are but parts
of an order, the hidden beauty and poise of which is nobler far
than their partial interpretations. Perhaps the dawn of Nature's
unity misappropriated by evolutionists as due to their discover-
ies shows best of all how progress is tending back to the
securing of first principles, those fine old-fashioned ideas of God
as the First Cause, Good, True, Beautiful, One and Multiple, of

*See Manual of the History of French Literature and Le roman naturaliste, by F.
Brunetiere. t Tintern Abbey.

2i8 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

Whom came all things and through Whom are all things,
Whose footstool is the Everlasting Hills, Who speaketh in the
rain and the wind and the thunder, Who holds this universe in
the hollow of His hand, in Whom we, too, live and move and
have our being. There is a truth then, as well as an error, in
the scientist's declaration that all matter is but the result of
the action of energy, and that all phenomena whatever are but
manifestations of power ; but the fact has come to light not so
much through the discovery of Natural Law in the Spiritual
World as through the revelation of a Spiritual Law in the
Natural World.

NATURE HAS A MESSAGE ON HER LIPS.

It argues naught that this glorious prerogative is unseen by
many, for we cannot expect Nature's full splendor to dawn on
minds untutored, or perhaps warped by false influences. Often
the light that shineth into the darkness is comprehended not.
Very entertaining is the following account of instructions given
by an enthusiast in Nature-worship to a conventional young
lady anxious to learn:*

" * Tell me,' he says, ' did any flower ever make you cry ? '

* No,' answered Mercy, with a puzzled laugh; 'how could
it?'

'Did any flower ever make you a moment later in going to
bed, or a moment earlier in getting out of it?'

' No, certainly. You would not really have me cry over a
flower? Did ever a flower make you cry yourself? Of course
not ; it is only silly women that cry for nothing.'

' A man may really love a flower,' was the answer. ' A
flower comes from the same heart as man himself, and is sent
to be his companion and minister. There is something divinely
magical, because profoundly human, in them. In some at least
the human is plain ; we see a face of childlike peace and con-
fidence that appeals to our best. Our feeling for many of them
doubtless owes something to childish associations; but how did
they get their hold of our childhood ? Why did they enter our
souls at all ? They are joyous, inarticulate children come with
vague messages from the Father of all. If I confess that what
they say to me sometimes makes me weep, how can I call my
feeling for them anything but love ? The eternal thing may
have a thousand forms of which we know nothing.' '

And then when the speaker learns that his pupil cannot re-
member to have been ever consciously alone, he bids her, if she

* What 'j Mine 's Mine, by George Macdonald.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 219

would commune with Nature, to climb a lonely hill, sit down on
a solitary rock, look out over the wide world and up into the
great vault above, be still, and listen for a whisper.

Reading the above strong speech in the pages of a novel
one might, no doubt, be tempted to call it exaggerated senti-
ment. We are likely to listen with more reverence and yield
greater credence to the poets who may be considered as having
come from the contemplation of Nature with her message on
their lips. Whittier's " Worship of Nature," for instance, if not
of the first rank as a work of art, is, however, instinct with sug-
gestions that appeal most strongly to us. And so with others,
many more in number than we could wish to mention. But let
us turn to the poet-royal of Nature, the man whose song rings
echoes in the heart of every lover of the visible world, and who
has bared for our enlightenment the wondrous secrets of his
own intercourse with our common Mother. Mark how he came
to regard her with the fervent ardor of a boy's first love,
through living constantly in her presence :

" Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,

Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ ;
Whether her fearless visitings, or those
That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light
Opening the peaceful clouds.

In November days,

When vapors rolling down the valley made
A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods,
At noon and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
When by the margin of the trembling lake,
Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine ;
Mine was it in the fields both day and night,
And by the waters all the summer long.

I held unconscious intercourse with beauty
Old as creation, drinking in a pure
Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters colored by impending clouds.

220 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

Even then I felt

Gleams like the flashing of a shield ; the earth
And common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things." *'

And so the influence that we see portrayed in that exquisite
gem,

" Three years she grew in sun and shower,"
gradually wrought in him a positive growth, a development of
hidden powers :

" The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her ; for her the willow bend ;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.

The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her ; and she shall lean her ear

In man)'- a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face."

He had but passed his boyhood when he found the follow-
ing to be the result of his sympathetic intimacy with Nature :

" The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms were then to me
An appetite, a feeling, and a love."f

But further and it is Wordsworth's treatment of this point
which raises his verse to the dignity of a message the sensu-
ous enjoyment of Nature's beauty proves but the entrance to
an unseen world wherein man is led on from joy to joy, his
mind enlarging, his soul deepening, until in rippling brook, and
pattering rain, and mountain wind will be found an inspiration,

" In which the burden of the mystery
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.":):

* The Prelude, i. and ii. t Tintern Abbey. \ Ibid.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 221

It is Nature interpreting to man the still, sad music of
humanity :

" The human nature unto which I felt
That I belonged, and reverenced with love,
Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit
Diffused through time and space.

Thus was man

Ennobled outwardly before my sight,
And thus my heart was early introduced
To an unconscious love and reverence
Of human nature.

In the midst stood Man,
Outwardly, inwardly contemplated
As of all visible nature's crown, though born
Of dust and kindred to the worm : a Being,
Both in perception and discernment, first
Through the divine effect of power and love :
As, more than anything we know, instinct
With godhead, and by reason and by will
Acknowledging dependency sublime."*

And thus, finally, is the worshipper led through Nature up
to Nature's God. The day comes when he can read the world
as a Divine Scroll, when all living things breathe upon him
the fragrance of the Divine Presence and reflect the light
issuing from the Divine Bosom, when the sunset cloud on the
mountain shines beautiful as the feet of those who bring glad
tidings from an unseen world.

" I looked for universal things, perused
The common countenance of earth and sky :
Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace
Of that first Paradise whence man was driven:
And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed
By the proud name she bears the name of Heaven.
I called on both to teach me, and I felt
Incumbencies more awful, visitings
Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul
That tolerates the indignities of Time,
And from the centre of Eternity
All finite motions overruling, lives
In glory immutable.

* The Prelude, viii.

222 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

Wonder not

If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
With every form of creature, as it looked
Toward the Uncreated with a countenance
Of adoration, and an eye of love.
One song they sang, and it was audible.

If in this time

Of dereliction and dismay I yet
Despair not of our nature, but retain
A more than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life : the gift is yours,
Ye winds and sounding cataracts ! 'Tis yours,
Ye mountains! Thine, O Nature!"*

Schooled in this reading of Nature, we rise to that senti-
ment so thrillingly worded in the sunset scene at the conclusion
of the* great poem of the great Nature-poet:

" Eternal Spirit ! universal God !
Power inaccessible to human thought,
Save by degrees and steps which thou hast deigned
To furnish; for this effluence of thyself,
To the infirmity of mortal sense
Vouchsafed : this local transitory type
Of thy paternal splendors, and the pomp
Of those who fill thy courts in highest heaven,
The radiant Cherubim, accept the thanks
Which we thy humble Creatures here convened
Presume to offer ; we, who, from the breast
Of the frail earth permitted to behold
The faint reflections only of thy face,
Are yet exalted and in soul adore." f

And now to consider how far such a sentiment may be
claimed as a flowering of Catholic faith. It is significant that
a passage of the Excursion represents the Solitary objecting to
that ardent and intimate love of Nature which bursts forth in
religious imagery, because, as he declaims with true Protestant
fervor-:

* The Prelude, ii. and iii. t The Excursion, ix.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 223

" How, think you, would they * tolerate this scheme
Of fine propensities, that tends, if urged
Far as it might be urged, to sow afresh
The weeds of Roman phantasy, in vain
Uprooted ? "

Indeed, the above passages, interpreted in their finest sense,
are but the splendid artistic expression of that sublime concept
which the Church of God has ever defended, alike against the
fanatical Manichean and the extravagant Animist. This shows
us the touch of Nature making the whole world kin in adora-
tion of the Creative Spirit, whose Unity, Beauty, and Immen-
sity our universe faintly reflects. Saint Paul's profession of
faith in the visible things through which the invisible are clearly
seen and understood is adopted into the solemn definition of
the Catholic Church proclaiming the cognoscibility of God by
the natural light of reason. And is it more than the formal
expression of such sentiments as the following ?

" Go, demand

Of mighty Nature, if 'twas ever meant
That we should pry far off yet be u n raised

And if indeed there
An all-pervading Spirit, upon whom
Our dark foundations rest, could he design (ft'.??
That this magnificent effect of power,
The earth we tread, the sky that we behold
By day, and all the pomp which night reveals ;
That these, and that superior mystery,
Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,
And the dread soul within it, should exist
Only to be examined, pondered, searched,
Probed, vexed, and criticised ? "f

TRUE FLOWERING OF CATHOLIC TEACHING.

And we find this creed echoed and re-echoed through the
ages by those pre-eminent in claim on the Catholic's love and
reverence : by the Three Children singing their Benedicite in
the fiery furnace : \ by God's servant Job learning of his Mas-
ter from the earth, and its beasts, from the birds of the air,
and the fishes of the sea : by the Psalmist, as he sings of the

* " Those godly men

Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal,
Shrine, altar, image, and the massy piles
That harbored them."
t The Prelude. \ Third chapter of the Book of Daniel. fob xii. 7.

224 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.,

heavens revealing the glory of God, or of the eternal hills that
spoke to him as they do to us in our sorrow : " I have lifted
up mine eyes to the mountains, whence cometh help unto me ";
or of the glad chorus that he hears breaking forth from the
whole adoring universe : " Praise the Lord, fire and frost, snow
and mists, stormy winds that do his will, mountains and all
hills, fruit-trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping
things and fowl with wings, kings of the earth and all peoples,
princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens,
old. men and children." * When Saint Augustine sought God
in the sea, and the deeps, and the fleeting air, in the heavens,
the sun, the moon, and the stars, they answered : " We are
not God ; it is he that made us." " My asking was my con-
sidering them," he says, " and their answering was the beauty
I discovered in them." f A thousand years later the hill-
side of Subiaco, and the Umbrian plain, resounded with the
song of another saint, worshipping Nature, the handmaiden of
God. Even the martial-spirited Loyola in his communing with
the Creator " loved to contemplate the splendor of the starry
skies and to behold the flower-besprinkled meadows and fields
where he became rapt in God." Thus do the centuries, linked
in common adoration, encircle the shrine builded upon the
pillars of the everlasting hills.

ST. FRANCIS A LOVER OF NATURE.

Perhaps we may take the Poor Man of Assisi as the
typical embodiment of that combination of lofty mysticism and
artistic sensitiveness which is the true flowering of Catholic
teaching. To him everything in creation from the sun to the
glow-worm was instinct with divine existence. His was not
that spirit of artificial sentimentalism commonly and noisily dis-
played by so many. It was an integral property of his great
soul, an outcome of his inborn sympathy with Nature, due to
his abiding sense of an omnipresent Deity animating and sus-
taining the whole universe, its meanest as well as its noblest
part, rendering all alike in a certain sense divine. It was what
made him really the first of those artists soon to awaken
lethargic Italy into the life of the Preraphaelite movement,
artists to whom men are turning to-day, moved by the instinct
of piety, for their awkward drawing and ungraceful forms con-
tain a spiritual suggestiveness sought elsewhere in vain. Even
in the midst of his contemplation, Francis is ever communing
with the visible creation. He is fascinated by the gloomy

* Psalms xviii., cxx., and cxlviii. t Confessions, x. 6.

1899-] NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. 225

forest and ravished by the massing of splendid clouds ; he
tastes a joy unutterable as he gazes into the running stream,
or caresses a fragrant flower.* His Canticle of the Sun records
an ecstatic burst of song possessing at once the immortal
beauty of an artistic masterpiece, the calm grace and natural
dignity of a summer evening, or a starry night, and the solemn
religious thrill of a thousand-voiced Te Deum, or a midnight
Mass. It is the harmony of Nature worshipping her Maker,
caught and translated for us by a mystic soul, steeped in
Divine knowledge and aflame with Divine love.

The story of the Seraphic Saint presents a wonderful in-
stance of Nature's power as a religious influence. That her
language is not always audible, nor her symbolism intelligible,
merely presents the artist with the opportunity of winning her
secrets and voicing them in tone, or color, or line. The writing
on the wall must be interpreted to ordinary mortals, and to
read it with prophetic ring is the artist's duty. And who greater
than Wordsworth, among the poets fulfilling this office ? Nature's
favored child, for whom the language of forest, and ocean, and
storm held no secrets, whose music was in thunder and wind
and sounding water, he more than any other has impressed on
his generation how

" We, like foolish children, rest
Well pleased with colored vellum, leaves of gold,
Fair dangling ribbons, leaving what is best,
On the Great Writer's sense ne'er taking hold.
Or if by chance we stay our mind on aught
It is some picture on the margin wrought." f

Can we help recalling " the ethereal Ruskin," and his won-
drous reading of visible forms, his interpretation, for instance,
of the " ordinance of the firmament"? Can anyone rest satis-
fied if an alien to his faith in the clouds as messages from God,
thus expressed in a chapter of Cceli Enarrant ? " And all those
passings to and fro of fruitful shower and grateful shade, and
all those visions of silver palaces built about the horizon, and
voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories
of colored robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts
the acceptance, and distinctness, and dearness of the simple
words, Our Father, which art in heaven.' " We may not,
indeed, possess his, or Wordsworth's, wonderful faculties and

* See the first Life of Saint Francis, by Thomas of Celano.
t The Lessons of Nature, by W. Drummond.
VOL. LXX. 15

226 NATURE-WORSHIP A CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT. [Nov.

marvellously keen insight, together with perfect opportunity for
observation. We may not be sensitive, as some known to us,
so that Nature's beauty lifts us into momentary rapture and
leaves our vital energy terribly wrought upon. But neverthe-
less and mark it well ! all of us as we go farther in the
worship of Nature will grow closer to Nature's God.

CREDE EXPERTO, AND MAKE THE TRIAL.

It may be on some mountain lake by night with a wondrous
silver moon rising beyond a mile of shining, starlit water, over
dark walls of forest and rock, that out of the utter stillness un-
heard-of things will be whispered to you. Or perhaps in the
breaking of some dawn a silver sheen from the Great White
Throne will filter through gray clouds, and steal over mountain
tops, to stray in among myriad forest leaves, to soften the
grass, and rouse the birds, and burnish the cold dew lying dull
on the violets. Or maybe, again, as you lie on the spur of a
cliff, and miles away across the flashing waters the Day hides
in clouds he has touched into ethereal golden glory, there
will come flying to you the glitter of El Dorado through a rift
in the western sky ; and you will see, be it only for an instant,
the Holy City having the glory of God, the light thereof like
unto a precious stone, as it were a jasper, or a crystal, its
gates of pearl and its streets of pure gold, clear as shining
glass, and the Lamb the lamp thereof.

Ah! were we to sit at Nature's feet, she would teach us strange
secrets. Wherever she is, there too is her Life, there too is
her God, thrilling her into communicative gladness. The man
that cannot read God in Nature must be insensitive alike to
God and to Nature, dead to the influence of the all-pervading
spirit that animates whatsoever springs from the Creator's living
fingers. For through all these the Creator speaks : each hour
he stands at the door and knocks, looking through the windows,
peering through the lattices, his head wet with dew, and his
locks with the drops of the night, and if any man open, He
will enter in.

And so again I say to thee, were thy heart pure every
creature rippling water, and floating cloud, and flashing sun-
shine were, indeed, to thee a mirror of life and a book of
holy doctrine,* as with him who sang :

" To me the meanest flower that blows can give
' Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." f

* Imitation, ii. 2. t Intimations of Immortality.

HOUSE OF THE MISSIONARIES AT SURINAM.

THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA.

BY REV. CHARLES WARREN CURRIER.

lURINAM ! What a host of memories arise be-
fore me when I recall that name ! Unforgotten
scenes, beloved forms of the dead past are
clothed with life again, old familiar faces greet
me, and voices long since hushed fall upon my
ear. The fragrance of its early mornings, when the sun would
burst suddenly upon awakening creation, and the tropical
woods begin to teem with life ; the rapid course of its broad,
yellow rivers ; the fierce glare of its midday sun, and the cool-
ness of its declining day ; the varied hues of the heterogeneous
population, and the delightful association with my fellow-work-
men in that far-off portion of the vineyard, all these are
features of the kaleidoscopic picture now passing before me.

Memories like these which often flit before my mind were
forcibly recalled by a recent despatch from Kingston, Jamaica,
which appeared in our daily press. I reproduce it in full, that
it may serve as an introduction to this article :

228 THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. [Nov.,

RELAPSED INTO SAVAGERY. FUGITIVE NEGROES IN GUIANA
AGAIN MAKING TROUBLE.

Kingston, Jamaica, September n. The " Bush negroes " of
Surinam, Dutch Guiana, have been calling attention to them-
selves in a sensational exhibition of savagery, according to a
newspaper published at Nickerie, in that colony.

These people are the descendants of fugitive slaves who have
relapsed into savagery, making Goejaba and the other terri-
tories occupied by them counterparts of Equatorial Africa.
The Dutch government long ago concluded to let them alone.

The trouble that has just brought them into prominence
grew out of a fishing dispute. Some neighbors of the Goejaba
community poisoned the fish in a creek that appears to have
been common to both parties. The Goejabans then went on
the war-path, but apparently got the worst of it, for their vil-
lage was burned and they lost six warriors killed and many
wounded. Later advices will probably bring further details.

The incident is important as furnishing the Dutch authori-
ties a pretext to intervene and bring the natives under sub-
jection to the laws of the colony, whose peace they menace.;
As an ethnological study, illustrating the possibilities of the
negro when left almost entirely to himself, these " Bush
negroes" have, perhaps, not had the attention they deserve.

The last sentence is especially worthy of note, for though
they live in our Western Hemisphere, the Maroon negroes of

Surinam are less known to
us than the inhabitants of
Equatorial Africa, whom the
writings of Stanley and others
have introduced to the world.
The name of Guiana has,
within these last years, fre-
quently been brought to our
notice.^ It was Guiana that
figured in the Venezuelan
boundary dispute, and, on the
occasion of President Cleve-
land's message to Congress,
wrought our people up to
fever heat. It was off the
coast of Guiana that for five
long years the unfortunate
Dreyfus languished in prison.
Guiana is the name borne by

FATHER DOUDERS, C.SS.R., WHO DIED . .

AMONG THE LEPERS OF SURINAM. the entire region lying between

THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA.

229

the Amazon and the Orinoco, and five countries exercise juris-
diction over it. The eastern portion, watered by the Amazon,
lies within the limits of the Republic of Brazil, and the ex-
treme western, bounded by the Orinoco, belongs to Venezuela.
The central part is divided into French Guiana, or Cayenne,
on the east, British
Guiana, or De-
merara, on the
west, and Dutch
Guiana, or Suri-
nam, in the mid-
dle. The general
features of Guiana
are the same from
river to river.
Low, alluvial
lands on the coast,
rising toward the
interior, impene-
trable forests, di-
vided by gigantic
streams that color
the ocean with
their yellow mud
for twenty or
thirty miles out to
sea, the fauna and
flora of the tropics

ORANGE STREET, PARAMARIBO, ON THE SURINAM RIVER.

in rich abundance

such are some

of the characteristics that mark the region which helps to form

the basins of the Amazon and the Orinoco.

Dutch Guiana is inhabited by representatives of the five
great races into which humanity is divided. The aborigines
whom the first white settlers found there, when the French,
under Poucet de Bretigny, occupied the site of Paramaribo in
1640, still dwell in the land. Their tribes bear the historic
names of Waraws, Caribs, and Arrawaks. The Caribs and
Arrawaks were known to Europeans long before the names of
Huron and Iroquois, or even of Aztec and Inca, had been
heard. Living, some on the coast lands, others buried in the
primeval forests, they are peaceable neighbors, whose indepen-
dence has long been respected by the present masters of Surinam.

230 THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. [Nov.,

The whites, comparatively few in number, are descendants
of Europeans, of Jews exiled from the Portuguese dominions
they are Portuguese emigrants from Madeira or they belong
to the official circles, and to the clergy, the army, and the
navy.

A number of Chinese live scattered through the country,
occupied principally in mercantile pursuits. Since the emanci-
pation of the slaves, large numbers of coolies have been im-
ported from British India. These perform the labors of the
sugar plantations. They have brought India with them to the
New World in their costumes, their language, their religion,
and their mode of life.

African slavery was introduced into Surinam at an early
period in the history of the colony. During its long duration,
which came to an end with the emancipation in 1863, the
slaves were, with few exceptions, systematically kept aloof from
Christianity, the slaveholders fearing that the Christian reli-
gion would diminish the unrestricted dominion they exercised
over the souls as well as the bodies of their victims.

It is to slavery that the settlements of Maroon, or Bush,
negroes owe their origin. Imported from Africa to work on the
coffee and sugar plantations, the number of slaves increased to
such an extent that by the year 1690 there were about 25,000,
and in 1791 53,000 in the colony. From the beginning of the
European settlement the slaves began to run away from their
masters. This was not quite so difficult as it might appear.
The plantations, generally on the banks of creeks and rivers,
were surrounded by the dense growth of South-American vege-
tation. It was quite easy for any man, or body of men, to
hide in the fastnesses of the forest and defy the onslaught of
civilization. The negro, accustomed to African forests, and
hardened against the murderous climate of Guinea, Congo, or
Sierra Leone, had nothing to fear from the dreadful miasma
of a soil that would inevitably prove fatal to a white man.
He needed little to live upon, and what he needed the forest
and the river furnished him in abundance. The climate dis-
pensed him from clothing, and a hut of palm-leaves sufficed
him for shelter. Under the yoke of the white man he had
barely touched the outskirts of civilization, so that, when the
opportunity presented itself, he plunged into the savage state,
like a fish into water. Banding together, for the sake of con-
venience and of mutual protection, the runaway slaves soon
formed themselves into villages, whence they made their depre-

1899-] THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. 231

dations upon the plantations of their former masters. As early
as 1684 or 1685 they had increased to such an extent, and had
become so formidable to the colonists, that the latter earnestly
wished to conclude an advantageous treaty of peace with them.
Nevertheless, continually increas-
ing, they carried on for a century
and a half their warfare against
the whites. Expedition after ex-
pedition was s.ent against them in
vain. The negroes had the im-
penetrable forest and the climate
in their favor, while the greater
number of the European troops
found death in the unhealthy at-
mosphere of the forest. To defend
themselves against such enemies
cost the colonists thousands of
lives and immense sums of money.
As I think of this stubborn resis-
tance of a handful of blacks to the
disciplined soldiers of Europe, I

cannot help wondering how long it will take the Americans to
subjugate the Philippine Islands.

During the present century the Maroon negroes have con-
ducted themselves peaceably in the enjoyment of their inde-
pendence. They live far from the white settlements, isolated
in their villages, on the banks of the rivers. Treating with the
representatives of the Dutch government as freemen, not as
subjects, their chieftains rule their tribes as monarchs, exer-
cising the right of life and death. It is quite likely that
another war would be just as disastrous to the Dutch as the
previous ones were, and it is possible that the negroes would
not find it very difficult to lay Paramaribo in ashes, if they
took it into their heads, as I have heard they once threatened
to do.

At present the Maroons are divided into three principal
tribes, the Acecanians, Saramaccans, and Matoarians. They
live principally in the districts of the Upper Surinam, the
Upper Saramacca, and the Marowyne. I remember having
read of them in the " Lettres Edifiantes " of the Jesuits, who
many years ago had charge of the missions in French Guiana.
The old military cordon which, no doubt, served as a base of
operations against them, and which stretched from Post Gelder-

232

THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA.

[Nov.,

land, in the interior, to Post Orange, on the coast, is now com-
pletely abandoned.

The camps of the Maroons are generally situated on the
banks of the rivers. The cutting of wood constituting their
principal industry, these rivers serve as a means of communica-
tion with Paramaribo. There are no roads in Surinam worth
mentioning, and all travel must be done by water. The wood
is made into rafts, and thus floated down the river, in the same
manner as we see the work done in the lumbering regions of
the United States and Canada. Their vessels are hollow trees
which are known as coryals, a,nd which they navigate with
paddles.

The camp I visited was well kept, and built upon a level
plain of white sand. Their cottages are made of the leaves of
trees, such as the palm and cocoa-nut, and sometimes a porch
is added to the cottage. The apparel of these children of the
forest consists of very little, some of them going about almost
nude. A visitor to one of these camps might easily imagine himself
in Equatorial Africa, and an engraving taken from works of travel

in the Dark Con-
tinent would an-
swer to perfection
for an illustration
of a camp of Bush
negroes.

I have never
been able to dis-
cover much reli-
gion among them,
although I have
made inquiries
to that pur-
pose. Their
worship seems to
be nothing but a
tissue of supersti-
tious practices,
which prevail
among the other
pagan negroes

CHURCH OF ST. PAUL, SURINAM. , ,

throughout the

colony. IThe whole religion consists in propitiating deities,
apparently evil. Great veneration is shown to a large tree,

THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA.

233

known as the cot-
ton-tree, and offer-
ings of beer and
other articles are
laid at its foot.
Propitiatory sacri-
fices are also of-
fered to the
" Wattra - mama,"
the Mother of the
Waters. Christi-
anity has made
little progress
among these peo-
ple, and the Ca-
tholic religion
none whatsoever.
The Moravians
are the only ones
who, perhaps,have
made a few nomin-
al converts among
them.

Their morality
is at a low ebb, and
I have heard it

said that disease is, in consequence, thinning their numbers.
Polygamy is carried on, the limit of wives being a man's ability
to support them.

The government of the tribe is vested in a Granman, or
upper chief, who is succeeded after death by another member
of the family. Each village is governed by a captain.

The language of Surinam presents a philological problem.
Although the English have occupied the country but little, yet
the English language is the basis of the jargon now spoken
from one end of the colony to the other. It seems scarcely
credible that the short-lived British administration, which lasted
only seventeen years after the departure of the French, whose
sojourn was brief, should have stamped its features upon the
language of the colony. And yet such seems to have been the
case ; for the language of Surinam, the Negro-English, bears
all the evidences of a corruption from our language, with a
number of Dutch and other foreign elements.

Besides the seventeen years which elapsed between the

THE LATE RT. REV. JOHN SCHAAP, C.SS.R., BISHOP OF
NETALONIA AND VICAR-APOSTOLIC OF SURINAM.

234 THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. [Nov.,

landing of Lord Willoughby, Earl of Parham, and the conquest
of the country by the Dutch, the English were again masters
of Surinam for a few brief periods, some months between 1667
and 1668, again from 1799 to 1802, and, finally, from 1804 to
1816. That the English language has exercised an overwhelm-
ing influence upon that of Surinam is quite evident, nor do I
see how that influence could have been exerted if it is not to
be traced to the first occupation of the colony by the English
between 1650 and 1667. At all events, the Negro-English,
spoken from the Marowyne to the Corantyne that is, from
Cayenne to Demerara is now the predominant language of the
colony, the language of the street and of the home, though
not of the school. Although the Indians have preserved their
native tongue, which differs widely between the tribes, yet for
intercourse from tribe to tribe, and with the rest of the popu-
lation, they use Negro-English.

The Maroons speak no other language. Although they have
preserved their African mode of life, the language their ances-
tors brought from Africa has, with the exception of some
words, almost completely disappeared.

The two predominant elements of this tongue are English
and Dutch, the former for words of every-day life, the latter
for religion and expressions relating more to the world of ideas
than to material objects. This Dutch element was introduced
principally by the Moravian missionaries, who, having to deal
almost entirely with the negro population, cultivated the lan-
guage, reducing it to some kind of a system. Besides these
two elements, we find also Spanish and Portuguese words, to-
gether with some African. It is quite natural that the Maroons,
isolated as they are, should possess certain peculiarities of lan-
guage, and speak the Negro-English in a manner different from
the rest of the population. Although I have never observed
it, yet it seems reasonable to suppose that they have fewer
Dutch words, and more of the original features of the language.

From my first landing in the colony my attention had been
drawn to this singular people. They would occasionally come
to town in groups, either to bring their lumber, or perhaps to
make purchases. Their appearance alone marked them from
the rest of the population. Tall and powerfully built, of a jet-
black hue, without the admixture of white blood that is slowly
turning the negro into a yellow race, sometimes tattooed all
over their body, their plaited hair rising from their head like
horns, they might have looked like demons were it not for the
many-colored pieces of cloth in which they draped themselves.

1 899-]

THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA.

235

As the law forbade their coming into town in their nude con-
dition, they complied with it by adopting the most fantastic
and incongruous attire.

One day a number of them, impelled, no doubt, by curiosity,
walked into the church. Glad to have the opportunity of com-
ing into personal contact with them, I followed them and, as
they stood look-
ing around in won-
der at the various
objects that met
their gaze, I be-
gan a conversa-
tion. Poor crea-
tures ! how ex-
tremely ignorant
they were of all
religion. Pointing
upward, I told
them of God, and,
as they attentive-
ly listened to me,
their eyes follow-
ed my gesture as
though they ex-
pected to see God.
They questioned
me regarding a
statue of the Bless-
ed Virgin. I told
them it represent-
ed " na Mama foe
Gado" the Mo-
ther of God; but
how difficult it was to convey these ideas of our religion, some of
the highest and most metaphysical we have, to their untutored
minds ! God certainly has his own way of dealing with these poor
children of Adam, which, whatever it is, is a just and holy way.

It was not long before the opportunity presented itself of
visiting these poor blacks in their own homes. The bishop
had decided to pay a visit to the leper station of Batavia, and
he had chosen me to accompany him. The terminus of the
journey was to be a camp of Bush negroes, for the bishop
wished to find out if there were any possibility of doing mis-
sionary work among them.

RT. REV. WILLIAM WULFINGH, C.SS.R., BISHOP OF

PHILIPOPOLIS AND PRESENT VICAR-APOSTOLIC

OF SURINAM.

236 THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. [Nov.,

It was the month of September, the dry season was at
its height, and not a drop of water had for weeks moistened
the heated atmosphere. Our party consisted of the Bishop,
Mr. Arnold Borret, of Paramaribo, and myself, as first-class
passengers. A negro servant and a leper, whom we were con-
veying to the leper station of Batavia, were in what I might
call the steerage, as they housed out-of-doors on the top of the
wooden tent at the stern of the boat. The crew was made up
of about ten stalwart negroes, who plied the oar with a vigor
worthy of a more temperate climate, besides the man at the rudder.

How ,1 love to remember those pleasant days! Of the
three travellers who set off from Paramaribo on that Sunday
afternoon I am the only survivor. Right Reverend John Henry
Schaap, my beloved father in Christ, and one of my dearest
friends, has long since been numbered with the dead. He
sleeps beneath the cathedral he erected in the heart of the
tropics. Arnold Borret, at the death of whose father, once his
cabinet minister, old William III. of Holland could not restrain
his tears, was then one of the three judges of the Supreme
Court of Paramaribo, the friend of the governor-general, and a
man with a brilliant career before him. I loved him as I
have loved few since. After he sent his resignation to the
king and left all the world had to give him, I accompanied
him to the foot of the altar, saw him invested with the livery
of religion in the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer,
and we bade each other a last farewell. For a few brief years
he exercised the priestly office, and now, " Consummatus in
brevi," he too rests beneath the palm-tree in the torrid zone.
He preceded our friend, the bishop, to the tomb.

Such was the party that, with the turning of the tide, rowed
up the Surinam River, on a voyage to the interior of Guiana.
The night had suddenly fallen, as it does in those regions,
when we found ourselves in the canal that connects the Suri-
nam with the Saramacca. Tall and weird arose, like black
shadows on either bank, the giants of the forest, while the clear
moon shot down its rays between them, and the voices of the
oarsmen singing hymns floated over the silent waters. The
next day we glided down the broad Saramacca to the Atlantic,
and in the afternoon, cutting through the breakers of old
ocean and turning into the Coppename River, we reached the
leper station of Batavia.

Here we were hospitably received by the saintly Father
Douders, who had spent twenty-five years of his life among
the lepers of Guiana. A few days' rest in that abode of soli-

1899-] THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. 237

tude and suffering, and the journey was resumed. Up the
Saramacca we went, further and further from civilization. The
plantations were left far behind ; we passed several negro settle-
ments, exercising our ministry on the way, until the last vestige
of civilization had vanished, and we knew that the only inhabi-
tants of the country were the Indians and the Bush negroes,
excepting the laborers in the gold fields beyond the cataracts.

The beauties of tropical scenery with its luxuriant vegeta-
tion and the magnificent solitude of South American forests
have been so often described that I pass them over in silence,
though they stand like an in-
delible picture, imprinted upon
my imagination with all their
gorgeous coloring, and I still
seem to hear the sounds from
the animal world greeting the
new-born day.

It was four in the afternoon,
after several days of travelling,
when we sighted the camp of
the Bush negroes. Children
were sporting in the water, and
a number of black forms were
moving to and fro upon the
shore. The approach of our
boat had evidently caused a
stir in the camp.

On landing, we at once in-
quired for the " Granman,"and FATHER CURRIER AT SURINAM.
volunteers were not wanting to conduct the " Roomsoe Katho-
lyki Biskopoe " and his companions to the august presence.
We found his highness and several members of the court ready
to receive us, for we must have been observed when we first
turned the bend in the river. The palace was a thatched cot-
tage, apparently of two rooms, situated in the centre of the
camp. The chieftain, his wife, an old negress, as well as the
former's brother and son, had donned their clothes, which were
no better than those of a day-laborer on the plantations. The
old chieftain received us with the greatest courtesy, and what
struck me more than anything else was his natural dignity. It
was hard to conceive that he was merely the descendant of a
runaway slave. Yet, within the limits of his jurisdiction, he
was probably more powerful than any of the European consti-
tutional sovereigns.

238 THE BUSH NEGROES OF DUTCH GUIANA. [Nov.,

They had come to the conclusion, they said, that there was
only one God to be adored, and consequently they had per-
mitted the Moravian missionaries to establish a church among
them. We saw the little frame church in which, if I remem-
ber well, there was a small organ. The Moravians do not
seem to be as exacting in their demands as the Catholics must
necessarily be. Whether they have met with any marked suc-
cess I am not prepared to say. We found polygamy the great
obstacle to the evangelizing of these people. The present zeal-
ous Bishop of Surinam, Monseigneur William Wulfingh, who
has done wonders for the colony, has, I believe, made further
efforts toward mission work among the Bush negroes, but the
difficulties of the task are immense.

Bidding the old chieftain farewell, we accompanied his brother
and son on a tour of inspection through the camp.

In one of the huts we found an old sick negress lying on
the floor. The bishop gave her his blessing, and her cure which
followed, as we learned on a subsequent visit of some of the
negroes to Paramaribo, was regarded as the result. Quite a
sensation was created among the population when Mr. Borret
sat down to make a drawing of the camp. How I regret that
I had not then a camera in my possession !

The impression made upon us was by no means unfavor-
able to the blacks. They seemed kindly disposed and gentle
in their disposition, yet, as I think of the strong and well-
developed bodies of the men, they appear to me no mean ad-
versaries, when their savage nature is aroused.

The great evil among them, the curse of the colony, is im-
morality, and how can it be otherwise without the restraining
influences of the Gospel ? It may, however, be said that they
have not the refined vices of civilization. Their almost nude
condition seems natural to them, nor does it appear to exer-
cise any immoral effect.

Our visit over, we shoved off from the land, and the
negroes congregated on the shore to bid us good-by. As the
camp gradually receded we could still see the old negro chief-
tain, standing at the door of his hut and bowing his adieu.
Thus ended our visit to the Maroon negroes of Guiana, and I
returned to Paramaribo with a burning fever, brought on, no
doubt, by exposure to the sun and the miasma of the forest.
A few months later I had left Surinam for the United States.

1899-] REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS. 239

REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS IN
ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

BY REV. C. L. WALWORTH.

CARDINAL WISEMAN AND CARDINAL NEWMAN IN THEIR TRUE
MUTUAL RELATIONS.

'ATHER BERNARD being chosen Provincial for
the United States in 1850, it was not long be-
fore he made a demand to have the services of
the two American fathers in their own country.
This claim being acceded to, brought our five
years and a half of life in Europe to a termination. Leaving
this return home to be spoken of hereafter, I wish to make
these reminiscences linger a little longer in England in order
to place the noble personage of Cardinal Wiseman in juxtapo-
sition with the equally noble figure of Cardinal Newman. I
wish to show them in their true relations to each other, for
in history they cannot be alienated. Truth has yoked them so
together that no false glamour can ever separate them, or dis-
turb that substantial confidence which existed between them.
In their very pains and trials there was a sympathy which
minor differences, always existing more or less, could never
disturb. Cardinal Wiseman had for a very considerable time,
an all-sufficient time, the opportunity to act as patron to his
friend. Who can doubt the fulness of that gratitude which the
great English convert felt for the patronage that helped in
time of need to seal his own grand life-work ?

Newman's appreciation of Cardinal Wiseman's masterful
management of the storm which awaited him on his return to
England after the establishment of the new Catholic Hierarchy
is given us in a letter of his to Sir George Bowyer. Unfortu-
nately the exact date of this letter is not furnished us in
Ward's biography. It must, however, have been written in Jan-
uary, 1851. These are Newman's words:

" He is made for the world, and he rises with the occasion.
Highly as I put his gifts, I was not prepared for such a dis-
play of vigor, power, judgment, sustained energy as the last

240 REMINISCENCES OF A CA THOLIC CRISIS [Nov.,

two months have brought. I heard a dear friend of his say,
before he had got to England, that the news of the opposition
would kill him. How has he been out ! It is the event of the
time. In my own remembrance there has been nothing like it."

So much for Newman's confidence in Wiseman as the man
of the hour for England and for the new hierarchy. The fol-
lowing letter shows how Newman expresses his personal attach-
ment to this great friend and benefactor :

" EDGBASTON, February i, 1854.

" MY DEAR LORD CARDINAL : Your Eminence's letter arrived
yesterday evening, the very anniversary of the day of my hav-
ing to appear in court, and of the sentence from Coleridge.
And to-morrow, the Purification, is the sixth anniversary of
the establishment of our Congregation, and completes the fifth
year of our settlement in Birmingham. As to the Holy Father's
most gracious and condescending purpose about me,* I should
say much of the extreme tenderness towards me shown in it
did not a higher thought occupy me, for it is the act of the
Vicar of Christ, and I accept it most humbly as the will and
determination of Him whose I am and who may do with me
what He will. Perhaps I ought to remind your Eminence that
to do it, the Holy Father must be pleased to supersede one
of St. Philip's provisions in our Rule, which runs : ' Dignitates
ullas nemo accipere [debet], nisi Pontifex jubeat?

"As to yourself, I hope, without my saying it, you will un-
derstand the deep sense I have of the considerate and atten-
tive kindness you have now as ever shown me. I shall only be
too highly honored by receiving consecration from your Emi-
nence.

" I do not know that I have anything to add to the second
letter I sent your Eminence about a fortnight ago. I go to
Ireland to-night or to-morrow morning. My purpose is to call
on different bishops about the country, and to try to talk them
into feeling interest in the university. Now that I am to be
recognized as having a position in it, I have no hesitation in
doing so at once. I wrote to Dr. Dollinger about six weeks
ago, asking him to assist, if only for a time ; but I have not
had his answer yet.

" The reports in England are that your health is much bet-

* To secure for Newman a satisfactory status as rector of the Irish University the Cardi-
nal had sought to obtain for him a titular bishopric, and, believing himself to have succeeded
had written of it as assured.

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 24 L

ter for the change of scene and work; it was very pleasant to
have your own confirmation of them.

" Pray convey my hearty congratulations to dear Dr. Man-
ning. I hope he is not so ailing as he was last winter.

4 Kissing his Holiness's feet, and your Eminence's purple, I
am, my dear Lord,

" Your affectionate friend and servant in Christ,

" JOHN H. NEWMAN,*

11 of the Oratory:'

I will here introduce another letter. There is a lesson in
it. The lesson needs no expansion. It expands itself. Cela
va sans dire. There is a second lesson in it which may not
speak so plainly for itself. A few words from me will fill the
blank. The letter reads as follows :

"THE ORATORY, BIRMINGHAM, May 16, 1866.

" MY DEAR FATHER WALWORTH : Though I have left your
kind present of your volume f so long unacknowledged, you
must not suppose it to have been from any want of gratitude
to you, or any want of interest in its contents. It treats of
one of the main religious difficulties of the day and is a noble
attempt to meet our needs and you deserve the thanks of all
Catholics for making it.

"Then why have I not written to you about it sooner?
The reason has been that I am too much perplexed with your
subject to be able to say anything upon it which would be
worth saying, and I did not like to write without saying some-
thing. My perplexity arises out of the continually shifting con-
dition of physical discoveries, and the indeterminateness of what
is Catholic truth as regards their subject-matter, and what is
not, in a province in which the church has not laid down any
definitions of faith. None but an infallible authority can separ-
ate Apostolical tradition from hereditary beliefs, and till this
is done we must be at sea how to think and how to act.

"You have opened the subject, well and boldly and, while
a writer so acts, and submits all he says to the judgment of
the Catholic Church, his writings must tend to edification. But
I am much interested to get information as to the matter of
fact, whether your volume has been taken up, whether it has
made a disturbance, whether it has elicited any other works on
the subject. You are more outspoken in America than we are

* See Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman, by Wilfrid Ward, vol. ii. pp. 74, 75-
t The Gentle Skeptic.
VOL. LXX. 1 6

242 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Nov.,

here. I do not know enough of the state of science and the
teaching of divines to know whether all that you have said
may be safely said but, if I held it ever so much, I should
not dare to say it ; first in consequence of the scandal that it
would (needlessly) give here, and next because I should be in-
volved in a controversy, for which I have neither time nor
relish, nor strength.

" A letter like this is a poor return for your kindness but
it will be enough, I trust, to show why I have delayed my
acknowledgments to you, on an occasion when you would
naturally be desirous to receive as many criticisms upon your
work as possible.

" I am, my dear Father Walworth,

" Most sincerely yours,

"JOHN H. NEWMAN."

The second lesson to which I have already adverted before
giving the above letter is this : The prevalence of infidelity in
the general public, both in England and in America, brings
every clergyman, whether Protestant or a convert, or Catho-
lic by heredity, forward. It forces them to the front. And
the higher they stand and the more they are known and the
greater their influence with the public, the more distinctly they
are forced to speak their minds out.

Wiseman met the question fairly and frankly. Those that
wish to know how he met it will find it all in his far-famed
work on science and revealed religion, acknowledged by all
who have read it as dealing most learnedly and most liberally
with the subject. Some Catholics, who have never read any
book on the subject since, think they know all that is to be
known about it by posting themselves up on this book. They
expose only their own ignorance. Science, real science, has
progressed wonderfully since that day, and they ought to know
it before discoursing on the subject. The position of a great
leader of religious thought in regard to it can be gathered from
the preceding letter.

Here comes in very properly a letter addressed by Newman
from Rednall to Archbishop Manning at Westminster:

" REDNALL, icth August, 1867.

" MY DEAR ARCHBISHOP : My memory differs from yours as
to the subject of that letter of mine to Patterson last spring,
which he felt it his duty to show you. It did not relate to
Mr. Martin, but to Cardinal Reisach.

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 213

"You are quite right in thinking that the feeling, of which
(alas!) I cannot rid myself in my secret heart, though I do
not give public expression to it, towards one whose friendship
has so long been a comfort to me, has nothing to do with
the circumstance that you may be taking a line in ecclesiasti-
cal matters which does not approve itself to my judgment.

" Certainly not ; but you must kindly bear with me, though
I seem rude to you, when I give you the real interpretation
of it. I say frankly, then, and as a duty of friendship, that it
is a distressing mistrust, which now for four years past I have
been unable in prudence to dismiss from my mind, and which
is but my own share of a general feeling (though men are
slow to express it, especially to your immediate friends), that
you are difficult to understand. I wish I could get myself to
believe that the fault was my own, and that your words, your
bearing, and your implications, ought, though they have not
served, to prepare me for your acts.

" I cannot help thinking that having said this, I have made
a suggestion, which, if followed out, may eventually serve bet-
ter the purposes you propose in our meeting just now, than
anything I could say to you in any conversation, thereby se-
cured, however extended.

" On the other hand, as regards, not me but yourself, no
explanations offered by you at present in such meeting could
go to the root of the difficulty, as I have suggested it. I
should rejoice, indeed, if it were so easy to set matters right.
It is only as time goes on that new deeds can reverse the
old. There is no short cut to a restoration of confidence,
when confidence has been seriously damaged.

11 Most welcome would the day be to me, when, after such
a preparation for it as I have suggested, a free conversation
might serve to seal and cement that confidence, which had
already been laid anew.

" But such a day, from what I know both of myself and of
you, cannot dawn upon us merely by the wishing; and the
attempt to realize it now would be premature, throwing back
the prospect of it.

" That God may bless you and guide you in all things, as
my own sun goes down, is, my dear Archbishop, the constant
prayer of yours affectionately,

"JOHN H. NEWMAN."

*See Purcell's Life of Cardinal Manning, vol. ii. pp. 330, 331 ; for Oakeley's letter urging
a meeting with a view to a reconciliation see p. 327. Letters of Newman to Oakeley, pp.
328, 329.

244 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS L Nov ->

CANON OAKELEY'S LETTER.
" ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, DUNCAN TERRACE,

" ISLINGTON, N., 6th July, 1867.

" MY DEAR NEWMAN : The Archbishop has more than once
expressed to me his great regret that there should exist be-
tween himself and you what he feels to be a state of personal
alienation, and his earnest desire of doing anything in his
power to remove it.

" I have ventured to say, on my part, that the case was
hardly one, as I feared, to be met by mutual explanation, in-
asmuch as there was, I conceive, no personal quarrel nor breach
of charity on either side, but only the absence of those cordial
and intimate relations which depend on similarity of character,
antecedents, personal views, and the like, and which no media-
tion can bring about.

" I think, however, that you ought to know both what the
Archbishop feels and what I have said, in order that I may
not be the occasion, through any misrepresentation, of hinder-
ing what is abstractedly so much to be desired, and what I
should be so happy to promote.

" I have not told the Archbishop that I have written to you.

" Ever yours affectionately,
"F. OAKELEY."

NEWMAN'S LETTER TO OAKELEY.

"THE ORATORY, BIRMINGHAM, 28th July, 1867.

"MY DEAR OAKELEY: I will answer you as frankly as you
write to me. The only and the serious cause of any distance
which may exist between the Archbishop and myself, is the
difficulty I have in implicitly confiding in him. And I feel
this want of confidence in him especially in matters which con-
cern myself. I have felt it, and, as I think, on sure grounds,
for four years past. But I cannot state those grounds, for
various reasons: first, because they lie in a number of occur-
rences which are cogent mainly in their combination ; secondly,
because they lie in communications which have been made to
me confidentially.

" Such grounds, it may be objected, are not capable of being
met, and I ought not to expect others to accept them, it is
true ; I will appeal then, in my justification, to the general
sentiment of Catholics in the matter. Mr. Martin testified to
that sentiment when, on presuming last April to write on the
subject of obstacles at Rome to my going to Oxford, he found

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 245

it necessary to assure his readers that the Archbishop had
nothing to do with the matters to which he referred. And,
when an address was, in consequence of his allegations, sent
to me from the laity, certain distinguished lajmen testified to
the same sentiment, when they declined to sign it on the sim-
ple ground that to do so would seem to be taking part against
the Archbishop.

" This being the general feeling of Catholics in England
and at Rome, the best means which the Archbishop could
take to set the world and me right, and to show that he had
nothing to do with barring me from Oxford, would be to
effect the removal of any remaining difficulty which lies in
the way of my undertaking the mission. In saying this, I do
not mean to imply (what would be untrue) that it would be
any personal gratification to myself to have such difficulty re-
moved ; but that such an act on his part would be going the
way to remove an impression about him, which every one
seems to share, and no one seems even to question. Ever
yours affectionately in Christ, JOHN H. NEWMAN,

" Of the Oratory:'
NEWMAN TO OAKELEY.

"THE ORATORY, BIRMINGHAN, 3ist July, 1867.

11 MY DEAR OAKELEY : I have no objection to your using my
letter. However, I don't expect, any more than you, that any
good will come of it. The Archbishop will answer, ' I have
literally taken no part in the Oxford Oratory matter. My
action has been confined to the question of education.'

" If by ' his action ' he means what he has said or written
to Rome, his assertion is quite intelligible and credible. But
if by * his action * he means to assert that the action of York
Place has been simply withheld either way, nothing is more
opposed to fact. The question is, whether his house has not
been a centre from which a powerful antagonism has been
carried on against me ; whether persons about the Archbishop
have not said strong things against me both here and at Rome ;
and whether, instead of showing dissatisfaction publicly of
acts which were public, he has not allowed the world to iden-
tify the acts of his entourage with himself. No one dreams of
accusing me of thwarting him indeed, the idea would be
absurd, for I have not the power. The world accuses him
without provocation of thwarting me ; and the priina facie
proof of this is, (i) that his entourage acts with violence
against me. (2) That, instead of taking any step to prevent

246 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Nov.,

them, he contents himself with denying his having done any-
thing against me himself, and with deeply lamenting that there
should be a distance ^between us.

" The world thinks, and I think, that he has virtually inter-
fered in the Oxford Oratory matter and the world and I
have to be convinced to the contrary, or we shall continue to
think so. Ever yours affectionately, JOHN H. NEWMAN,

" Of the Oratory r

NEWMAN TO MANNING (Two years later).

" THE ORATORY, 3d November, 1869.

" MY DEAR ARCHBISHOP : Thank you for your kind letter.
" I can only repeat what I said when you last heard from
me. I do not know whether I am on my head or my heels
when I have active relations with you. In spite of my friendly
feelings, this is the judgment of my intellect. Yours affection-
ately in Christ, JOHN H. NEWMAN."*

It must be well understood that none of this correspon-
dence, brought. on through the agency of Canon Oakeley, led
to any satisfactory results. They certainly in no way repre-
sent any reminiscences of my own concerning the relations
which actually existed between Dr. Newman and his eccle-
siastical superior at Westminster. They came to my knowledge
only recently. They came to me, as they must have come to
others interested in religious matters there, as an unexpected
revelation. The words are monumental and documentary.
The revelation must remain as we find it lying before us, and
not as we previously conceived things to be or wished them to
be. The seal set upon Newman's life work by our Holy
Father, Pope Leo XIII., cannot-be removed. The memory of
Catholic England will henceforth see him gilded with the light
which belongs to his true apostleship ; and under all the cir-
cumstances of his later years, as we now know them, his last
thoughts could only be what his last words of joy give us :
"ALL IS LIGHT." It is painful to think how both Catholics
and Protestants who took part in the tidal wave which moved
so many forward towards Rome, including not only Newman
but Gladstone, had to struggle, until comparatively a late date,
with their suspicions of Wiseman's successor in the Archdiocese
of Westminster. How could they continue to address him as
" My dear Archbishop " at the head of letters, when the body
of those letters show so positive a want of confidence?

* See PurcelPs Life of Cardinal Manning, vol. ii. p. 346.

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 247

It is passing strange that Dr. Newman, after so distinctly
declaring in his letter to Archbishop Manning that he could
neither understand him nor put confidence in him, should ad-
dress him in terms of apparent affection. We know, however,
how hard it is to lay aside old terms of friendship when founded
on religious sympathy. We know, moreover, how hard it is
for Catholic readers to cease to recall as facts things which
never were facts, although for the time we received them as
facts. So it is, however. Cardinal Manning lias furnished the
world with his own record. He has made his own bed in
history, and on that bed henceforth he must lie.

XII.

WISEMAN AND NEWMAN. THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT.
BROWNSON, HALL, AGASSIZ.

My recollections of England's great Cardinal-Archbishop of
Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, are strong and vivid. His
relations with Dr. Newman, and with that crowd of converts
which clustered around that great founder of the English
Oratory as their natural leader in the current of conversions
to the old and only true Faith, has no signs of weakness in it.
My judgment will not tolerate any theory which imputes any
weakness to Wiseman's will. No theory of that kind can ever
be made to hold water. It is contrary to Wiseman's natural
disposition, which in the recollection of too many living men
that once knew him towers above all suggestion of such
weakness.

In Newman's letter to Wiseman of February I, 1854, given
in chapter xi., the reader will find these words : " As to your-
self, I hope, without my saying it, you will understand the
deep sense I have of the considerate and attentive kindness
you have now as ever shown me." This considerate kindness
did not consist merely of courteous language which, in order
to avoid scandal, often passes between old friends and allies
although in reality much alienated. Dr. Newman wrote this
letter frankly and cordially. He was not referring to fair
words but to kindly deeds intended for the benefit of New-
man and of Newman's cause. The letter was written, be it
remembered, at the time when Newman, through Wiseman's
influence, had been elected to preside over the new Dublin
University. It was considered necessary that the new president
should be clothed with the dignity of bishop, an official stamp

248 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Nov.,

from Rome to add to the prestige which his personal character-
istics had already given him. Newman put in no profession
of modesty to waive away this proffered honor. He entered
heartily into Wiseman's plans. Having been assured by the
Archbishop that Rome was ready to carry out this purpose
in his favor, he writes: "As to the Holy Father's most
gracious and condescending purpose about me, I should say
much of the extreme tenderness towards me shown in it, did
not a higher thought occupy me, for it is the act of the Vicar
of Christ, and I accept it most humbly as the will and deter-
mination of Him whose I am and who may do with me what
He will." He goes on to point out a difficulty in the way of
accepting a bishopric, not in order to oppose the purpose
but, on the contrary, to further it. The Oratorian rule under
which he had now lived for five years forbade his acceptance
of a bishopric except by command of the Pope. This would
require a special dispensation from Rome.

At the date of this important letter from which we are
quoting, namely, February I, 1854, Newman was already the
acknowledged Rector of the Catholic University, and in the
letter he announces his intention of going directly to Ireland
to enter upon the duties of his new post there. The first
work to be done was to call upon the Irish bishops and "to
try to talk them into feeling interest " in that foundation, so
eager and prompt in action was this simple-minded, single-
hearted man in all that belonged to his apostolic vocation.

When I said just now that Newman entered heartily into
Wiseman's plan with regard to his selection as Rector for the
new institution of a Catholic Irish University, I must not be
misunderstood. This Catholic University for Ireland was not
Newman's own idea. His own zeal and judgment was in favor
of a Catholic College at Oxford.

Was the founding of the Irish University an enterprise
started by Wiseman ;as the best thought left to utilize the
position and powers of his friend? It may be so. It proved
to be a failure, however, and the bishopric would not have
helped it. The great Cardinal of Westminster had perhaps
overrated his influence, and a retreat both for him and for the
Rector became manifestly necessary. Chief-Justice Coleridge's
insults, with the foul shadow of Achilli, soon passed away. The
fine of $46,000 was soon paid up, with a remainder of $18 ceo,
the most of which went to the Irish University fund.

Newman was soon restored once more to the Birmingham

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 249

Oratory. Wiseman was forced by circumstances to change his
thought of a bishopric for his friend, and Newman was forced
to change his first desire to establish a college at Oxford.
Can any one doubt that God overruled both these plans in
Newman's favor that he might do greater things to promote
the work of England's conversion ?

I trust it will not be too much of a digression to introduce
here a remarkable feature in the character of England's great
Cardinal-Priest. His love of truth he carried out to a critical
tenacity to what is most perfect in duty and accurate in detail.
In order to illustrate this last characteristic I must borrow an
anecdote from a lecture given by Mr. Adams, a clerical con-
vert, at Union Hall in Albany, on Thursday, March 2, 1899.

When John Henry Newman was five years old he went
with his mother on a visit to a friend. One of the first ques-
tions the lady hostess asked of her guest was :

"On what train did you start?"

Newman's mother answered : " On the five o'clock train."

The boy at once corrected her statement by saying : " The
train, mamma, started at fifteen minutes to five."

"Why, child," said she, "what difference does it make?"

" I want you to be accurate," said the little John Henry.

" I am afraid I shall have trouble with that boy ! " ex-
claimed the mother to her friend.

I cannot leave the stately figures of the two great English
Catholics with which I have just been occupied without com-
paring them with another prominent form which rises before
me, namely, that of our own Crestes Brownson. He was like
these former, a true Catholic. He resembled both in many
personal peculiarities. He was unlike either in many other
respects. He was of English blood, but no Englishman.
Americanism is to be found in him and strongly marked.
Keeping in mind the distinctions so neatly and justly made by
the Head of our Holy Church, now happily ruling,* Brownson
had " certain endowments of mind which belong to the
American people, just as other characteristics belong to various
other nations." It is not necessary here to dwell on any pecu-
liarities not commendable. When wishing to speak fairly
and courteously of nations and of people, it is best to dwell
on the nobler types of character. St. Francis of Sales says
somewhere that we owe to our own country a preference of

*Leo XII I. 's Letter to Cardinal Gibbons on "Americanism" (see CATHOLIC WORLD
MAGAZINE for April,. 1899, p. 139).

250 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Nov.,

affection not always of reason and in argument. Brownson was
not always so courteous and considerate as the two great
English Cardinals of our day. He was a Rough Rider and
could be rude betimes. Whether he was, as Lord Brougham
is recorded to have said of him,* " the master mind of
America," is a point I forbear to discuss. He was unquestion-
ably a master mind in America, and American Catholics espe-
cially may well be proud of him as a noble-hearted and
faithful Catholic, *' an Israelite indeed " and without " guile."

I have said that this great American Catholic convert was
a " Rough Rider." I do not mean this in every sense of that
word, but in the best sense, perhaps, that that word will admit
of, unless we descend to slang, which I do not wish to do. I
mean simply that sometimes when engaged in argument and
getting warm, as he often did in such case, he was not always
sufficiently considerate. He did not always consider what kind
of person he was talking to or talking of. Dear and valued as
he was to me, I do not hesitate to acknowledge this of him.
When speaking or writing calmly he would often acknowledge
it, and without excusing it. In fact, I have known him to
criticise others for failing in this kind of considerate charity
even towards adversaries from whom he differed very widely.
I know him to have criticised a most friendly intimate for
showing suddenly a book to a learned professor, taken down
from a shelf, when the learned man insisted no such author or
book had ever existed. I have this from the doctor's own
mouth. He could be rude sometimes, as Dr. Newman said he
was. A beautiful trait in him and a remarkable one was that
when he committed an error of faith or memory he would not
deny the truth in order to make himself consistent, however
recently the mistake may have been made. He would rather
say:

" When I said that last year I was mistaken. I know better
now."

Dr. Brownson is well known to have criticised severely
Newman's theory of Development. What that theory really
was I do not well know, either from the author's own lips or
from the book itself. From what I have heard of it, I have
no doubt that it has helped to solve a question which must
come up and must be solved by Christians who stand by the
ancient faith once delivered to the saints, and whose duty
and anxiety it is to defend it against all adversaries so far as

* See CATHOLIC WORLD MAGAZINE for April, 1899.

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 251

they feel themselves capable. Newman and Brownson may
claim to have done this. Thus differing and yet co-operating
in their way of explaining Catholicism to prejudiced outsiders,
both are made orthodox and conforming to the ancient faith
by teaching under the protection of the same chair of Peter
from which both sought to derive instruction. Neither meant
to disregard the memorable maxim of St. Vincent of Lerins :
" In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas."
St. Vincent would have united with both in adding: " Erga
auctoritatem docentem, docilitas."

I cannot leave this point without giving the reader an
anecdote to illustrate Newman's position I mean his position
as I gathered it at the time of my residence in England, and
from the lips of one of his own disciples. One of these was
making a spiritual retreat in our convent at Hanley Castle.
If I am not mistaken, it was Dalgairns, the Oratorian, at that
time attached to the London community. Before he left he
was asked one day, at our table :

" What does Dr. Newman think now of his theory of
Development ? "

The answer was : " This seems to be his present position.
He does not intend to argue the subject any further ; but his
opinion is that at the bottom of the question, as treated by
him, there is something true which a more perfect scrutiny and
a more competent authority may bring into better light."

Passing -by at this moment what theologians on religion,
charlatan philosophers on all subjects, or infidels, may say in
regard to the difference between development and evolution,
let me here repeat the opinion of a dear friend of mine, one
of the most thorough scientists I ever knew, and one of
whom this State of New York has reason to be proud. I re-
fer to Professor James Hall, so long State Geologist of New
York, and predecessor of John M. Clarke, the able student and
assistant of Hall, succeeding him in his duties under a new title
of State Palaeontologist. I asked Professor Hall :

" Please tell me what is you opinion of evolution ? And
how does it differ from what we used to call development?"

He answered : " By evolution we mean in geology nothing
different, that I know of, from development. The former, how-
ever, is a more convenient term for us. We do not wish to be
confused by any special definition by others, outside of our
work, in other sciences for which we are not responsible."

Professor Hall then mentioned to me the name, I think, of

252 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS. [Nov.,

Babbage, the mathematician of Cambridge, who has also written
on geology, as an author who had given him a light or a clew
of light to harmonize his faith with new discoveries in science.
I could never get access to the book he referred to. but from
that conversation I had this confidence in him, that his faith
in Revelation was as true as my own. Neither of us felt that
there was any need of controversy between ourselves on the
main question.

Somewhat later, when giving a mission at Cambridge,
Mass., I visited the celebrated Louis Agassiz, and spent a
whole morning with him in his museum by his own invitation.
I would not have visited him otherwise ; hearing it reported, al-
though unjustly, I believe, that he was apt to be uncourteous
when clergymen called upon him. It was not so, however, in
my case. What pleased me most at his museum was the last
chamber of collections that he showed me. It was a large,
long room full of coffins, not opened as yet but containing
human bodies obtained from every quarter of the world.

" I am not content," he said, " when I study different races
of men to have only their skeletons or skulls." He then
showed me a few large glass jars filled with heads and faces. " I
have some of these things," he said, " but I do not value them
very highly now. I look for the whole man with his whole
flesh on him, and then I compare him with what I know of
man before death, with his various pursuits and habits which
guided him through life. This is my way of studying zoology,
including anthropology, and as far as possible the fauna of
palaeontology."

After this we returned to his private room. There he en-
couraged me to talk, and I introduced questions regarding the
relations of Sacred Scripture with natural science. He believed
firmly in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth. His great
difficulty was not a disbelief in the supernatural, but an aver-
sion to admit miracles in nature, which he thought argued a
want of order in the Creator. He was not a Christian, neither
was he a heathen nor an atheist. I do not praise this great
man for everything he did or said. I cherish his memory,
however, for his readiness to acknowledge a mistake, and his
love of light when it was made to gleam on his understanding
and his conscience. For all such men, especially when I am
brought in contact with them, my prayer is :

<k Solve vincla rets: Profer lumen c<zcis"

1899-] " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED." 253

"THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED."

BY E. B. BRtGGS, D.C.L. (Catholic University of America).

|N an article contributed by the writer to the July

| number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD MAGAZINE

the following propositions were advanced, viz.:

ist. That the inhabitants of the Philippine
i Islands do not, as yet, constitute a jural "so-
ciety " or "people"; and 2d. That until such a jural " society"
or " people " shall have been developed in those islands (the
possibility of which no " expansionist " has, to the knowledge
of the writer, attempted to deny), there will be no "moral
entity " therein, capable of giving the "consent of the governed "
spoken of in the "Declaration of Independence."

In view of the fact that the above propositions have been
fiercely assailed by a great number of Catholic editors, even
to the absurdity of personal attacks upon the writer, he pro-
poses, in this paper, not only to substantiate the same, but to
prove, from the writings of the most eminent Doctors of Holy
Church, for centuries acknowledged, in the words of Suarez, as
"ancient, received, and true" the third and further thesis that,
until a jural ' society " or "people " exists, i. e., until organic
social and civil or political society, as contradistinguished from
the family, patriarchal, and tribal forms of domestic society, is
evolved, there can exist, nowhere, a moral organism capable of
giving the "consent of the governed" spoken of in the immor-
tal " Declaration."

Is it true to assert that, "Wherever men are found, organ-
ization is found"? that, "Wherever human society exists, in
the tribal or barbaric forms, as well as in the civil, the princi-
ple of the Declaration of Independence is applicable"?

The opinions of the great Catholic Doctors, accepted for
centuries as "ancient, received, and true," not only say "Nay! "
to this, but clearly and distinctly point out the radical and es-
sential difference between the purely domestic society of the
family, patriarchal, and tribal types (the patriarchal and tribal
forms being universally conceded to be but amplifications of
the family), and social and civil society ; in other words, " na-
tion," or " state," or both combined. They go on to affirma-

254 " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED:' . [Nov.,

tively show: 1st. That social and civil society does not come
into being by any "consent," expressed or implied, of the
"members" or "people," if you will, of the pre-existing three
domestic types of society ; and 2d. That it does come into ex-
istence by the direct act of God, operating through the "jus
naturale" and upon being so constituted, and only so consti-
tuted, collective ly t and as a " moral entity," gives the " consent
of the governed " by the institution of its agent, political gov-
ernment, by virtue of the "jus gentium"

That the foregoing observations do not constitute " sophis-
tical special pleading " is proved by the subjoined literal quo-
tations, viz.:

Balmes, History of European Civilization, chap, xlviii.: " Na-
ture herself has pointed out the persons in whom resides the
paternal power ; the wants of the family mark the limits of this
power" " In society it is otherwise : the rights of the civil
power are tossed about by the storms of human events. The
rights and duties of parents and children are written in charac-
ters as distinct as they are beautiful. But where shall we find,
with respect to the civil power, an expression as unequivocal ?
If power comes from God, by what means does he communi-
cate it? In what channel is it conveyed? Was there ever a
man who by natural right found himself invested with civil
power ? It is clear that in this case power would have no other
origin than paternal authority ; that is to say, in that case
the civil power ought to be considered as an amplification of
that authority, as a transformation of domestic into civil power.
We immediately see the difference between the domestic and
the social order, their separate objects, the diversity of rules by
which they must be regulated, and we see how different are
the means which they both use for their government. I do
not deny that the type of society is found in the family, and
that society is in the most desirable condition when it most
resembles the family in command and obedience ; but mere
analogies do not suffice to establish rights, and it always re-
mains indubitable that those of the civil power must not be
confounded with those of the paternal.

" On the other hand, the nature of things shows that Provi-
dence, in ordaining the destinies of the world, did not estab-
lish the paternal as the source of the civil. Indeed, we do not
see how such a power could have been transmitted, and the
legitimacy of its claims have been justified. We can easily un-
derstand the limited rule of an old man, governing a society

1899-] " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED" 255

composed of two or three generations only, who were descended
from him; but as soon as this society increased, extended to
several countries, and consequently was divided and subdivided,
the patriarchal power must have disappeared, its exercise must
have become impossible, and we can no longer understand how
the pretenders to the throne could come to an understanding
with each other and the rest of the people, to justify and
legitimize their rule. The theory which acknowledges the pa-
tcrnal as the origin of the civil power may be as promising as
you please ; it may sustain itself on the example of the patri-
archal government, which we observe in the cradle of society ;
but there are two things against it. First, it asserts, but does
not prove; second, it has no means of attaining the end for
which it was intended, viz.: the consolidation of government,
for it cannot establish itself by proving its legitimacy. I have
not been able to find this theory either in St. Thomas or in
any of the other principal theologians ; and to go still higher,
I do not know that it can find any authority in the doctrines
of the Fathers, in the tradition of the church, or in Scripture
itself. It is, consequently, a mere philosophical opinion, of
which the explanation, and proof, belong to those who ad-
vance it."

Billuart, Moral Theology : "I maintain, in the first place, that
legislative power belongs to the community, or to its represen-
tative. It will be objected that the right of commanding and
compelling is vested in the superior, and cannot belong to the
community, since it is not superior to itself. To this I reply :
Society, in one sense, is not superior to itself, but in another
it is. The community may be considered collectively as one
moral body, and in this sense it is superior to itself as con-
sidered distributively in each of its members''

Concina, Theology, Rome, 1768: "In support of the
opposite opinion, many answer, and certainly with more pro-
bability and truth, that, in reality, all power proceeds from
God, but that it is not delegated to any particular individual
directly, unless by consent of civil society''

St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principium : " It is in
the nature of man to be a social and political animal, living in
community. Thus, if it be natural to man to live in society,
it is necessary that some one should direct the multitude."

Bellarmin, Bell, de Laicis, I. iii. c vi.: " In the first place,
political power, considered in general, and without descending in
particular to monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, emanates im-

256 " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED:' [Nov.,

mediately from God alone ; for being necessarily annexed to the
nature of man, it proceeds from Him who has made that na-
ture. Besides, that power is by natural law, since it does not
depend upon men s consent, since they must have a government
whether they wish it or not, under pain of desiring the de-
struction of the human race, which is against the inclination
of nature. In the second place, observe that this power resides
immediately, as in its subject, in all the multitude, for it is by
divine right. In fine, society should be a perfect state.

" In the third place, observe that the multitude transfers this
power to one or more by natural right, for the republic not being
able to exercise it by itself, is obliged to communciate it to
one or to a limited number ; and it is thus that the power of
princes, considered in general, is by natural and divine law ;
and the whole human race, if assembled together, could not
establish the contrary, viz., that princes or governors did not
exist.

" Observe, in the fourth place, that particular forms of
government are by the law of nations, and not by divine law,
since it depends on the consent of the multitude to place over
themselves a king, consuls, or other magistrates, as is clear;
and, for a legitimate reason, they can change royalty into aristo-
cracy, or into democracy, or vice versa, as it was done in
Rome.

"Observe, in the fifth place, that this power in particular
comes from God, but by means of the counsel and election of
man, like all things which belong to the law of nations ; for
the law of nations is, as it were, a conclusion drawn from the
natural law by human reasoning."

Suarez, Defence of the Catholic Faith, Book III. c. ii. : "We
consider the opinion of the illustrious Bellarmin ancient, re-
ceived, true, and necessary."

Thus is the contention of the writer thoroughly and com-
pletely supported by the unanimous opinions of the most bril-
liant galaxy of Catholic divines who have ever discussed the
theory of the state ; and in language very plain, very simple,
and very easy to understand.

Nor do our American publicists fall behind these illustrious
Catholic Doctors. Lack of space forbids a citation from more
than one of them ; but the name of Theodore Woolsey will
appeal to every student of his country's institutions. He says,
Political Science, vol. i. chap. ii. : "If, however, the question
refers to the rational grounds on which we can justify the ex-

1899-] " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED:' 257

istence of an organized society, the answer is found in the
nature and destination of men, in their being so made as to
seek society, for which they are prepared by the family state,
and in the impossibility that society should exist, be permanent,
and prosper, without law and organization. The individual
could make nothing of himself or of his rights except in
society; society unorganized could make no progress, could
have no security, no recognized rights, no order, no settled in-
dustry, no motive for forethought, no hope for the future.
The need of such an institution as the state, the physical
provision for its existence, the fact that it has appeared every-
where in the world unless in a few most degraded tribes, show
that it is in a manner necessary, and if necessary natural, and
if natural from God."

The Catholic Doctors have proved the meaning of the
" consent of the governed " in the natural law, and in the law
of nations, i. e., that it is, solely and alone, the act of social
and civil society in ordaining for itself a frame of political
government.

Has it a different meaning in political science and constitu-
tional law?

A citation or two will suffice to answer the question.

Woolsey, Political Science, vol. i. c. vi.: " Is any formal
assent of the individual necessary before he is morally bound
to obey the laws and conform to the Constitution? Or what
is meant by the maxim that government depends on the * con-
sent of the governed'? Does it mean that a single person,,
when he comes to the age of reflection, is free to renounce his
allegiance to his country while he remains within its borders?
If by allegiance we intend obligation to obey the laws, this
obligation certainly can never be refused, unless there is some
higher obligation requiring disobedience, for to admit such a
rule would destroy all order and confidence. The society
would not consent to it without ruining itself, and this con-
sideration alone ought to make the individual feel that he
cannot, in this respect, act as he chooses." . . .

" Or, again, will it be said of a whole people that a constitu-
tion which they had no hand in making imposes on them no
obligations, unless they give each one for himself a voluntary
adhesion to it ? " . . . "Society" (sec. 68), "in short, has
more wisdom and right than the sum of its members, and
much more than contending claimants in a given case. The
right comes not from renounced power but from the state's being,

VOL. LXX.- 17

258 " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED:' [Nov.,

in the natural order of things, God's method of helping men
towards a perfect -life"

"If, again" (sec. 73), "it be asked, What is intended by a
public act of a people occupying a large territory? as, for in-
stance, the adoption of a new form of government, or the
choice of a line of kings, the answer must be that if the people
act at all, they act either in masses constitutionally gathered
at various points through a country, or by representatives con-
stitutionally appointed, or appointed by some of those rude
methods of which history furnishes so many examples."

This, and this alone, is the only " consent of the governed "
known to Anglo-American jurisprudence; and, hence, spoken of
by the representatives of the American people, in the " Declara-
tion of Independence." It comes into being with the birth of
the state, and is the act of the juristic people, the collective
citizenship of the state, through its representatives, not only in
the creation of its political agent, government, but in all legi-
timate acts of that government, once it is created.

What, then, is meant by the term "Juristic People"?

It has a threefold meaning, viz.:

1. It has a social meaning, implying a distinctive civilization.
Bluntschli, Theory of the State, c. ii.: " The conception of a
* people ' may be thus defined. It is a union of masses of men,
of different occupations and social strata, in a hereditary so-
ciety of common feeling, spirit, and race, bound together es-
pecially by language and customs, in a common civilization, which
give them a sense of unity and distinction from all foreigners,
quite apart from the bond of the state."

2. It has a civil, or national, meaning, viz.: "When we speak
of the people we designate those who live within the territory
of the nation " . . . " organized into a jural society and
occupying a position among the independent powers of the
earth." (Black, Const. Law, c. ii.)

3. It has a political, or state, meaning, implying the political
citizenship of the state. (Penhallow v. Doan, 3 Ball., U. S.
Sup. Ct., 93 ; Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall., 472 ; Dred Scott v.
Sanford, 19 How., 393.)

Do the " Filipinos " fall within any of these three classes ?

It "goes without the saying" that they do not fall within
the second or third. It takes more than "proclamations" to
constitute a " nation " or a " state."

Do "they fall within the first of the above three-fold mean-
ings? It is asserted that they do; but, as remarked by Balmes,

1899-] " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED'' 259

assertion does not prove ; and, so far, not one scintilla of evidence
has been placed before the level-headed and common-sense
American people to prove the assertion. On the contrary, in-
stead of proofs, we have been regaled by " senators" and
"editors " with a grand revival of the social and political theo-
ries of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

What do we know of them? We know that the Spaniards
found them barbarous tribes ; and that such civilization as they
have was forced upon them by Spanish power. We know, in
the words of Ramon Reyes Lala, himself a " Filipino," that
they have a " half-civilization " ; that they are divided ; that,
of Malay origin, " they probably number from 6,000,000 to
8,000,000 ; and are divided into a great many ' tribes,' scattered
through hundreds of islands " ; that of these " tribes " the
" Tagalogs," of Luzon, the " Visayas," of the central and
southern islands, and the fierce " Moros," constitute the bulk.
We know, too, that a part, and a part only, of the " Tagalogs "
are in insurrection against the United States. We know, too,
that among them more than sixty different . languages are
spoken ; and that they never have had any form of civil or
political government of their own.

It is asserted that the American people were in the same
position as the Philippines at the outbreak of the Revolution !

Is this true? It is not only false ; but legally false, in Eng-
lish constitutional law. Prior to the American Revolution the
colonies were recognized by English constitutional law to be
a juristic " people," social, civil, and political ! Campbell v.
Hall, King's Bench, 1774 (Cowper, 204).

Admitting, with the " Declaration," that the just powers of
government are derived from the consent of the governed,
and claiming that the " Filipinos " are incapable of giving
that consent, whence come our just powers to govern them ? "

The answer is easy, viz. :

1st. Because the "Filipinos" are not a "people."

2d. Because the "jus gentium" which is not violative of
" natural law" but is " a conclusion drawn from the natural
laiv by human reasoning " (see Bellarmin, above), has always
recognized title by " occupancy," by " conquest," and by " ces-
sion " ; and this doctrine has been incorporated from the " jus
gentium " into international law. (Glenn, International Law,
chap, iii.)

3d. Because international law is adopted in its full extent
by common law ; and is a part of the municipal law of the

260 " THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED'' [Nov.

United States. (Blackstone's Comm., Bk. IV. c. 4 ; Talbot v.
Seeman, I Cranch, i ; The Amelia, 4 Dall., 34 ; The Charming
Betsy, 2 Cranch ; Kennett v. Chambers, 14 How., 38 ; The
Scotia, 14 Wall., 170.)

4th. Because the American Union is not " a contract or
compact between the States of the Union " and concerning
" only those entering into it " ; but is a " national sovereignty,"
supreme within the limits of its powers. (McCulloch v. State
of Md., 4 Wheat., 316; Ex Parte Siebold, 100 U. S, 371.)

5th. Because external and general " sovereignty " are vested
in the Union; because the United States, by virtue of its ex-
ternal and general sovereignty, possesses precisely the same right
as any other sovereign state or nation to acquire territory by
" occupancy," by " conquest," and by " cession " ; and possess-
ing the right to acquire, it would, in the language of the
Supreme Court in " Mormon Church v. U. S.," be " absurd "
to say that it has not the right to govern. (Rutgers v. Wad-
dington, Mayor's Court, City of N. Y., Aug. 27, 1784; Am.
Ins. Co. v. Cantor, I Pet., 511 ; Mormon Church v. U. S., 136
U. S., i, 42-43; Jones v. U. S., 137 U. S., 202; In Re Ross,
140 U. S., 453 ; Fong Yue Ting v. U. S., 149 U. S., 698 ; U.
S. v. Kagama, 118 U. S., 375.)

The foregoing observations, authorities, and citations are
submitted to the calm judgment of my Catholic fellow-citizens.

It is for the " unhyphenated," plain, sensible " American
People " to decide whether our country is " right " or wrong.

Holland and the Hollanders * is a pretty bit of
book-making ; paper, printing, and to some extent
the illustration, being of the best. The writer has
given us generous information regarding a coun-
try not sufficiently well known to the ordinary
European traveller, and while not exactly destined to do duty
as a Baedeker, the volume would make an interesting compag-
non de voyage in the land of dikes. Descriptive comment on
the political, racial, and physical peculiarities of Holland con-
stitute the chief element in the book, the literary part of the
work being done in bright and pleasing style, and the plan
being methodical and thorough. Of special interest is the
part devoted to matters religious, where the writer notes the
national passion for sectarianism as extreme enough to be
compared with our own American vagaries. We fail, however,
to find any notice of the important gains that the Catholic
faith has actually made in Holland during recent years. All
told, the book is a welcome one and will probably tempt new
visitors to the Zuider-Zee.

It is the possession of simplicity and freshness, so far re-
moved from affectation, yet so little marred by dulness or
triviality, that has gained fame for Madame de Sevigne's letters.
Culture, natural refinement, charm of manner, all lend their
tone to her simplest sentence ; and sound judgment together
with sparkling wit are characteristic of her style. The selec-
tions published in the volume f before us, being principally
drawn from her correspondence with her daughter, bring out
in strong relief the prominent traits of the writer's personality,
and will give considerable aid in the study and formation of
the qualities essential to perfect letter-writing.

An abundance of stories and illustrations told in masterly

* Holland and the Hollanders. By David S. Meldrum. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.
t Selected Letters of Madame de Sevigne. Edited for school .use by L. C. Syms. New
York : American Book Company.

262 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

fashion, simple but instructive treatment of doctrine, and a
general tone of friendliness and good-natured interest will be
sure to catch and retain childish attention. Now and then,
perhaps, there may be language or topic in Mother Loyola's
book * a trifle beyond the very juvenile minds for whom the
book is destined primarily, but the commentary of an elder
friend would make this a lasting gain rather than a drawback.
Nor will the volume lack interest for those of larger growth ;
in fact, many a priest may find it wonderfully helpful in sug-
gesting and exemplifying a mode of religious teaching which
is sure to be most successful in Sunday-school talks, or in the
conferences at children's retreats. Surely we cannot but be
gratified at the skill, originality, and success with which the
author has adapted the best educational methods to the im-
parting of solid and necessary religious instruction.

The translation of the Abb Hubert's Dialogue Philosoph-
ique \ puts an interesting little volume in the hands of English
readers. They will find it to display rather clever handling of
a rather formidable subject, and in both plan and treatment it
must be credited with a charming originality. The idealist, or
rather the metaphysician, personified by Plato, voices his senti-
ments about the nature of the universe from a point of view
that can be occupied as well by the empiricist, the modern
name of science, whom Darwin is made to represent. Using
the very terminology of physical science, Plato develops with
beautiful lucidity the thesis of Nature's unity. He shows how
the invisible world is just as real as the world of matter, both
being but expressions of a great unseen Reality ; and working
on the very premises of the empiricist, demonstrates the exist-
ence of the spiritual order and its ruling Divinity from man's
actual adaptation to such existences. In similar fashion he
brings the scientific mind to the recognition of evil as a neces-
sary element in the evolution toward final good. And then,
with a warning to him who would lay down symbols as a
limit to further investigation, he dwells upon the unseen world
as the one, true, and everlasting reality, absolutely unchange-
able, interpreted now and then, partially and imperfectly, in
ideas and definitions which never exhaust its immensity. The
little volume thus affords interesting suggestions to the scien-

* The Child of God; or, What comes of our Baptism. By Mother Mary Loyola. Edited
by Father Thurston, S.J. London : Burns & Gates ; New York : Benziger Brothers.

t Plato and Darwin : A Philosophic Dialogue. By the Abbe Marcel Hebert. Trans-
lated by the Hon. William Gibson. London and New York : Longmans, Green & Co.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 263

tist, the idealist, and above all to the man who loves to see
God manifested in the universal unity which makes beast and
flower and human soul, in some deep, true sense, the mutually
related offspring of the Primary Personal Cause.

The Characteristics of the Early Church * has for its object
the presenting in a brief and clear manner proof of the iden-
tity of the teachings and practices of the church now with
those of the primitive church. Broadly speaking, the followers
of the reform leaders agreed in holding that the church of the
first five centuries was that of Christ as he intended it. It is
good controversy, then, to identify the church of to-day, in faith
and practices, and devotional life, with the church of the first
five centuries. Father Burke handles his matter with decided
ability, and he has, moreover, succeeded in compressing a vast
amount of accurate information into a small volume.

In a work entitled The Church f Dr. Bagshawe considers the
question": What is a Church? and in relation to that the ob-
jections to what people call the " Roman theory." The book,
therefore, is intended for believers in the Lord's divinity and
mission and who feel that he left some sort of system, not
merely as a memorial, like a philosophical school, but to carry
on his work. It would be irrelevant to ask what is a church
unless those addressed held that something meant by the word
was established. No doubt the author puts the question, Has
Almighty God left a distinct living body upon earth with
power to teach in his name, or has he not? But that is merely
a prelude to the essential question : What must be the necessary
characteristics of such a body ? It is obvious, if we want to
determine where that body is to be found, we must look for
those essential marks. It may be said that Protestants of all
kinds are agreed, or are tending to agreement, in the opinion that
there can be no religious creed, no dogmatic teaching of any
kind, without a divinely appointed and perpetual Teacher. This
opinion has been forced upon them by the fact that among
them Christianity is assuming by degrees the position of a
rather uncertain system of morality, which each one is free to
interpret for himself. If there be such a Teacher, it must
naturally be that "pillar and ground of truth " which our Lord

* The Characteristics of the Early Church. By Rev. J. J. Burke. Baltimore: J. J.
Murphy Co.

t The Church. By John Bagshawe, D.D., Canon Penitentiary of Southwark. London :
Catholic Truth Society.

264 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

meant his church to be. Of course the question still remains:
What is the Church ?

We take it that it must be some kind of organization ; the
word body, other words of our Lord and those he inspired,
establish this necessity ; and being so, it must have certain
qualities and attributes, and it must have received some measure
of authority from God. If we were all agreed as to those
points, it would be plain sailing enough. We want a definition of
the word church as our Lord used it. If he intended something
definite, we want to know the limit, the boundaries; to know
who is included, who is excluded. If a definition cannot be
had, there never has been a church, never a body, an organiza-
tion, a society. Christians are a rabble or a number of rabbles,
an Asiatic horde, a collection of atoms, anything ; but they are
not a body, not an organization. We have outlined the line of
inquiry, and we send the reader to the work for the fuller
statement of the question, with the answer ; and we give the
assurance that he will be well repaid for his pains. We regret,
indeed, we cannot follow Dr. Bagshawe throughout his invalu-
able presentation of this divine fact. His is one of the rare
books which can only be adequately examined by a review,
and which cannot at all be made the subject of a mere book
notice.

When we come to the function of the church as a witness
to the Lord and his revelation, we find the writer in his hap-
piest manner. He is careful, studiously considerate, but not
weakly civil in his method of testing the claims to the title of
witness of those bodies or institutions that are called by recog-
nized names, and contrasting them with the church's claim. Of
course no one would dispute the importance of this function-
in fact, it includes in itself, or implies, the functions of teacher,
ruler, guide in all that belongs to salvation and yet, strangely
enough, it has not been put forward by any body or associa-
tion of believers except that world-wide body which we call
the Church, and which Episcopalians and other Dissenters call
the Roman or Romish Church. Remember, not one of the
schismatic bodies, even though by antiquity, the possession of
the sacramental system and body of doctrine, these may put
forward a claim to be reckoned Apostolic churches not one
has asserted a capability to give testimony, a title to be a wit-
ness for the revelation of our Lord. This is a consideration
of the most pregnant character, and we wish readers to con-
sult Dr. Bagshawe upon the point. He illustrates the necessity

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 265

and the character of a witness to the Lord's teaching in a re-
markably lucid manner from common experience, and this analogy
is running side by side with the Lord's own declaration that
he wanted his church to be his witness to the uttermost ends
of the earth and the last moment of time. In a word, he
demonstrates in a way a fair man can understand that it is
essential to a revelation, such as God has given in the Christian
faith, that a permanent testimony to it should be left on
earth, and that to give this testimony is the first office of his
church. Again, if this office of witness be the primary object
of his church, he must have so constituted her as to enable
her to know her duty and to perform it. Now, the only body
on earth capable of fulfilling the functions of a witness is the
Catholic Church, or, as her enemies call her, the Romish
Church.

Then the author, in the next chapter, expands the function
of witness into the necessary senses of teacher and guide, and
thence passes to the subject of "A Single Infallibility." He
deals with the objections to what the High-Church people call
the " Roman system." It is a tiresome task, in truth, to be for
ever listening to these objections ; but meaningless as they
are often, and valuable as they never are, they must be an-
swered lest fair-minded people should fail to see the real
points in debate. We hear of " absolute dogmatic despotism,"
" will-worship," the " credulous ear," " not guided but driven,"
and so on ; but what is the value of such phrases if God have
in reality appointed an authority to tell men what is the
truth ? The useful course is to look for the authority, since
we are all practically agreed Protestants as well as Catholics
that such an appointment has been made. Of course our old
friend Galileo comes up, and we are free to admit that the
condemnation, to the Protestant mind, may present a difficulty
to the church's infallible authority in matters of doctrine. If,
however, you are convinced, as you reasonably can be, of her
infallible authority, the right inference would be that you mis-
understand the character, the meaning of the condemnation.
Objections can always be found, doctrinal, critical, historical,
if you look for them ; but do they touch the marrow of the
matter? We can understand objections going to the root of
all revelation nay, more, even to the existence of God ; but if
men believe in a revelation and its corollary, a permanent and
infallible authority to expound it, does it not seem inconsistent
to impeach the authority ?

266 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

The plain truth is, that the meaning of the condemnation
of Galileo is misunderstood by those who bring it forward as
an objection to the infallible authority of the church or of
the pope. There are two functions in the pope : that of su-
preme teacher and that of supreme judge. He acts differently
in these two functions. The case rests upon the question, In
which capacity was the pope deciding ? There is no doubt
whatever but that he was deciding as judge ; and to the judg-
ments pronounced in that capacity infallibility does not attach.
The point has been well presented by a Protestant, Karl von
Gebler, who concludes as follows : " The conditions which would
have made the decree of the congregation, or the sentence
against Galileo, of dogmatic importance were, as we have seen,
wholly wanting. Both popes* had been too cautious to en*
danger the highest privilege of the Papacy by involving their
infallible authority in a decision of a scientific controversy ;
they therefore refrained from conferring their sanction, as
heads of the Roman Catholic Church, on the measures taken
at their instigation by the congregation * to suppress the doc-
trine of the revolution of the earth.' Thanks to this sagacious
foresight, Roman Catholic posterity can say to this day, that
Paul V. and Urban VIII. were in error 'as men* about the
Copernican system but not 'as popes'." This sound criticism
of a Protestant on the stock case of his co-religionists against
infallibility is commended to their attention and to that of
certain Catholics ; and with it we close this very inadequate
notice of Dr. Bagshawe's admirable treatise.

The author of Idyls oj Killowen f gives us a number of
short poems of rare merit. Before saying a word more we
must ask the reader to learn from himself his reason for spell-
ing "idyll" with one 1. If the argument from analogy be suf-
ficient, he has made out his case. No one would expect any-
thing else from a man of Father Russell's reputation in
polite literature; and having said so much we go to the first
piece, which is entitled " The Irish Farmer's Sunday Morning. "
It is indeed an idyll a glimpse of fairyland in life, of the
purest happiness amid real fields ; very sweet, very gentle, yet
strong and earnest as homely things may be when seen in that
light of fancy and spoken of with that power of expression which
are gifts given only to the child of song. Charming is the only
word we can use to describe the succession of pictures show-

* Paul V. and Urban VIII.

t Idyls of Killowen. By Rev, Matthew Russell, SJ. London: James Bowden.

l8 99-J TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 267

ing a peasant family in their home before all things are ready
for their setting out to Mass, then on the road to Mass, and
finally in the chapel-yard. The humor is delicious, and natu-
ral as the scene and sunshine ; the touch which shows the
mother's pride in her children's appearance, particularly a more
grown daughter's, is so benevolent that one would think the
reverend writer was their own parish priest, to whom every
thing of theirs was a matter of most amiable interest. The
village patriarchs talking politics as they sit on the wall of
the chapel-yard is as suggestive as Wilkie's masterpiece. There
runs through all he has written in this book the evidence of
two passions, each of which has caused men to do great
things, but so naturally united in an Irish Catholic gentleman
as we have them here love of faith and love of country.

" A Picnic at Rostrevor " has all the airy grace of Praed,
and we are reminded very much of Mortimer Collins by "The
Yara-Yara Unvisited," "The Allo Unvisited," and one or two
that follow. We do not think in his peculiar command of
incidental expression and colloquial rhyme that Collins executed
a verse superior to this one :

" Simmons of Blackwood here was * raised '

(Loquendo Yankice") at Kilworth,
Whose poems, by Kit North o'erpraised,

A passing glance are still worth ;
And Edward Walsh not far away

Sang his * Maergread ni Challa,'
But where his rustic school-house lay,

In sooth I know not Allo."

He has a great love for the poets of his own land, some-
thing akin to the sympathy which goes out to the peasants in
the verses first spoken of. Poor Edward Walsh's life, dogged
by the twin jailers that follow the steps of so many of our
men of genius humble birth and narrow fortune rises before
us in the lines which recall that " Maergread ni Challa," the
pathos of which, now we are so far away, strikes upon our
memory like the sobbing of a child grieving beyond the grief
of childhood. As we have given this verse alone, it is just to
add that the writer gave himself the task of ending every
stanza with "Allo," that river of dreamland which "echoes"
down to the Blackwater of real land ; and so there is no mere
rhyming in the last line, but confession to the naiad of his
ignorance of the place where the poor poet taught the three

268 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

Rs. What a noble heart Jeffrey had ! We now think of the
effect produced upon him by the then just published Ballads
of Ireland, and if for nothing else but for making us feel the
spell of those enchanters of the lyre, those Irish singers in our
memory, we would be bound to thank the author of these
poems.

He rises to the higher platforms of song in " The Irish
Children's First Communion," a poem in three parts or stages.
One reads it with an emotion which makes him realize why
soldiers left happy homes and marched over deserts with the
cross upon the breast, why missionaries died on pestilential
sands as though borne away on a triumphal car. And so they
were borne, in good sooth.

"In Memoriam C. W. P." is worthy of the saint and
scholar to whose memory it is sung, and with these words we
give a Cead millc failte to a volume which vindicates Father
Russell's right to a high place among the singers of our time.

The Nineteenth Century and Other Poems? by William A.
Maline. In the long piece which gives the principal part of
the title of his book Mr. Maline tells the triumphs of the cen-
tury in discovery and invention. We do not think that sub-
jects of the kind are the most favorable for the exercise of
the poetic talent. In that rather inferior variety of verse
which halts between satire and burlesque matters of the kind
may be treated, and have been treated, with force ; but Mr.
Maline is very much in earnest. Among his sonnets we think
that " To Baby Julian on his First Birthday Anniversary " de-
serves favorable notice, and the odes are upon the whole
promising.

Songs of the Settlement and Other Poems,**; by Thomas
O'Hagan. Mr. O'Hagan has the rhythmic gift which with study
will become music. "An Idyl of the Farm," which is the first
in the collection, is bright and ringing. There is power in " A
Dirge of the Settlement," and humor and expression in "The
Old Log-Cottage School." We are reminded of Clarence
Mangan's audacious fun by " The Old Brindle Cow," though
we are bound to say the gaiety of Mr. O'Hagan does not
carry him to that disregard of certain usages of verse in which

* The Nineteenth Century and Other Poems. By William A. Maline. Cleveland : The
BurroVes Brothers.

t Songs of the Settlement and Other Poems. By Thomas O'Hagan. Toronto : William
Briggs.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 269

Mangan revelled, and which in him, while it delights one be-
yond measure, baffles all description. Mangan poked fun at his
own ideas and did so remorselessly. This little volume is
dedicated to the pioneers of the county of Bruce, Ontario, and
we venture to say their poet-laureate has a better claim on
their gratitude than Southey had on that of a king, or than
Austin has on that of a queen of England.

It would be rather late in the day to insist on the value
to the clergy of some knowledge of patristic literature, but
one can readily understand how easily so many would hesitate
about embarking in a course of reading which would mean the
employment of every spare hour for the attainment of any
considerable result. The number of volumes contained in the
Cursus Completus Patrologice of the Abbe" Migne would at the
bare mention strike terror into the student's heart. Of the
Latin Fathers and ecclesiastical authors from Tertullian to
Innocent III. there are 217 volumes quarto, of the Greek
authors from the time of the Apostolic Fathers to the Council
of Florence there are 162 volumes quarto and parenthetically
we may say that this does not express the enormous service
to the student of this branch of theological science rendered
by this monumental work and the question then arises, How
is the fruit of this mass of learning to be brought within the
reach of the hard-working missionary priest ?

In answer to this question we suggest that a small and
well-arranged guide to the epochs, authors, and the subjects
will be of inestimable value by bringing down patristic litera-
ture to the hand, and such we think is this manual by Father
Schmid.* For the students who are still in the seminaries
some degree of study in the doctrinal inheritance of the church
is required as a part of their training. Many of them have
the opportunity to become fairly well read in the Fathers ; but
we consider it worth while to impress upon priests engaged in
missionary work that it is largely within their power to acquire
a habit of acquisition which will enable them at a moment's
notice to turn to and lay hold of the opinion or testimony of
some Father on. any matter. This can be done almost insensi-
bly from their existing knowledge ; and is a very different
thing from looking up for an occasion a subject accidentally
connected with one's professional pursuits. As an illustration
of our meaning we hear dogma spoken of as a prison for the

* Manual of Patrology. By the Rev. Bernard Schmid, O.S.B. St. Louis: Herder & Co.

270 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

mind. Theological students will sometimes dilate on the iso-
lated character of the constituents of dogmatic theology and
contrast them with the scientific sequences of moral ; speaking
of the first as if the subject were something arbitrary and
pointing out how well the second rests on the experience of
each man.

But he who has some tincture of the learning of the Fathers
will see a new world in dogmatic theology. In that learning
you have dogmatic theology in its historical aspect : you see
how dogmas grew ; you can see as though the long centuries
were passing before you, and the struggle going on, the wrest-
ling between falsehood and truth, the agony of fear in faithful
hearts, and emerging at length the truth crystallized in a dog-
ma. Now, under the guidance of such a book as this one can
read a few portions of the more important Fathers ; and he
will be so well rewarded in the result as to be tempted to
make opportunity for the study, instead of going to it for a
hint in a sermon or an answer in a controversy. We are not
to be understood as offering this manual as a text-book, how-
ever condensed, of patristic science; it can be nothing but an
introduction to a knowledge of the Fathers. In fact Patrology
is no more than the exposition of certain preliminaries to the
study of the Fathers ; but it can be used as an index and
digest both in one. For such a purpose we doubt if there be
anything better in any branch of study we are acquainted
with ; and we know of many very useful and some very excel-
lent compilations of this kind in law, history, and economics.

To give some notion of Father Schmid's method of treat-
ment and his power of imparting interest, we beg to allude to
something mentioned in the second section under the heading
of " Patrology Proper " that is, the special as distinguished
from the more general or preliminary part of the science.

He tells us that even in the earliest works of the Apostolic
Fathers, scanty though the remains are, we are able to trace
the ground-work of the different forms of future theology.
In Clement we discover the first germs of Canon Law ; in
Barnabas the first attempt at dogmatic theology; in Ignatius
and in the Epistle to Diognetus the outlines of apologetics ;
in the Interpretations of Papias the beginnings of Biblical exe-
gesis, and in the Shepherd of Hermas the rudiments of ascetical
and Amoral theology. The foundations were then laid of the
science which in one form or another the world raves against,
scoffs at, or dreads. It hates the authority, obedience, self-

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 271

denial, and union with God with which and of which some
branch of the sacred science makes it its especial business to
speak, and it fears the vastness and unchangeableriess of its
influence. Well, there it is beginning with the few pages of
the Apostolic Fathers and growing like the growth of the
divine society itself ; and doctrine the same throughout, more
like, even to the eye of the mind, than the sapling and the
tree. How much of what Protestantism rejected in the six-
teenth century is to be found in the Doctrine of the Twelve
Apostles, a work quoted by so many early Greek and Latin
authors ! You have there the traditional doctrine of the church
on the obligation and merit of good works, fasting included,
the necessity of baptism, the Holy Eucharist, both as sacra-
ment and sacrifice, -confession, the duty of submission to ec-
clesiastical superiors, the divine institution, authority, and visi-
bility of the church. The treatise was lost in the twelfth
century, no trace of it when, in 18/3, it was discovered in a
codex containing other works in a monastic library at Constan-
tinople. Even the practice of baptism by pouring " water on
the head thrice in the name "* is shown from it. We wonder
if it had been restored in the sixteenth instead of the nine-
teenth century what would have been the history of modern
society.

Were any one to read the present work f of Mr. Hutton,
and then ask himself if he had found anything that seemed to
be original in the volume, he would certainly say that the
happy thought of holding up Plato's Ideal Friendship as a
model to be aimed at in our love for Christ was commendably
novel. Mr. Hutton has taken the noblest of pagan ideals and
read into it a Christian meaning. He has analyzed the Plato-
nic conception of ideal love, and side by side therewith he has
placed the outlines of the mystic love of the saints of God.
When one sees these two analyses side by side, two thoughts
at once arise, and the second is the outgrowth of the first.
We take pleasure in the fact that such a book as Mr. Hutton's
has been written and hope that many of his readers will
come to look on Christ as a personal friend. But after rejoic-
ing for a moment in the consideration of that mighty ardent
love which we would have for Christ could we but reach the
Platonic ideal, we cannot help but think that, noble as this

* Kefalen tris udor eis to onoma.

t The Soul Here and Hereafter. By E. R. Hutton. London, New York, and Bombay :
Longmans, Green & Co.

2/2 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

love would be, it is not and cannot be the love which saints
have given to Christ over and over again in the nineteen
centuries that have passed.

Plato did not anticipate, he could not in any way prefigure
or foretell, in the loftiest soarings of his somewhat too specu-
lative mind, the incomprehensible love which the saints have
borne to God and Jesus Christ his Son. That love is altogether
supernatural; the unaided powers of man cannot so much as
conceive it ; and since Plato was no prophet, and had no su-
pernatural revelations to enlighten him, he could not have the
faintest notion of this love. We cannot help but think that
Mr. Hutton has gone too far in one direction, and lost in con-
sequence an excellent opportunity. The idea of making a
parallel between the Platonic Ideal Friendship and the love of
the mystics for Christ is an excellent one, but here the author
should have been less anxious to exalt Plato and more careful
deeply to penetrate the almost fathomless meaning of the mystics.
Had he understood the saints better than he did, he might
have gone further and told his readers to strive after the
Platonic ideal in a warm and personal love for Christ, and then
wait and pray for that blessed time when God should make
them feel and understand the nobler and still more ardent love
with which his chosen spirits burn.

The main idea of Mr. Hutton's work, let it be understood,
is excellent and deserving of much praise more perhaps than
we have given it ; but we regret that he did not reveal to his
readers the vision of a higher and more perfect life. Perhaps
he has not perceived it himself, and if so it would be difficult
to describe it.

Mr. Colby informs us that his Outlines of General History*
or, as he says, "the present volume," is designed for students
who have not yet reached the point "at which special histori-
cal studies should properly begin." He adds that for "ad-
vanced work," whatever that means, "specialization is, of
course, indispensable." No one can overestimate the import-
ance of a good compendium for beginners; there are such
books, but this is not one. It may be a fairly well digested
collection of leading facts in the history of nations, but they
are arranged and colored according to a preconceived theory
or preconceived theories. Religion is an evolution from anim-
ism or fetichism ; that is to say, this assumption which has

* Outlines of General History. By Frank Moore Colby, M. A., Professor of Economics,
New York University. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : American Book Company .

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 273

not even reached the stage of an hypothesis which explains
the fact of universal belief in God, much less the influence
which religion has on morality and morality on the establish-
ment and preservation of states is taken for an ascertained
discovery, like the law of gravitation. The compiler of a com-
pendium has no business with theories. When what he is
pleased to call the period of " specialization " by which, of
course, he means the philosophical study of history is reached,
is it time to lay down theories. He should have reserved
them to be estimated on their merits by the advanced students
for whom he may write at a later date; in other words, for these
students to whom the philosophy of history is a possible pursuit.
But even his theories do not hold water. When he speaks
of the Hebrews the one just mentioned breaks down, for
he tells us "the mission of the Jews was to found a re-
ligion which should influence the entire world"; they did not
"add much to the world's knowledge of art or science. Their
mission was to spread a higher form of religion than any other
race had developed. Their whole history seems to tend in
this direction. Had they conquered and annexed other lands
they would have felt to a greater degree the influence of other
religions." This is not like biological evolution. If they had
a mission it must have been that which we find in the Sacred
Books. We cannot permit this writer to evolve its character-
istics from his Consciousness while taking the fact of the mission
from those books. Whether his view is a cynical interpolation
into his system in order to satisfy certain opinions possibly
he might call them ignorant prejudices or, on the other hand,
it is the fair conclusion on the history of God's relations with
his people as they appear in the Scriptures, in either case he
must take the mission as the writings present it, both as to its
origin and method. Now, this mission is the preservation of
a belief in one* God, the Creator of all things and the fountain
and vindicator of all morality. These arc antecedent facts
behind all society because behind all life. If the Jews had
this mission, the reason is obvious why they had not conquered
and annexed other lands. Indeed, certain critics imagine an
influence of the Captivity on what they call the later develop-
ments ; and it may be fairly inferred that if there had been
such conquest and annexation, such minds would have found
the whole formation of the worship and all the ideas, mystical,
social, and moral, which were wrought into the life of the
nation arising from that contact. We think the reasonable
VOL. LXX. 1 8

274 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

theory, then, on Mr. Colby's statement is, that the Hebrews
preserved the primal religion and had been set apart to pre-
serve it. What we complain of is, first, that there should be
theories in a class of books which properly is limited to undis-
puted statements of fact ; second, we say when there was a
theory of the origin of religion at all it should not be one
springing from biological sociology instead of the belief in
possession which acknowledges a direct revelation of God
to man.

From the first letter of M. le Querdec's book* we learn,
by implication, that Monsieur le Sous-prefet is so technically
precise that the vicar, or other parish priest, is " an officiating
minister" with him: not M. le Cure at all; that would smack
of Catholicity and the old regime. In that letter we have in-
cidentally a winning estimate of Monseigneur the Bishop, and
in other letters we find proof of how excellent the rural
clergy are, how hard the humiliating circumstances under which
they live. In a letter at page 63 the Vicar says : " I have to
convert my people, and am a true missionary in an infidel
country. In the borough are some sturdy persons who pro-
fess to believe in nothing; I must bring them back to the
faith ; in the villages are poor baptized pagans who must be
led to the Gospel." Now, this is a chance for that Mr.
Sabatier who wrote an insolent letter the other day to his
Eminence Cardinal Vaughan.

The way our Vicar handled the village Figaro is admirable
(Letter x.) We must premise that he is a Republican, so the
barber had nothing against him on the score of politics; but
religion that is another matter. " In my young days I be-
lieved all that," says this fellow, and we fancy he is a good
type of the scoundrel who will be civil to a priest as long as
his pocket is the fuller by abstaining from rudeness. The
good Vicar does not despair of him.

In Letter xviii., from the Marquis of St. Julien to the
Comte de Beuregard, we have some of the little troubles of a
country gentleman arising out of the Vicar's wish to promote
a good understanding in his parish. It is very amusing and
very natural. The Marquis has called upon him, and this is
the account of the interview :

" * Monsieur le CureY said I, * it is you who make them (his
wife and daughter) persecute me/

* Letters of a Country Vicar. Translated from the French of Yves le Querdec by Mara
Gordon-Holmes. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 275

" The poor fellow grew pale ; besides, he seems to be al-
ways afraid of me ; I added at once, to reassure him : ' Yes,
Blanche and her mother are always advising me to go to your
Sous-prefet ; it is a veritable persecution, and I strongly sus-
pect your having something to do with their solicitations/

"The Vicar settled himself in his chair and said: *I avow,
Monsieur le Marquis ' he is fond of using titles * that I have
talked with these ladies about the expropriation with which
you are threatened, and I said that I thought that is to say,
that I saw, no other means of obtaining justice than by your
applying to the higher administrative power.'

" * And so you advise me to go and cringe to this Sous-
prfet ? I do not see myself easily in that position.' "

The conversation continued with the result that the marquis
followed the vicar's advice and won, as indeed he had a right
to win, along the whole line ; but the most remarkable thing is
that he found a Republican could be a man of sense and
honestly anxious to discharge his official duty. Perhaps there
ought to be a little more give and take, and the nobility
should try and come out of their tents. Still, if the particular
question be like those which divide the nobility and the Re-
publicans in local politics, and we are rather inclined to think
it is, it is hard to blame the former for sulking in their tents.
The reasonable act the local council wanted to do was to cut
and carve the marquis* park for a new road, and this simply
to rob him. They are having their innings, but politics, local
or national, should not be left to them, and the honorable
classes have only themselves to blame for not possessing their
proper influence. In this case the marquis made an important
concession : he granted the land gratis to enable the local
authority to widen the old road. This was a great deal more
than that body and its followers deserved ; but the conces-
sion was clearly due to the good offices of the vicar and the
impartial spirit of the Republican sous-pre"fet.

I. FATHER LUCAS'S SAVONAROLA.*

The writer's view of his subject may be gathered from his
adoption of certain words in which Dr. Schnitzer (Savonarola
iin Lichte der neusten Liter atur) expresses his judgment on the
career of Savonarola and the cause for which he offered up his

* Fra Girolamo Savonarola: a Biographical Study. By Herbert Lucas, of the Society of
Jesus. London : Sands & Co.; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder.

276 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

life. " He died," says Schnitzer, " for the noblest cause for
which a man can give his life for the spread of God's king-
dom on earth. The future belonged to him and he to the
church." Such a life as this great man's must be always one
of the highest interest and value to mankind. Errors of judg-
ment there were, impetuosity of temper carried beyond bounds
there may have been ; but there was a zeal for truth and righ-
teous living which lifted him high above his contemporaries and
upon which the judgment of the world will rest without much
regard to his mistakes of method, or what may be deemed
his pride, and what certainly must be admitted as his disobe-
dience of authority.

We must place ourselves in his day and amid his world in
order to judge him fairly. It was a time of party passions, of
abuse of power, of political vengeance. It may be regretted
that he took so much interest in public affairs it is hardly
ever safe for a priest to be a popular tribune at the same
time it is probable he despaired of successful labor for souls
as long as governments were corrupt and tyrannical and offered
the prizes of life or the indulgence of passion as the induce-
ments to prefer the present to the promises of the life to come.
We think there is a blot on his name for not using all his in-
fluence to save Bernardo del Nero and the four others sacri-
ficed to the vengeance of party because of the incitements urged
by him in a sermon ; at least he could have obtained for them
the benefit of an appeal to the Consiglio Grande. The question
has been much discussed. Father Lucas, in a somewhat hesi-
tating manner, disapproves of his inaction ; well, we have only
to say that he let loose passions by those incitements and that
acquiescence which within a year devoured himself. History
teems with parallels of the kind. Often when men for the de-
struction of their adversaries advocated extreme measures, or
searched in the remote past for bloody precedents, they found
in the bitter hour the meaning of their lessons. Their own
policy destroyed them.

The vexed questions which arise all along the great friar's
life are treated dispassionately, learnedly, wisely. We have not
the space at our disposal to consider either the political rela-
tions of parties in Florence or between Florence and the out-
side world ; we need only say that there were feuds like the
family feuds of Scotland, but with a political element in them,
and they were transmitted from father to son, so that Savona-
rola's "inroad on these evil legacies was a proof of the influ-

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 277

ence of his preaching. Neither can we say anything of the
" prophecies," though this part of the subject has been handled
with great ability by many of his biographers, and by none in
a manner so just and reasonable as that of Father Lucas. We
think his explanation of the fulfilment of so many of the pre-
dictions concerning public events is the true one. There can
be such a thing as profound and far-sighted judgment applied
to circumstances with the success and rapidity of intuition.
We see it daily in the instance of great lawyers we see it in
a degree in the method of detectives ; while the historical stu-
dent has observed the exercise of it thousands of times on the
part of great statesmen and great generals. This quality, or
something like it, is the power to which Father Lucas attributes
the predictions and the fulfilments of them in the given cases ;
and we are not at all disposed to agree with a very distin-
guished critic who seems to think the exercise of such a power
is incompatible with Savonarola's good faith, or with common
honesty, he might have added. These intuitive judgments
might well have been taken for inspirations by a man on fire
with the intensity of his conviction, taken or mistaken for in-
spiration by one who, like Savonarola, had sought in the pro-
phecies of the Old Testament for the methods to be employed
upon a wicked generation, and who had found, as he supposed,
in the historical books the precise character of the conse-
quences to be expected from God's justice in all instances.
This, we think, is the answer Father Lucas might give the able
and accomplished critic we have in view. We shall conclude
with one word. Alexander VI. has more to answer for, per-
haps, than most men, but we will not admit that in the death
of Savonarola he has to answer for as much as the Signory
and people. The judicial murder or the legal punishment,
whichever it may be, that the unhappy and illustrious victim
suffered at the hands of the ungrateful city for which he did
so much was but in the smallest degree the work of Alex-
ander.

2. THE CATECHISM EXPLAINED.*

This English translation of the well-known work of Father
Spirago is a clear, simple, interesting, and up-to-date exposition
of Catholic doctrine, following the lines of the Catechism. It

* The Catechism Explained. By Rev. Francis Spirago. Edited by Rev. R. F. Clarke,
S.J. New York : Benziger Brothers.

278 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

is not, as so many other books of the kind, an adaptation of
some previous work, but an original presentation of the old
truths.

The beauty of the work consists in the fact that he makes
the dry-as-dust catechism a living thing. Illustrations from
church and profane history, quotations from the Fathers of the
church and modern Catholic writers, examples from Scripture
and from every-day life these make a bright, readable book
that will be of good service to our catechists.

The ordinary form of question and answer has been set
aside as not affording ample enough scope for an intelligent
grasp of Christian truth. The catechism, like the Scripture,
always calls for an interpreter. Everything is put in a simple
way, technical terms are avoided as far as possible, the con-
nection between the different doctrines is clearly set forth, the
heart is instructed as well as the head, and all the several
branches of religious teaching the Bible, church history,
doctrine, morals, and liturgy are treated under systematic
headings.

It sometimes happens that teachers in our Sunday-schools
know but little more of their faith than the children they
teach. Again, some think they fulfil their duty by exacting a
mere parrot-like recitation from their pupils. Unless the priest
take the children well in hand himself, how can we expect the
rising generation to remain true to the practice of their belief?
No wonder the church lays so much stress on the instruction
of youth, for she knows the lessons then taught are lasting.
A book like Father Spirago's, explaining clearly a*nd illustrat-
ing forcibly the doctrines of the faith, while at the same time
breathing forth the love of God and the brethren, will help
any one whose duty it is to instruct the young.

Again, take the Catholic layman. He has a duty to preach
the gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as the priest of God. And
with that duty goes a corresponding obligation to prepare him-
self for the task. Every day of' his life he comes in contact
with people whom the priest never meets. In his home, at
his place of business, at his recreations everywhere is the non-
Catholic, uncertain, doubting, questioning. Every Catholic
should be able to give a certainty for this uncertainty, a surety
for this doubting, and an answer to the questioning. If he
knows full well a book like the above, he is well equipped for
his missionary apostolate. Many do not realize this duty. I
was talking to a Catholic army officer the other evening. He

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 279

had been asked a number of questions by a High-Church
Episcopalian, who was very much unsettled in mind, owing to
many recent happenings in that body. " I cannot answer you,"
he said, " I do not know enough about such matters ; you had
better go to some Catholic priest." No wonder that his advice
was not heeded. If he had satisfied better his questioner, there
might have been more hope, humanly speaking, of deeper
study. One question was whether a man could not believe
the essential doctrines of Christianity and not bother about
those of minor importance. Here is Father Spirago's way of
answering it (p. 91):

"A faith which does not comprise all the doctrines of the
Catholic Church is no faith at all. It is like a house without
a foundation. A man who believes all other Catholic doctrines,
but rejects the infallibility of the pope, has no true faith.
What insolence is it on the part of men to treat God like a
dishonest dealer, some of whose goods they accept, and others
reject. . . . As a bell in which there is one little crack is
worthless, as one false note destroys a harmony, as a grain of
sand in the eye prevents one from seeing, so the rejection of
a single dogma makes faith impossible. He who wilfully re-
jects a single dogma sins against the whole body of doctrine
of the Catholic Church."

A busy priest on the mission will also find the book useful.
The many paraphrases of the Fathers, the great abundance of
Scripture texts, the historical references, the countless ex-
amples of saints and religious men and women, are all very
suggestive to a mind that feels talked out from speaking Sun-
day after Sunday to the same people.

Books like these are a sign of the times. The church is
assuming the aggressive, especially in this our country, and in
the splitting up of the sects the intelligent layman must be the
church's right hand to win hundreds from the infidelity towards
which they are hastening. An intelligent and convincing,
though simple and popular, presentation of the faith is given
him in The Catechism Explained.

3. THE FOUR GOSPELS (Second notice]*
To bring out at this date a new version of the Gospels, after

* The Four Gospels : a new Translation from the. Greek Text -direct, with reference to
the \'ulgate and the Ancient Syriac Version. By the Very Rev. Francis Aloysius Spencer,
O.P. New York : William H. Young & Co. 1898.

280 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.,

so many others, seems at first sight to be both a useless
and a presumptuous undertaking: useless, for so many transla-
tions have already been published of which none can equal the
original ; presumptuous, because the qualifications required for
putting one's self in comparison with former translators ought to
be very great. Are the reasons against the undertaking out-
balanced by those on the other side ? The Catholic version in
use is far from being idiomatic ; that a version should be made
into idiomatic English, such as our Lord would have spoken
had he lived now, seems desirable, so that to the busy mechanic,
for example, the meaning may at once be made clear. If this
can be done without sacrificing the exact meaning of the text,
great good will have been accomplished. Moreover, a version
made direct from the original Greek, and not, as the Rheims Ver-
sion, from the Vulgate, would certainly form a distinct addition
to the stock of Catholic Scripture literature, and would bring
those who are unable to read the original into closer touch with
the word of God, and thereby to a better understanding of it.
These reasons seem to turn the scale in favor of Father
Spencer's undertaking ; and to the best of our judgment,
making, however, some reservations, a large measure of success
has been obtained by him larger than was to have been ex-
pected. Of all literary work translation is the most difficult.
To be literal and exact requires the sacrifice of beauty of
style ; on the other hand, to secure beauty of style requires
more or less of a departure from literal exactness. Father
Spencer has done about as well as the nature of the task al-
lowed. The work reads like a book written by a scholar of
the present day; the style is at once dignified and lucid. A
point worthy of special praise is the way in which the exact
force of the Greek tenses has been preserved ; this is necessar-
ily lost in the Vulgate and in every translation made from it.
In this there is found an exception to what was just said
about the conflict between literalness and beauty. Literalness
is here in harmony with beauty. Father Spencer is to be con-
gratulated especially on this, feature of his work.

Another thing specially deserving of commendation is the
version of what is perhaps the most difficult verse in the New
Testament John viii. 25. If our readers will refer to Father
Hewit's Teaching of St. fohn the Apostle they will find a dis-
cussion of this point. Father Spencer's version seems to solve
the difficulty. The only point about which we should hesitate
is whether the Greek verb used admits the rendering " declare "

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 281

and governs an accusative. But every translation of this verse
offers difficulties. We cannot think that the rendering of
John ii. 4 is correct, and there are other points as to which
we cannot concur in Father Spencer's judgment. The substi-
tution of "you" for the more reverential " thou " and " thee "
seems to us to lower the dignity. Again, while " I tell you
most truly," or " certainly," or " assuredly," is better than the
"Amen, Amen" of the Rheims version, it is not so good as
the " Verily, verily " of the King James's. There are other
criticisms which might be made, but to do so would involve a
detailed discussion. The various renderings of Matthew vi. 25
show how great is the importance of an exact version of the
divine teaching, and the wisdom of the church in condemning
unapproved versions. According to King James's version our
Lord instructs his disciples to take no thought for their life ;
the Rheims version has " be not solicitous for your life," which
is a much more accurate rendering ; the full force of the
original appears best, however, in Father Spencer's " Be not
anxious for your life." Upon the differences between the
Catholic renderings on the one hand and the Protestant on the
other an entire system of practical ethics, quite distinct from
each other, might be built.

The Greek text which Father Spencer has taken has been
derived from the consensus (not concensus, as appears in Father
Spencer's Introductory Remarks) of well-known editors. Vari-
ations considered to be of considerable importance have been
noted in the margin. What appears to us a very valuable
feature of this edition for practical purposes is the way in
which the parallel passages of the Synoptic Gospels have been
indicated. We regret that St. John's Gospel, so far as parallel,
was not included. Another useful feature is the division into
sections with headings, as well as the indication in the margin
of the Gospels of the Sundays and principal feasts. A few
foot-notes have been given, for which Father Spencer ac-
knowledges indebtedness to Archbishop Kenrick and Father
Maas, S.J.

The church, in order to encourage her children more fre-
quently and in greater numbers to have recourse to the Holy
Gospels, that they may draw from these "most abundant
sources, which ought to be left open to every one, purity of
morals and doctrine " (Letter of Pius VI. to Archbishop of
Florence), has recently granted an indulgence to those who
read them. Father Spencer's version, made by a member of

282 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov.

the order which is most closely associated with the Inquisition,
ought to show so clearly what the mind of the church on this
point is as to put an end to the calumny that the church is
against the use of Holy Scripture by the faithful, and that
she wishes to keep it from them. All her measures have been
taken to preserve its purity, to prevent abuse, and to preserve
and maintain her own rights as the guardian and interpreter
of Scripture. And now she stands before the world as mani-
festly the staunchest defender of that Bible and of its inspira-
tion on which Protestantism, as against her, thought to build a
stable religious system. Protestant principles have undermined
their own foundation, and full belief is no longer given by
any considerable number to the written Word of God, or at
least cannot be required for church membership. On the other
hand, the Catholic Church, speaking in the Vatican Council
and by Leo XIII., has reaffirmed the ancient faith, and de-
clared that the books of Holy Scripture and all their parts
are divinely inspired that is to say, have God for their author.
God, that is, is the principal and immediate cause of the Holy
Scripture, and the sacred writer is only the active instrumental
cause. Moreover, as a further indication of her care for the
maintenance of the divine authority of Holy Scripture, by
the new Constitution of the Index all works are to be placed
upon it in which the notion of inspiration is perverted,
or its extent unduly limited. In this, among other ways, the
church appeals to all who love and reverence the Inspired
Writings as the defender of their integrity. In fact, she is
now the only defender to be relied upon. When this is
brought home to the minds of those who are outside, and who
still reverence the Bible as the Word of God, we may hope
that all such, if not brought within the one fold, will at least
be brought nearer to it ; that this her unflinching defence may
become, as Leo XIII. says in his Letter to the Bishops of
Scotland, "the starting point for the return to unity."

IF the Independent had taken the trouble to
inquire into the personal history of Rev. N. H.
Harriman it probably would have thought twice
before printing his glib statement concerning " Religious
Liberty in the Philippines." Any one with a bit of insight,
from his own story, without much other inquiry, can easily
see the sort of a man he is. But if further details of his
character are desired, it might be well to investigate, among
other things, why the sailors on the Indiana, at Iloilo, made a
protest against his company.

Our main purpose just now in the Philippines is to pacify
the people. It is such fellows as Harriman who, associated
with the army in " a semi-official capacity," by attacking the
people on their most sensitive side, their religious beliefs and
practices, render the task of pacification doubly laborious.
Send a few more Harrimans to the Philippines, and it may
take a decade of years and millions of money to accomplish
our purposes.

It now is very evident where much of the antipathy to
General Otis originates. The missionary societies precipitated
the troubles in Samoa. They now have black-listed General
Otis, and while they suggest certain secondary matters, in
reality the cause of their antagonism is the refusal on the
part of Otis to allow them to turn the war into the bitterest
kind of religious conflict.

The best "missionaries to non-Catholics " nowadays are the
non-Catholics themselves. They can do more work in ten
minutes in rending asunder the Protestant structure than we
can do from the outside in ten years. If we may judge from
the number and character of the assaults that have been
prominently published lately, the work of demolition is being
vigorously carried on. Sedgwick's article in the Atlantic Monthly
for September, Mosley's publication of Newman's letters in the

284 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Nov.,

Contemporary Review, and Percival's " Future of the Christian
Religion " in the Nineteenth Centiiry are notable recent ex-
amples of this kind of warfare.

While these assailants are busy prosecuting their work it
behooves us to open wide the door of the True Church in
order that the thousands of souls who are wandering about
seeking for the truth that will satisfy their minds, and for the
spiritual peace which will calm their hearts, may be attracted
hitherwards. In these days of crumbling creeds and wrangling
voices the spectacle of a united church possessing the treasure
of the ages and offering to a hungering people the Bread of
Life must of itself draw many to her.

England will probably triumph in South Africa through
mere force of numbers and strength of battalions, but it will
be only another instance of the weak nation going down be-
fore mere brute strength. That this spectacle could happen
on the very morrow of the World's Peace Conference, and
during the closing hours of the century when all the world is
recounting the triumphs of the Prince of Peace, is a sad com-
mentary on the sincerity of the nations' proposals, and is conclu-
sive evidence of the inefficiency of mere law, apart from the
great moral factor of the world, to bring about the reign of

peace.

It is pleasing to note that at last the American people are
coming to a better understanding of the Philippine question.
More and more are we realizing that we have to deal not with
savages just emerging from barbarism but with a civilized
people, and the policy of more diplomacy and less gunpowder
will bring about surer and more lasting results. Archbishop
Chapelle will succeed where men like Worcester and Schurman
failed. If the administration will now make good its plea of
" war for humanity's sake," let it bend its energies to suppress
the American savage who fills the brothels of Manila, desecrates
the Philippine churches, and degrades the American flag by
his drunken orgies.

1899-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 285

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

/CONSIDERABLE discussion has been aroused among those who may be
\j designated as educationists by the publication of the New York Catholic
Teachers' Manual. It appeals to all having an interest in educational work,
whether as teachers, parents, or philanthropists. In brief form it is intended to
show the gradual progress of the Catholic child in the parish school. A copy
of this manual would refute the silly objection sometimes heard among Catho-
lics, that the children learn nothing but their prayers in a Catholic school. The
committee in charge of preparing the Manual have had many favorable ex-
pressions of opinion on their work from progressive observers in the United
States and Canada. Especially gratifying to all concerned is the following
letter of approval from Archbishop Corrigan :

" I have read the New York Catholic Teachers' Manual with great interest
and pleasure, and warmly congratulate the committee charged with its prepara-
tion on the successful result of their labors.

" The many and attractive aids held out to our children in the pursuit of
knowledge are not only a record of progress already accomplished, but also a
hopeful sign of the still greater advance and improvement confidently expected
in future, especially in view of the zeal and efficiency of our devoted Brothers
and Sisters, whose lives are spent in the Apostolate of Catholic Education."

The Ave Maria contained these words of commendation :

" Teachers who are not inclined to rest and to rust all summer will be glad
to examine a new Manual which is to be used henceforth in the Catholic schools
of New York. Its object is two-fold : first, to arrange the course of studies of
the various grades, so that it may be in actual accordance with the advancement
in educational methods ; secondly, to afford useful hints and suggestions gathered
from observation and experience."

From the American Ecclesiastical Review the following notice is taken:

" There is perhaps no surer means of raising and maintaining the standard
of our Catholic schools than by securing for them uniformity of methods and
subjects throughout the several grades of their elementary training. In this
way the efficiency of the individual teachers may be tested, the results of the
different schools more easily passed upon, and the diocesan examiners and super-
visors are better enabled to suggest needed improvements and advance along
the lines of true education. The little book before us is well calculated to serve
this excellent purpose by introducing into our New York Catholic schools the
same detailed plan, grade for grade, of the primary and advanced departments
of our schools.

"Within the 109 pages of the Manual the teacher will find a wealth of
practical suggestions notes, they might be, of a course of exhaustive lectures
on the different topics treated. First, last, and at all times attention must be
paid to the inculcating and the preserving of the Catholic spirit and instinct.
' Since all truth belongs to God, there is no branch of learning in teaching which
the instructor cannot in some way keep before the minds of the children the
Almighty Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and absolute owner of human beings.'

286 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Nov.,

In the next place comes the English language course, which is strongly insisted
upon. Arithmetic, geography, penmanship follow. Music is given a place which
it has long been deprived of, and which it eminently deserves ; and sewing
lessons are prescribed. The whole, which is the work of a committee of the
School Board, is a most valuable aid to the teacher. The paper and letter-press
of the stout little volume are of high quality, and well worth the price asked for
it 40 cents."

Orders for the New York Teachers' Manual and for the new Introductory
Catechism may be sent to the Cathedral Library, 123 East Fiftieth Street, New
York City, Borough of Manhattan.

* * *

In the year 1898 the Rev. Josiah Strong, D.D., wrote a book entitled The
Twentieth Century City, in which he attempted both a diagnosis and a prescrip-
tion. ' The book consisted largely of a series of articles published in the Chris-
tian Advocate. He claimed a profound knowledge of modern civilization, its
weakness and its peril, particularly in the cities of the United States. Among
the forces having a stronghold in several cities he found a solidified body of
voters not amenable to reason, governed by ecclesiastical authority in a way dan-
gerous to the Republic. He then proceeds to make this amusing statement :
" The growing spirit of charity which thinketh no evil is slow to recognize the
fact that most Roman Catholics are Catholics first and citizens afterward. The
fact remains, however, and makes it possible to throw the Roman Catholic
Church into a single political scale. Those who do not believe that the priest-
hood has both the power and the disposition to cast a substantially solid Catho-
lic vote, simply do not know what some others do know. . . . This control
is not only claimed but actually exercised, which fact accounts for the solid bat-
talions of Tammany Hall " (pp. 95, 96).

By a remarkable coincidence, or a plagiarism, the Rev. James M. King
selected for the title of his recent volume words taken from his brother pessimist.
The new diatribe is called Facing the Twentieth Century, and might be more
appropriately named The Wailing of a defeated Bigot. He is far inferior to
the Rev. Josiah Strong in literary skill. Over six hundred pages are filled with
a dreary recital of his erratic attempts to protect American institutions. The
product of his own ferocious imagination is set forth as accurate history, espe-
cially in relating his unsuccessful efforts to control the New York Constitutional
Convention in the year 1894, and in his reckless accusations against distinguished
representatives of Church and State. With an arrogance truly astounding, he
ventures to present to the public distorted views of prominent ecclesiastics, and
incoherent accounts of the work proposed for some organizations among Catho-
lics. His pompous display of secret knowledge concerning church officials at
Rome is supremely ridiculous. One of his wildest flights of imagination is shown
when he declares that the Paulist Fathers acted under direct orders frcm the
Pope in arranging for the Child-Study Congress at New York City during the
latter part of December, 1897. He affirms, page 339, that, " The entire trend of
discussion was to establish the necessity for Roman Catholic religious instruc-
tion in our primary schools, where the character of childhood is being shaped.
The work of the congress was substantially the opening of a new crusade, based
upon scientific principles, against the public schools."

A rumor has been circulated that some of the leading magazines have re-
fused" to allow their advertising space to be purchased by the agents for this

1899-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 287

book of fabrications. Catholic readers should be vigilant in having the same
plan adopted in any of the public libraries or journals dependent on their
patronage. Fortunately, the number of bigots is now very small who defame
and misrepresent their neighbors. There are still a few non-sectarian poli-
ticians, wearing the ministerial garb, who endeavor to raise a cry of alarm
whenever Catholics combine to exercise their common rights as citizens. While
these alarmists are seldom out of politics themselves, even when preaching in
their pulpits, they become infuriated when denouncing any alliance between
religion and politics. Honest observers are keen to see, however, that the pre-
cepts declared are not in harmony with the example given.
* * *

We are indebted to the Book Buyer for an interesting sketch of Agnes
Repplier, which is here condensed :

Some years ago an honored citizen of Philadelphia was attracted by the wit
and style of an occasional essay appearing in the Atlantic Monthly attached to
the name Agnes Repplier, and having known two or three generations of authors
he determined to make his bow to this latest of the elect. To New York, to
Boston, and finally to Baltimore he carried his inquiries, only to discover in the
latter town that Agnes Repplier lived at his very threshold in Philadelphia.

There indeed she has always dwelt from that year, not so remote, when she
became the second daughter of a household well known in the city's business
annals and occupying one of the comfortable old houses which gave dignity to
upper Chestnut Street. Her parents are of French extraction, a fact full of
meaning to readers of the light-hearted essays, and adhered to the Roman
Catholic faith, in which she, with her sister and brother, remains.

The influences which Miss Repplier early felt were such as might naturally
develop literary instincts in a sensitive mind, but she appears to have fore-
shadowed the independence of view which she has since so gracefully matured.
She persisted in refusing to learn to read, and at nine was so hopeless a case of
illiteracy that a friend of the household pronounced her "plainly deficient," and
despaired of her ultimate enlightenment. At eleven Miss Agnes and her sister
were sent to the convent school at Eden Hall, near Torresdale, Philadelphia.

But Miss Repplier owes little to the pedagogue. She is an advocate, be-
cause an intense lover, of growth by unconscious assimilation. She holds that
what has delighted her most and remained longest in her memory is that which
she sought from preference and learned with pleasure.

Hence it is that one of the pleasant characteristics of Miss Repplier's books
is her lively interest in children. This she has drawn from recollections of her
own childhood. Her mind is a treasury of anecootes of her youth ; and indeed
so vivid a memory has she always been blessed with, that even the droll inci-
dents of her babyhood are woven into her sprightly talk, as they have frequently
been into her written pages. The books read to her at home, old-fashioned
novels and histories, Vathek and Undine, Miss Edgeworth and Scott, and
the long poems and ballads which were taught her orally by her mother, and
which she learned without effort years before she could read, these are the well-
springs from which come the apt illustration and sy mpathetic phrase of her essays ;
and that same inexhaustible memory which now acts with such unerring taste in
the choice of its amusing store is the source of an education in letters which aca-
demic rules and respectable text-books are powerless to explain.

" You, Agnes, can write," said her mother in playfully assigning to her

288 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Nov., 1899.

daughters their future tasks ; and write she did in earnest ; sketches, essays,
stones, poems, which appeared in the newspapers and in THE CATHOLIC WORLD
MAGAZINE, old readers of which will remember the romantic tales such as A
Story of Nuremberg and A Still Christmas, and several poems on devotional
subjects. Those who care to seek these out in the reflected light of Miss
Repplier's growing reputation will not be surprised that the tales abound in
bookish knowledge, and that both they and the poems are touched with singular
charms of style.

The recognition of its own by Philadelphia has hitherto been of a slow and
grudging order. This is illustrated by a minor incident of Miss Repplier's early
career. It was after a number of her finest essays had appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly and were making Bostonians eager to know the new author that a
certain hostess asked her to a reception of rather tame lions and benignly intro-
duced her as the writer of a child's story in a daily newspaper. All this is
changed now, and a fondness for society which was her birthright makes the
author of Essays in Idleness a central star of all the constellations of bright
people known to the drawing-rooms of the Quaker City.

According to a writer in the Critic Miss Repplier's new volume, Varza,
owns the salient qualities of her other volumes. It has insight and humor ; it is
light-hearted and open-minded. The author has at times done work more con-
spicuously brilliant than any that will be found herein, but a few clever things
more or less do not matter in such a warm and hospitable atmosphere of intel-
lectual good cheer as that with which she surrounds her readers.

The Eternal Feminine is a much-needed demonstration of the fact that
there is not and never has been such a thing as the " new woman," although
complacently stupid human nature in each passing generation has heralded its re-
discovery of her as something fresh and unheard-of. The mannishness of fash-
ionable ladies was satirized in the last century. The pages of The Spectator par-
allel those of Life and Punch when it is a question of gibes at the educated girl,
and champions of progressive womanhood have been using the same arguments
at intervals for at least six hundred years. " The indifference of women to in-
tellectual pursuits, which has earned for them centuries of masculine contempt ;
and their thirst for intellectual pursuits, which has earned for them centuries of
masculine disapprobation," have always been contemporaneous, and the phe-
nomena are as old as the conflicting estimates with which they have been
received.

Where all is good it is invidious to choose, but probably Miss Repplier's
protest against Little Pharisees in Fiction will appeal to a wider audience than
any other of these essays, for who has not suffered from the heroine of the
Sunday-school book ? Beginning with the literature provided for children in the
days of the Pilgrim Fathers, the author arraigns one popular favorite after
another, from The Fairchild Family to The Elsie Books, and proves her charges
of priggishness, self-righteousness, and lack of charity. There is no reason, of
course, except lack of precedent, why Sunday-school books should not occasion-
ally be good literature, but the fact remains that children like them immensely
just as they are. The new theories maintain that the child in the different
stages of its development retraces the long history of the race.

An Angel sped from the joys above To the shepherds camped on Judea's plains,

All the wondrous news to beat Watching the night-flocks there."

" Where the Mother so meek and her King -Chi Id lay
Safe from the might of the storm."

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD,

VOL. LXX. DECEMBER, 1899. No. 417.

If? calm-fiytfJ moon \y\ \\\e
To ih chosen st&r c-nVd, ".VVVilce !
l f^ wdfchful kiM45 if the
Your cJori'oM $ message t^ke !

/M ^flflfl -Spiel Jrortr t/Jff ("V*
Rll the wondrous nevV5 fo i7<?a
Jo the slltpJi*rA* Oam|B>^<l on
\VaHc hi'ncj fkf m'^f-J/ocks" f fi
Tlfe ii*trei|f ox jrom /r*t slfi| he v
l>f ox M*1 Ni/edi att ^ay,
ii's l(e<?s he benl \Y\ w
the irtl/e slfAn^cy lay,
Tfle ass
nf'/A "f/je/r

MOVV .t BeTfclefrenis ^I's
tk flic sf*fe/^ cedars f 4 f|

ji iV/t"s|offr<?cl - "AvVflite Ant/ wtfrA,"| 3 your -Lord!*
fie ilowejrv neafk tAf s^f/4s jt ft |l.

only fh *ou' H*1 l)e came to
ettcd tl^t (gracious Lftrd .'

VOL.' LXX. 19

290

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dec.,

HE LUBE OF oui^ LCOI^D ^ESUS

T. JOHN the Baptist was the saint with whom
it pleased God to close the older dispensation
and its long line of heroes a saint whose virtues
should be a worthy type of the ancient glories of
Israel. His origin was from the purest sources of
Hebrew holiness, the venerable couple Zachary and
Elizabeth, and was intimately joined to the con-
ception and birth of the Messias, of whom he was appointed
to be the precursor.

It was to Zachary that it pleased God to send the earliest
announcement that the world's redemption was at hand. In
the performance of his priestly duty in the Temple he had
entered the Holy of Holies to offer incense. We may well
suppose that God opened this true priest's heart to the entire
race of mankind in preparation for his marvellous vision, but
especially that his holy soul, forgetting personal unworthiness,
expanded and embraced in its offering to God his own chosen
race, upon whom Zachary well knew all other races depended
for their redemption. As the fragrant incense ascended it bore
his heartfelt petitions upward to the throne of grace.

Suddenly a flashing light dazzled and almost blinded him,
at the right side of the altar, just beside the bread of proposi-
tion, stood an angel of the Lord. Zachary's humility over-
whelms him: is this a visitation for his sins?

* The extracts under the illustrations in this form are from the new LIFE OF CHRIST
BY REV. WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P. This superb work has been going through the press
for the last year, and it will be some months still before it is issued. Besides the strong
devotional tone which makes its narrative so attractive, the work is adorned by over five
hundred beautiful illustrations.

The half-tone illustrations published here are copyrighted by J. J. Tissot, and are used
through the courtesy of the McClure-Tissot Co. ED. C. W. MAGAZINE.

1899-] THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, 291

"THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS."

"He was troubled and fear fell upon him." The angel
speaks and fear gives place to a thrill of ecstasy : " Fear not,
Zachary, for thy prayer is heard ; and thy wife Elizabeth shall
bear thee a son." . . . More, oh ! wonderfully more : he is
to be a prophet, another Elias, a leader of Israel, "to pre-
pare unto the Lord a perfect people."

2Q2

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dec.,

THE ESPOUSALS OF MARY AND JOSEPH.

HE union of Joseph and Mary in uncarnal wedlock
is the beginning of that marvel of our
concupiscent manhood, the celibate
priesthood of the Church of Christ.
Love for Jesus and for his living
tabernacle, his mother, was to Joseph
the passion of passions. As he served
Jesus and loved Mary in severe chastity,
so do the members of the priesthood serve the
ever-present Christ and his living tabernacle,
which is his Church, in a spirit of joyful self-im-
molation, being so fascinated with this holy love
that they forget the natural claims of flesh and
blood." Understand the virginal spouseship of
Nazareth and you have the key to clerical celibacy.

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

293

THE VISIT OF MARY TO ELIZABETH.

Since her miraculous conception of the forerunner of God's
anointed Elizabeth had known that he must soon appear, but
she had not the faintest notion where or how. The sight of
Mary revealed it all, for the Christ-bearer was beaming in
every loving feature of Mary's face, and quivered in the tones
of her voice as she saluted her kinswoman. The dignity of
Mary as the Mother of God made man, the promises of the
angel to her, and the relation of the two babes to each other
all was revealed. And not only to herself was this light given
and this heavenly secret unfolded, but also to her unborn son.
As Elizabeth was the first woman to acclaim the Saviour and
his mother with the voice of divine worship, so was the son in
her womb the first man to proclaim him now, though yet un-
born, and again upon the banks of the Jordan amid the elo-
quent tones of his penance-preaching.

294

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

[Dec,

JOSEPH IN DOUBT.

St. Matthew briefly describes the hard trial of Joseph and
its issue : " Now the generation of Christ was in this wise.
When as his Mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before
they came together, she was found with child, of the Holy
GhosU Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and
not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her
away privately."

1899-] THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. 295

JOSEPH is REWARDED FOR HIS FIDELITY.

'ET it is not too much to say that the heart of Joseph
was tried more painfully than Mary's, for the mystery
was all revealed to her and was all hidden from him.
To him the woe was overwhelming. God, therefore,
chose to set forth his will not to Mary but to Joseph,
and that by means of a vision. One night when he
had fallen asleep, wearied with grief and doubt, the
angel of the Lord was sent to him and spoke to him as in
a dream. The angel came to him and saluted him with the
great title of Son of David, called Mary his wife, and said,
" that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost."

296

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dec.,

JESUS is BORN IN A STABLE AT BETHLEHEM.

ON arriving at Bethlehem the Holy Family found the
little city swarming with people, like themselves
come to the place of enrollment.

Here it was that Mary became a mother, first
looked upon the face of her Babe, offered him
up to his Heavenly Father, pressed him to her
heart, gave him to Joseph to embrace, suckled him most
lovingly, " wrapped him up in swaddling-
clothes, and laid him in a manger " : then
they both knelt down and adored him. It
was a very humble cradle for the Son of
God ; but this monarch of the world will
yet choose to reign from a throne so pain-
ful as the cross.

i8 9 9-]

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

297

THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE.

ARY, under Joseph's escort, went to Jerusalem and
stood at the door of the Temple when her forty days
were accomplished, as if she too were unclean. One
of the priests sprinkled her with the sacrificial blood
and declared her purified. As she was too poor to
offer the yearling lamb, she presented the legal substi-
tute, a present of two turtle-doves.

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dee.,

JESUS AMONG THE DOCTORS IN THE TEMPLE.

The visit of Jesus, his parents all unknowing, to the pre-
cincts of the Temple, and what happened there, is a connect-
ing link between the Presentation and his appearance as
Messias on the banks of the Jordan. The divine zeal of Jesus
was .not visible in early childhood, but the heart of the Boy
was ablaze with it, and he allowed it suddenly to burst forth
eighteen years before his public manifestation.

i8 99 .]

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

299

MARY AND JOSEPH SEARCHING FOR THEIR CHILD.

ERHAPS Mary and Joseph were for a time separated

1 from each other, and when Jesus went back to the
Temple the mother may have thought him with Joseph,
and he have fancied the Boy to be with his mother ; and
so the first day passed without anxiety. But when the
evening halt was reached at Sichem or Shiloh, and the
scattered members of families came together to arrange
for the night, the distress of Mary and Joseph was ex-
treme : the Boy Jesus did not appear, he was not to
be found. After an anxious night the holy couple
started back to Jerusalem, arriving there only at night-
fall, and darkness and the confusion of departing caravans
hindered further search till the morning; and

that was the third day. Finally they found
him "in the Temple, sitting in the midst of
the doctors, hearing them and asking them
questions."

300

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dec.,

THE HIDDEN LIFE AT NAZARETH.

And he worked at his trade with Joseph, bending over his
bench, his chisel in hand, or his saw or hammer, and thus his
neighbors knew him until, eighteen years afterwards, he resum-
ed the life-work he had claimed from his parents in the Tem-
ple at that memorable Passover.

1 899-] THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. 301

JESUS AT PRAYER.

HOW all nature prayed when Jesus pray-
ed on the green hill-top !

ies l
*y-\

The earth

and the sun and the heavenly bodies
all spoke a language to him but vaguely
guessed at by the poets. How the whis- ^\
pering wind and the genial sunshine, and ^
the musical notes of the birds, the happy ^
voices of the little children, the murmur of
the brooks, the bright tints of the flowers, the
welcome rain how all were eloquent of God
to the heart of Jesus Christ at Nazareth !

302

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dec.,

CHRIST THE HEALER.

" Now there is at Jerusalem a pond called Probatica, which
in Hebrew is called Bethsaida, having five porches. In these
lay a great multitude of sick, of blind, of lame, of withered,

1899-] THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. 303

waiting for the moving of the water." It was a place of
miracles, one of those Holy Wells which God's loving provi-
dence has scattered over all parts of the world. " And an
angel of the Lord descended at certain times into the pond,
and the water was moved. And he that went down first into
the pond after the motion of the water, was made whole of
whatsoever infirmity he lay under."

As Jesus passed there, he saw among the anxious watchers
of the water's motion a sufferer whose air of despondency
aroused his compassion ; he had been infirm for thirty-eight
years, and our Saviour knew that he had been long and vainly
waiting for his cure. "Wilt thou be made whole?" he asked
him. The man supposed he meant the healing given by the
pool. His pitiful and even reproachful answer deepened the
sympathy of the Saviour, whose heart is a very ocean of heal-
ing. " I have no man to put me into the pond " ; as if to say,
other invalids are rich and have their servants to lift them up
and hurry them in before me, a miserable pauper ; by the
time that I have dragged myself to the bottom of the steps
the angel is gone. But Jesus lifted him up quickly and by a
mere word: "Arise, take up thy bed and walk." Instantly
the blood flowed new and fresh into his withered legs, the
dead nerves began to tingle with the warmth of life. He stood
up immediately, leaped and jumped, took up his bed and
walked."

GMMANUEL GOD SJIJBH Us.

<?</HEN the first man, the Old Adam, was created, it
ill was by infinite power breathing spirit life into
^V dead clay. " He breathed into his face the breath
of life, and man became a living soul." When it
pleased the Blessed Trinity to renew the race of
man through the Word made flesh, the New Adam
was not brought into existence by a new act of
creation ; but God breathes the breath of life into
the heart of Mary of Nazareth, unites the divine
life to her pure blood, and thus forms Jesus Christ
for the renewal of the fallen race. The New Adam is con-
ceived and born of the old race, but generated by an exclu-
sive act of infinite power and love without the co-operation
of human paternity.

THE LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. [Dec.,

CD'S loving condescension went even further than
taking the same human nature that Adam had
tainted by sin ; Jesus is not merely Adam's de-
scendant, and that of saintly men and chaste

women, with the greatest of saints for his mother;

but his blood is also that of apostate and idolatrous

kings and shameless harlots. By his mother, how-
ever, that blood was passed to him as if through a divine
alembic, and cleansed till it was the immaculate blood of a per-
fect humanity ^-worthy, if such a thing were possible, to be
the humanity which should be made instinct with the divinity.
This is the full meaning of the words of Isaias : " A virgin
shall conceive and shall bring forth a Son, and his name shall
be called Emmanuel God with us."

Jesus was, however, a perfect type of the Hebrew people.
The renowned race of Israel made Jesus of Nazareth its heir.
The fulness of David's mighty courage was his ; Abraham's
peaceful contemplation of God and faith in the promises were
his ; every noble human quality of kindness or loyalty or
bravery or patience inherent in the Jewish nature flowed down
into the heart of Jesus. In the supernatural order, all' the
predestination of God for this favored people was concentrated
upon Jesus, together with the completeness of all possible
spiritual endowments of faith and hope and love. The glori-
ous memories of the heroic past shall be radiant upon the
brow of the Hebrew Messias. Lowly as may seem his lot, the
Man Christ shall outshine all his ancestors in majesty, a
majesty only the more inspiring because it adorns the gracious
quality of universal love, which is the paramount prerogative
of his royalty.

THE NOON RELAY STATION. CEDAR RANCH.

THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.

,UST at 12 o'clock to the dot the heavy stage-
coach with its trailer drew up at the Cedar
Ranch for dinner. There were five of us, and
we were dust-begrimed and hungry. We had
been jostled about in the stage since seven in
the morning, and had left thirty-five miles of dusty road behind
us. We were on our way to see the greatest gorge in the
whole country, the Grand Cafton of the Colorado. Dixon the
driver, a small-sized, wiry "Arizona Kicker," with a great
broad-brimmed, white sombrero, makes the seventy-three
miles from Flagstaff on the Santa Fe route to the rim of the
cafton every day with four relays of horses ; and so well does
he know his road that he hauls up at the relay stations almost
with the exactness of a railroad train on schedule time. The
road, to be sure, is one of the best in "the country. There is
very little of it that is not level, and for the most part it is
through a beautiful forest of stately pines. But under the
shade of the trees and then out in the open sun of all places
in the world the sun knows how to shine out in Arizona ; they
call it the land of sunshine, and there is lots of it the four
bronchos were urged at a steady gait, till just as the sun was
overhead we hauled up for dinner. Around about the rough
board cabin on the hill-side there was gathered a motley crowd
that had evidently been regaling the inner man, for they were
busy chewing wooden toothpicks. At first we thought they
might be a kind of civilized Indians. They were all red enough
to be classed with the red man, and some of the women were
in short skirts with what at first sight seemed to be blankets

VOL. LXX. 20

3o6

THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec. r

thrown over their shoulders, and they all had dangling from
their belts what appeared on close inspection to be not a wicked
tomahawk but an innocent-looking hammer. We learned later
that it was Professor Salisbury, of the Chicago University, and
a party of geological students out on a nature-study expedition.
They had wisely selected Arizona, for probably nowhere in
the wide world is so much of the stratified interior of the
earth's crust exposed to view.

After we had hastily put away as good a luncheon as the
flies would permit, we scrambled back into our places in the
stage for the remaining forty miles. Away we started at a
slashing pace, by the long line of trough filled with a bountiful
supply of water. It was good to see the running water from
the spring on the hill-side as we passed out the gate into the
road again. Water is a precious treasure in this country, so

AT A SLASHING PACE FOR THE GRAND CANYON.

precious that in acquiring any property it is the water-rights
that are bought and the land is thrown in, and so much is it
prized by the natives that it is only the tenderfoot who can be
induced to put it to such base uses as drinking or bathing.

1899-] T HE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. 307

As one crossing the continent in the summer time rides
for miles over the dry and arid plains and sees the sparse
vegetation languishing for want of water, and notices the
animals panting in the heat with nothing but the dry ground
about, it is a great relief to get into the Mississippi bottoms,

THE PANORAMIC EFFECT OF THE CANYON.

where one can drink to his heart's content of the refreshing
beverage of nature. I presume it will always be a hopeless
task to attempt any scheme of irrigation in Arizona on account
of the geological formation of the soil and the tremendous drain-
age canal created by the Colorado River on its way to the sea.
The incidents of the afternoon were not of such a character
as to lend to our trip the excitement of thrilling hair-breadth
escapes of the dime-novel sort. We jogged along to the music
of Dixon's snapping whip, and in high anticipation of the feast
of sight-seeing that was before us for the next few days. Our
destination was the Grand Canon of the Colorado. People who
have travelled much in this country, if asked whether they have
seen the Grand Cafion, very often answer in the affirmative,
and as often mistake some of the many canons in Colorado, that
usually are seen from the railroad train, for the Grand Cafion
of the Colorado River in Arizona. There is no more comparison
to be made between any of these minor canons and the caflon
we were aiming for than there is between the toy yacht and the

308 THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

stately man-of-war. Undoubtedly there are many beautiful bits
of scenery throughout the Western country, and nature in some
of her wildest moods has tossed up high mountains and magni-
ficent precipices and dug out spectacular chasms, the sight of
which stirs our sluggish blood and elevates our ideas of what
is magnificent. They are all worth seeing, and a lover of fine
natural scenery is well rewarded for the magnificent distances
he generally must cover to reach them. But all these should
be seen first if one wants to appreciate them. There is, how-
ever, but one Grand Cafion, and when one has looked on its
mighty vastness, and been entranced by its fascinating witchery,
all these other sights dwindle into insignificance and become
merged in the commonplace.

We knew something of the feast that was in store for us
by the oft-repeated statements of dimensions. We were told
that as we stood on Bissell's Point we could look down in the

PACK-TRAIN TO THE COPPER MINES IN THE CANYON.

gorge six thousand six hundred feet that is, nearly a mile
and a quarter. We were told that the Yosemite, great as it is,
and magnificent in all its proportions, might be put into the
Colorado Gorge and it would probably take a spy-glass to find
it. The figures seemed to affirm the truth of this statement.
El Capitan, the highest bluff in the Yosemite, is one of the
crowning wonders of the West. It rises out of the valley of
the Merced River in the Yosemite thirty-nine hundred feet,
but if one would put another El Capitan on the top of the ex-
isting one, the two together would reach but a little above the
rim of the Grand Cafion, while the perspective of a few miles
that fills the view in the Yosemite is but a very small vista
when compared to the one hundred and forty miles that stretch
out before one's wondering gaze in Arizona.

1899-] THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. 309

These comparisons heightened our anticipation and led us
eagerly on wings of imagination faster than Dixon could urge
his bronchos. The third relay station was reached in the middle
of the afternoon, and a fourth new team replaced the jaded
beasts that carried us over the last stretch of twenty-six miles.
We left the open country behind and we entered into a
magnificent forest of pines.
This Coconino forest is in it-
self one of the wonders of
Arizona. It covers a belt of
sixty miles wide by one hun-
dred and eighty long. It is a
forest oasis in an immense
plain covering Arizona, New
Mexico, and extending up into
Utah and Nevada. All over
this plain nothing larger than
the sage-bush or the cactus
grows, while in this timbered
section the stately pine raises
its plumed head for a hundred
feet or more into the air. The
government has prudently
made this pine forest a reserve
in order to preserve the trees,
and the railroad which owns
each alternate section sells
timber rights only under certain restrictions. It is directly in
the midst of this forest, at Flagstaff, that the Riordan Brothers
have built one of the largest saw-mills in America, which they
have equipped with the latest and best machinery, that is turning
immense pine logs day by day into many thousand feet of
manufactured lumber.

A little incident occurred which, because it varied the
monotony of the staging, may be worthy of record. As we
passed the old Supai trail which led from the Indian villages
out on the northern plains to the pueblos of the Supai tribe,
some miles down the river, a lone horseman approached us.
As we saw him coming, and especially when we noticed the
glittering revolvers fastened to the pommel of the saddle, and
the angry-looking gun slung from his shoulder, visions of
" hold-ups " flitted across our mind, and one of the party was
preparing to slip his pocket-book and his jewelry into his boots,

IT is A HARD DAY'S WORK TO GO DOWN
TO THE RIVER.

3io THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

and another was wearing his mildest and sweetest smile in
order to charm the road agent and so soften his fierce de-
meanor should he demand the "hands up." But it was all
useless. With a slight but commanding gesture he stopped the
stage, and when we were expecting the word to deliver up all
the treasure, in the blandest of tones he merely asked if we had
seen a stray horse on the road over which we came. Though
we began to breathe freely, it was a great disappointment all
round that his intentions were so pacific.

It was over this same Indian trail that the Spanish padres
travelled as they went among these Indians to bring the mes-
sage of the Gospel. We have come across a very ancient map
drawn by these same missionaries two hundred years ago, and
one going over the same paths to-day can very vividly appre-
ciate the dauntless courage that was needed in order to face
the thousand and one dangers that must have beset these mis-
sionaries in that strange land. They undoubtedly passed on to
the rim of the cafion and were the first white men to behold
this stupendous chasm.

With such thoughts as these we bowled along with little or
no apprehension that anything heroic in the way of natural
scenery was even within hundreds of miles of us. We passed
down into a little dell, then up a sylvan slope with grass and
belated wild flowers carpeting the ground, and then along a
level stretch of road, until the thought impressed itself on our
minds that there must be some mistake about it all. Finally,
not a little fatigued with the long riding and with appetites
sharpened by fresh air, we reached the group of tents sur-
rounding a log cabin where we were to put up for the
night. The cafion itself was just beyond. We wanted to get
a glimpse of it anyhow before darkness set in. It was but a
step below the enclosure. We hastened down to the edge of
the precipice, and there below us, wrapped in a mystical haze,
was that immense under-world of crag and ravine and palisade
and chasm, stretching away as far as the eye could reach and
down precipice after precipice until it would almost seem that
we had come to the jumping-off place of creation. I do not
think I shall ever forget that first glimpse of this wonder
of wonders. It seemed perfectly unreal. I was borne back
through the ages to primeval chaos when the earth was void
and empty and darkness was on the face of the deep. Here
was a'nother world about to be born. It seemed to be the
dwelling place of eternal forces sporting in everlasting confu-

1899-] THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.

TABULA CALIFORTVIJ& Anno

jc autvptica, trbservaticmti tteknaato, a, K.P.Chtnc eSJ.

RARE MAP OF GRAND CANYON REGION MADE BY JESUIT MISSIONARIES Two HUNDRED

YEARS AGO.

sion. Though usually accounted to have very strong nerves, >et
involuntarily I found myself grasping at something to give sup-
port, and finally I settled down to the ground to assure myself
that the bit of earth I still clung to was solid enough to
hold me. I seemed to be a figure in one of those tremendous

312 THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

creations of Dor, magnified a million diameters, where all is
weird and infinite, where distances have lost all sense of rela-
tion, and where thousands of angels seem floating down from
untold heights. The time and circumstance of my first view
of the caflon, they told me, were unusually favorable. The
mantle of night was just settling down on the earth. The
gloaming lent a spectral aspect to the whole perspective. Away
down in the channel of the river, six thousand feet below,
was profound blackness, and -above and beyond it the perspec
tive took on a sense of vagueness : here a black chasm, and
out from its blackness, apparently floating in mid-air, a huge
mountain, and away in the beyond could be faintly distinguished

FIRST GLIMPSE OF THIS GREAT UNDERWORLD OF CRAG AND RAVINE.

crags and peaks like giant Titans sporting in the darkness.
The impression created was as if one were suddenly transported
to the highest Alps in the darkness, and a flash of lightning
for the moment revealed precipices and towering peaks on all
sides. Soon the settling darkness shut it out entirely from
view. There was nothing left but to go back to the tent and
dream -over it all or prepare for a closer study of the chasm
on the morrow.

1899-] 1' HE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.

The programme for the next day was a ride on horse-
back to Bissell's Point, nine miles away. Bissell's is the high-
est point of the
plateau which
makes one rim of
the canon and
affords by all
odds the best
panoramic view
of the entire
country. The
next morningi
bright and sunny,
came all too soon
to one whose
joints had been
stiffened by the
jolting stage-ride
of the previous
day, but when it
comes bright and
sunny there is
very little chance
for prolonged
sleep in a tent.
By eight we were
in the saddle and
on the trail to Bis-
sell's, with all day
before us to study,
to wonder at, and
to be impressed
by the changing
views that are af-
forded by a nine miles' ride along the edge.

Daylight revealed the cafton in all its wondrous majesty.
It is a great chasm wrought out through geologic eras by the
Colorado River. Across to the other rim, as the bird flies, is
fourteen miles. Away down in the bed of this gigantic gulch,
lying like a mere stock-ticker's tape on the landscape, is the river,
two hundred and fifty feet wide. Between the river's bed and
the top is a succession of gentle slopes, abrupt palisades, tower-
ing cliffs, and awful precipices, broken and scarred in the con-

ONE OF THE PRECIPICES.

314 THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

INDIANS KILLING GAME.

flict of volcanic forces that helped to create this wonderful
rent in the earth's crust. They say that by erosion only the gulch
was dug out. It is very hard to believe that some terrific up-
heaval did not rend the rocks asunder and leave a cleft into
which the waters found their way. Nature here is an open
book for the geologist. Mother Earth lays bare all the secrets
of her youth. The various strata, which are exposed in all
their varying colors, add not a little to the beauty of Nature's
architecture.

The peculiar formation of the precipices in many places
seems to provide square, rocky platforms on which have been
erected wonderful temples surmounted by cathedral spires or
fantastic towers. Across the way there is Vishnu's temple, for
all the world in shape like some of those Buddhist structures
in the East. I say across the way: it seems to the uninitiated

1 8 9 9-]

THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.

but the distance of a gun-shot, but it is a good decade of
miles. The ensemble of the cafion is so nicely proportioned,
and yet built on so gigantic a scale, that one loses entirely
his sense of distance. The effect is heightened by the purity
and rarity of the air. We are nine thousand feet above the
sea level. That cliff over there, it seems only the distance of
a short city block, but it is an hour's walk there and back.
Start a boulder down the walls, and it dashes from crag to
crag until only after the lapse of many seconds it comes to

INDIANS GATHERED BONES FOR BURNING AT CREMATORY POINT.

rest at the base of the first cliff, one-tenth of the way to the
bottom.

But after one has studied the minor details of the cafion he
irresistibly reverts to the panoramic view, and he never tires of its
majesty and grandeur. Perhaps it is because of the maivellous
scenic transformations that are created by the changing lights
and shadows. The coloring of the various strata seems to take
on new hues as the sun rises or goes down in the western
sky. The tones blend together in such peifect harmony that
the whole makes a pleasing concert without a single discordant
note. Nature is a matchless artist, and her var}ing tints of
sky and forest and moor have never been caught and trans-
ferred to canvas by the most skilful painter. Moran has
painted the Grand Cafion, and while his finished work gives

316 THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

some idea of its vastness, yet it fails to convey any notion of
richness and variety of color.

At Bissell's Point one can get the best notion of the im-
mensity of this cafion region. It is a whole continent in itself.
It is vast enough to have a climate as well as a fauna and a
flora of its own. It is curious to watch a rain-storm in the
cafion. A storm big enough to drench a region of fifty square
miles at a time seems to be tucked away in a small corner of
the vast area, and while it undoubtedly moves at a furious
pace, it seems from the viewing point to be moving along at
a very leisurely gait.

But, after all has been said, the deepest and profoundest
impression that is left on the sight-seer is one of a religious
nature. For thousands of years that river has been rolling on,
long before the white man, or even the Indian, gazed on its
beauties. For countless centuries all this magnificence and

COLORADO RIVER AS IT RUNS THROUGH THE CAI^YON is 250 FEET WIDE.

f 899.1 THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. 317

GOING DOWN INTO THE LOWER RlVER GORGE.

THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

sublimity has been upreared, and for whom? For unnumbered
ages this wonderful panorama has been literally wasting all its
beauty on the desert air, and there has been no intelligent
creature to admire it. "What is man that thou art mindful
of him."

" Thou didst make the soul
A wondering witness of thy majesty ;
And while it rushes with delirious joy
To tread thy vestibule, dost chain its steps
And check its rapture with the humble view
Of its own nothingness, bidding it stand
In the dread presence of the Invisible,
As if to answer to its God through thee."

In the presence of these many wonders man in all his little
devisings seems so puny, the span of his life so short, the
most exalted products of his genius so meagre, and the mightiest

DOWN RANGE'S TRAIL TO THE RIVER'S BED.

results of his striving so feeble! Here is the handiwork of a
God of omnipotent strength, guided by infinite wisdom. He
has raised for himself here a temple of exceeding beauty.

".From flint and granite in compacture strong,
Not with steel thrice hardened, but with the wave

1 899.]

THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.

THE GREAT THRONE FOR THE DAY OF JUDGMENT.

Soft and translucent, did the new-born Time
Chisel thy altars. Here hast thou ever poured
Earth's grand libation to eternity;
Thy misty incense rising unto God,
The God that was, and is, and is to be."

I could not help thinking what a fitting place this cafion
would be for the great drama of the Day of Judgment. It is
often a puzzle to one to realize how all the nations of the earth
may be gathered in the valley of Josaphat. Of course to God
all things are possible, but here in this cafion is a theatre high
enough, wide enough, and deep enough to accommodate every
one of the children of Adam, Just beyond, on the ridge of
Ayre's Peak, is a throne in some sense fitted for the Almighty,
with a commanding view of the whole cafion, and below it and
about it are the lesser peaks, seemingly fashioned for the
prophets, and the popes, and the great servants of God. As
in the vision of the prophet, one can see the resurrected hosts
gathered about on the right and on the left. The majesty of

320 THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. [Dec.,

the surroundings is in keeping with the solemnity of the mo-
ment, and the profound silence of the chasm seems to invite
the thunder tones of the great Judge. The vast and open ex-
panse affords an easy solution for the great manifestation of
hearts. Each one may stand out in that mighty arena and be
seen by all the world, and the opening heavens may easily
reveal a pathway to eternal bliss for the elect. It is such
scenes as are presented by this magnificent manifestation of
God's handiwork that stir the depths of one's religious nature,
and deep speaketh unto deep in no uncertain tones. There
have been visitors to the cafton who have seen in it all only
the subject of trivial comment, who have risen to nothing
higher than a desire to write their names on the rocks, or who
have found their greatest pleasure in listening to and record-
ing the fables of John Hance ; but they are mere sight-seers,
whose highest vanity is to tickle the retina of their eye or to
climb where others have not been. But,

" He who presses close to Nature's loving heart
Receives full recompense and sweet reward ;
Thine is a mighty power to refresh,
Inspire, delight, and lift men out of self
Into close touch with the infinite God."

pfe.

IPP^

THE ABRUPT WALLS NEAR MORAN'S POINT.

1899-]

INSANITY INCREASING?

321

IS INSANITY INCREASING?

BY WILLIAM SETON, LL.D.

insanity increasing ? is a question often asked
nowadays; and while not a few authorities an-
swer it in the affirmative, there are some who
deny it. We believe it is a question that may
be open to dispute. No doubt the ills of one's
own generation appear to be greater than the ills of days
gone by, for we are naturally more deeply impressed by what
takes place during our life-time ; and certainly never before
was so much care taken to count and to place upon record
the number of persons who become insane. As a rule books
of history throw little or no light on the subject of nervous
derangement. History concerns itself mainly with kings and
queens, with their intrigues and their beheadings, with great
battles and conquests ; with anything except presenting to
us a faithful picture of the slow and painful development of
the poor, suffering people. Moreover, it is only within com-
paratively recent years that we have studied the nervous sys-
tem and realized its vagaries. Formerly, when science was
neglected and when students devoted themselves too exclusive-
ly to metaphysics, the unhappy beings who suffered from brain
trouble were generally set down as witches or as possessed of
an evil spirit. We have among us to-day many believers in
what is called Spiritualism, and a scientific observer of those
who attend spiritualist meetings will recognize the majority of
them as persons who are uncommonly suggestible and prone to
hysteria. At a spiritualist sitting the medium plays the part of
the witch of days gone by : in the darkened, silent room the
hysterical circle is prepared for the expected manifestations.
But it would be a great mistake to argue that hysteria is in-
creasing because there are especially in hard-headed New
England so many spiritualists. Hysteria has merely taken
one other mode of expressing itself. Let us go back sixty
years and what do we behold? Lunatic asylums in 1840 were
comparatively few and far between ; railways were only just
beginning to be built ; people still travelled very much by
stage coach, and the struggle and excitement of the present
VOL. LXX. 21

322 fs INSANITY INCREASING? [Dec.,

day were unknown. Yet in those seemingly reposeful days
thousands of persons in many parts of the country became
hysterical through the visions of a certain William Miller, of
the State of New York, who preached that the end of the
world was near. Numberless men and women abandoned their
homes, and flocking to hear this lunatic, became lunatics them-
selves ; night was made hideous by their screams and loud
prayers ; property was freely given away, ascension robes were
made ready, and very many Millerites climbed to the tops of
high trees in order to be the first to greet the coming Son of
Man. And this nervous outbreak lasted four years.* Were
such a thing to occur in 1899 we should confine the Millerites
in lunatic asylums. If we are asked where were the other
mentally unbalanced persons besides the Millerites, who were
living sixty years ago, we answer that only a small number of
them were placed in any institution public or private, for at
that time, as we have said, there were not many asylums in
the United States ; the majority of lunatics in 1840 were scat-
tered broadcast over the country, but they were , hidden from
sight, confined in cellars, barns, and outhouses, uncared for and
uncounted. If we go backward a little further in time, say to
the beginning of the century, have we any good evidence that
people were less hysterical than in 1840? We have not. In
1800 a wave of religious madness swept over a large part of
the. then sparsely settled country. Thousands of men and
women assembled at camp-meetings, which generally lasted
three or four days, and there they raved and fell into convulsions.
At some of the camp-meetings twenty thousand persons were
present at one time. Children would pray and exhort like
their parents, while around the praying children might have
been seen rings of mothers and fathers writhing and screaming
in a paroxysm of religious frenzy. At some places the epi-
demic took the form of hysterical laughter and dancing, while
many individuals would assume the posture of dogs and bark
and snap like dogs. This, of course, was nothing new ; pre-
cisely similar nervous phenomena may be seen to-day, but in
order to see them we must go into our well-kept lunatic
asylums.

Nor were the insane more accurately counted or better
cared for in Europe a couple of generations ago than they
were in America ; nor is there any trustworthy evidence that
in the old world they were fewer in number then than now.

* Dr. Boris Sidis : Psychology of Suggestion, p. 356.

1 899.] Is INSANITY INCREASING? 323

In 1819 the great French alienist Esquirol, a disciple of Pinel,
wrote these words :* " These unfortunate people are treated
worse than criminals. ... I have seen them naked, covered
with rags, and having only straw to protect themselves against
the cold moisture and the hard stones they lie upon ; . . .
I have seen them in their narrow, filthy cells without light and
air, fastened with chains in these dens in which one would not
keep wild beasts. . . . This I have seen in France, and the
insane are everywhere in Europe treated in the same way."
And we know that the Code Napoleon classed lunatics with
brutes : the Code Napoleon punished those who permitted
"the insane and mad animals to run about free."

Is it any wonder, therefore, considering how these unfortu-
nates were treated in the hospitals, that their families preferred
to keep them at home out of sight where the authorities
could not find them ? Nor was any attempt made to count
them.

When Bethlehem hospital, in London, was inspected in 1816
men and women were found chained to the walls, covered only
with a blanket, and one of its crazy inmates had been chained
for fourteen years. In the very last years of the last century
Dr. Pinel, physician at the Bicetre (the great French prison
for lunatics), determined to better the condition of his wretched
patients, and he applied to Couthon, one of the leaders of the
Revolution, for authority to take the chains off them. It was
a dangerous request to make, and Couthon answered : " Citizen,
I shall go to-morrow to Bicetre to inspect it ; but woe to thee
if thou hidest the enemies of the people among thy lunatics.'*

Couthon kept his promise. But although he had seen many
persons guillotined, he could not endure the pandemonium of
yells and the clanking of chains, and addressing Pinel he said :
"Look here, citizen, art thou insane thyself, that thou wilt un-
chain such animals?"

" Citizen," replied Pinel, " I am convinced that these lunatics
are so unmanageable only because they are robbed of air and
liberty, and I dare hope much from the opposite means of
treatment."

"Well, do with them what thou likest, but I am afraid thou
wilt be a victim of thy presumption."

Pinel at once set about his humane work. One lunatic
whom he freed had been in chains thirty years. Although
he met with a good deal of opposition from the ignorant public,

* Archives of Neurology and Psycho-pathology, vol. i. p. 39.

324 Is INSANITY INCREASING? [Dee.,

he succeeded in the end. Then from the Bicetre he betook
himself to the Salpetriere, another huge prison for lunatics,
and began a like successful reformation there.

In England the first act for the regulation of mad-houses
was passed in 1773 ; and thirty years earlier in 1744 Parlia-
ment made the first provision for the insane in passing the
vagrant act, one section of which deals with persons " furiously
mad or so far mentally afflicted as to be dangerous to be left
at large." Here it is clearly indicated that only such lunatics
as were dangerous to the community were taken any account
of. May we not reasonably believe that there were numberless
others plunged in harmless melancholia who were kept at
home ? Hogarth's celebrated picture the " Scene in a mad-
house " where we have the final punishment which awaits the
Rake's progress, gives a most realistic impression of what
Bethlehem hospital was in his day (the first half of the last cen-
tury) : we see the naked lunatics offered as objects of curiosity
to the public, who were charged a small sum for admission.

We have now gone back to a period when insanity was
scarcely regarded as a branch of medical science and when the
insane were looked upon even by educated persons with super-
stitious dread % Nor have we to go backward very much
further in time in order to find them all, as a general rule,
classed as witches and were-wolves.*

We have before us a rare and curious little book of forty-
nine pages, giving the trial, torture, and execution of the last
witch burned at Geneva, on April 6, 1652. f It is one of the
very few original documents in which the whole trial of a
witch from beginning to end is minutely given ; nor can any
intelligent person peruse it without being convinced that the
unfortunate young woman Michee Chauderon was crazy.
And we may judge of the medical knowledge of two centu-
ries ago, when several of the doctors who examined the ac-
cused believed that they had discovered, by thrusting needles
into her flesh, the sigillum diaboli, the devil's mark; namely,
the part of her body which was insensible to pain.

From this period backward as far as history carries us we
find excepting among a few Roman and Greek physicians
little or no recognition of insanity as a bodily disease. Yet it
is interesting to know that among the records of the parish of

* From wolf 'and the obsolete word wer : in Latin vir man.

t Profes criminel de la derntere sorciere brulee a Geneve le 6 Avril, 1652. Paris, 14 rue
des Carmes.

1899-] Is INSANITY INCREASING? 325

Barking, in England, in 1370, mention is made of a retreat
" for the sustenatation of poor priests and other men and women
who were sick of the phrenzie, there to remaine till they were
perfectly whole and restored to good memorie."

But as a general rule, as we have said, lunatics in those
far-off days were looked upon as witches or as possessed of an
evil spirit. We have even epidemics of hysteria in the middle
ages and in ancient times compared with which the outbreak
of Millerism, in 1840, and the so-called religious revival at the
opening of our nineteenth century, were exceedingly mild
nervous manifestations. And are we to believe that there
were no other mad people in Europe then comparatively
thinly populated except those who were carried away by these
wide-spread psychical epidemics?

What were the were-wolves who roamed in numbers through
the forests, often on all fours and acting like wild beasts? At
times the peasantry, armed with pikes, would set out to
*' round them up " and destroy them. The were-wolves were
simply maniacs escaped or turned adrift from their homes,
whom, perhaps, even loving kinsmen could no longer endure to
have with them. In 1609 the district which now forms the
department of the Basses Pyre"ne*es, France, swarmed with
devil-worshippers; twenty-seven parishes were afflicted by the
malady, and the unhappy victims were all considered to be
possessed.

But space will not allow us to dwell on the various psychi-
cal outbreaks which occurred a few centuries ago, as well as
in pagan times. Suffice it to say they surely reveal an hys-
terical substratum, of which the student must take account if
he wishes to pass a correct judgment upon hysteria at the
present day. We know that formerly scholars of renown wrote
bulky tomes devoted to the discussion of witchcraft and de-
monology ; and what these learned men wrote and taught
must have done not a little to unhinge the intellects of the
over-credulous, suggestible people who listened to them. Their
writings and their teaching no doubt went a long way in the
making of witches and were-wolves. Joan of Arc the one
pure figure which looms above the selfishness and cruelty of
the fifteenth century was only one of the numberless victims
of a superstition which blocked the pathway of scientific
knowledge.

When, therefore, we go backward in time and endeavor to
estimate the number of mad people that may have lived in

326 Is INSANITY INCREASING? [Dec.,

former generations, when we read about the were-wolves and
witches that used to abound in all the countries of Europe,
and of the various nervous epidemics that broke out among
the poor people, we are not so very ready to believe in a
marked increase of insanity in our own generation.

Quite recently the General Lunacy Board, both of England
and Scotland, have pronounced that the greater number of
known lunatics may not indicate an absolute increase. The
friends and relatives of lunatics are much more willing now to
have them placed in comfortable asylums, where they will be
humanely treated, instead of keeping them concealed at home
as formerly.*

An eminent Boston alienist, Dr. Walter Channing, to whom
we wrote a few weeks ago and put the question, Is insanity
increasing? replied as follows: "... The answer is ex-
tremely difficult if it is to be at all accurate. On the sur-
face it would appear that there is a steady and large increase,
almost alarming in character, but on careful investigation this
proves to be somewhat misleading. . . . Hospitals have
improved so much and the public feeling has changed about
them to such an extent, that for these reasons alone a con-
siderable number of persons are sent to them for treatment.
Furthermore, of those who enter them not a large ^percentage
is discharged, so that the insane of these institutions form a
permanent class by themselves. However, it is my opinion
that if .a census could be taken of all the cases of mental
disease which occur in the general population, there would be
found an increase as compared with a period of, we will say,
thirty or forty years ago. These would not be cases of violent
insanity ; but there would be various forms of mental break-
down, some of which would not have been recognized so long
ago as the period to which I refer ; but notwithstanding these
facts, they represent an increase. The causes of insanity
which you mention in your letter . . . are not as potent
factors as they were a hundred years ago, but the strain of
life is greater and nervous exhaustion, as a reaction from it,
not uncommon ; and hence there is a tendency to some form
of mental deterioration or breakdown in a slow, but I believe
increasing, ratio."

No doubt, as this distinguished authority says, the strain of
life is greater than it was thirty or forty years ago, and there
are to-day forms of mental breakdown which were unknown to

* The Journal of Mental Science, July, 1899, p. 460.

1 899.] IS INS A N1TY INCREA SING ? 327

our fathers. We are living at a time when the anxieties of a
business life were never so great. Nevertheless, we in America
are becoming alive to the danger, and we are going to meet it
by leading a more out-of-door life. We are making better
roads; we have more parks; the facilities for getting out into
the country are very much greater than formerly ; the bicycle
vies with the trolley car in taking us rapidly away from the
bustle and din of the town ; and the lives, too, of people who
dwell in the country are much less lonesome and introspective
than they used to be. Although we are working never so hard,
we are at the same time striving in many ways to make life
more joyous.

In a late number of the London Lancet are some pertinent
remarks on this subject by the learned Italian physiologist,
Dr. Mosso.

"It is enough," he says, "to look at the passers-by in the
American streets to be convinced how much more developed
and strong they are than our compatriots. The boys and girls
are in point of physique far superior to ours. All the public
takes an interest in physical exercises every journal being
compelled to report athletic competitions, regattas, foot-ball
encounters, golf matches, etc. . . . My admiration for this
new world is all the greater when I reflect that its civilization
is that of the future, which even for Italy will have better
days in store." What Professor Mosso writes is certainly en-
couraging, and we believe that we may look in the near future
for a marked decrease of insanity among us. Insanity is a
disease of weakness ; and more fresh air, more bicycle riding,
more field sports, and, above all, more holidays, will tend to
make us stronger. And then, if we only have the will to do one
more thing, namely, to be more temperate in drinking, to im-
bibe less of the poison of alcohol (a very potent factor in
brain disease), we shall become in the twentieth century the
sanest people on earth.

328 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. [Dec.,

THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL.

BY MINNIE GILMORE.
I.

ROFANE not the name of love, my son," repri-
manded the padre. " Love is a dream of the
mind, an ideal of the heart, a sentiment of the
soul. To love is the best of life, yes ; but love
must be of God first, and of all men second, and
third and last of but one woman. Find her and wed her,
Francesco. Thou art five-and-twenty come next feast-day, and
the century of years that spans the longest human life is as a
snail in its first quarter, but as the lightning thereafter to its
end ! But name the sefiorita of thy choice to me, that my
word may speed thy suit. Shall it be the laughing Carmen-
cita of the Rancho Henriquez, or the fair and modest Sefiorita
Pepita Valdez, or even the proud young daughter of the rich
and noble De I'Alamos ? "

" But you know, my padre," interrupted Francesco sternly,
" that it is to the little Angela of Los Angeles that my dying
father betrothed me. You would not have me fail my promise
to the dead ? "

" The little Angela beseeches the good Don Angelo that
she may be a nun," reminded the padre. "My son, stand not
between the Creator and his creature ! God claims his own."

" It is the wish of Don Angelo that the heiress of Los An-
geles and the last of the Ferranis be wedded," replied Fran-
cesco, scowling. "And the will of the parent, my padre have
you not said that to resist it is to incur the vengeance of God? "

With a graceful salute, and an elaborate wave of his big
gray sombrero, he turned from the Mission, and, mounting his
horse, galloped toward Los Angeles ranch. The padre sighed
heavily, watching the reckless rider out of sight. His heart
loved Francesco, even as his soul feared for him.

Love for the Ferranis was a tradition of the Mission.
Were not the names of Francesco's father, and of his father's
father, and even of generations behind him, first and best-
beloved of the benefactors of the Mission, for the repose of
whose souls Mass was said every morning, when the bells rang

1899-] THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. 329

out, and the sun and the birds waked together, and the faith-
ful prostrated themselves on the pewless adobe floor, and thus
began the day with Heaven's blessing? Francesco himself was
too seldom among the worshippers ; but on the feasts of the
Mother of God, and on the anniversary of his father's death,
and now and again when a special feast-day appealed to his
devotion, he would kneel at confession, and receive at the
altar, and linger in thanksgiving, an edification to all. Then
the padre who loved him was exultant indeed ; nor was Fran-
cesco less happy, for the spirit of the wild young ranchero
was willing, and the love of the padre reciprocated. But to
resign his betrothed at the padre's word was surely too much
to expect of him. Had not Don Angelo himself forbidden
his daughter the cloister ?

II.

Don Angelo Serra had married a blonde American a Catho-
lic. The son of their union had died at birth, and while her
daughter was still but a toddling baby the frail heart of the
delicate American had failed her, and fled earthly love for
heaven. The Dofta Serra's death-bed prayer had been that
her motherless child might be educated in the States, and
when she was but a fragile human lily of seven Don Angelo
himself had resigned her to an American convent for ten long,
lonely years. Surely the dead blessed him for his paternal
sacrifice, as well as for his marital loyalty, for Don Angelo
had married no second time not he ! His personal happiness
was buried for ever in the blonde American's grave. That he
should look for compensation to the little Angela was only
natural. The love-dreams blighted for him should bloom for
her, and an heir of his race yet rule Los Angeles, or be a
priest of the church ! His life long friend, Francesco's father,
Don Juan Ferrani, of adjoining estate, had suggested that a
marriage between Francesco and Angela would be a marriage
of earth approved in heaven. Francesco was heart-free, loving
all fair young sefioritas indeed, but concentrating his affections
upon none ; and he remembered the little Angela as inheriting
her mother's flower-like beauty, so the proposal did not dis-
please him, and his father's dying blessing had sanctified his
troth.

Angela was but fifteen when she was notified, through
the superior of the convent, that her father had affianced her
to Francesco, whom she dimly remembered as a tall, dark,

330 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL, [Dec.,

handsome, riotous boy. The reverend mother wept gentle
tears as she told her, and at first Angela too had wept, she
knew not why ; but her beautiful pearl ring of betrothal had
done much to reconcile her ; and as the novelty of her roman-
tic engagement wore off, and her schoolmates ceased to won-
der and jest about it, the real significance of the episode faded
from the young girl's innocent heart. But she remembered 'it
always in her prayers, from which the reverend mother had
adjured her never to omit Don Francesco's name.

"To be the guardian angel of her husband's life, to pray
for him in life and death, to wrestle even to the final hour for
the salvation of his soul, this is the vocation of a woman of
the world," she instructed Angela, wisely ; for the reverend
mother had seen the world in her day, and had not forgotten
it. So Angela prayed dutifully for Francesco until, as years
passed, the habit of prayer matured a sweet attraction for it ;
and then it dawned upon Angela's enlightened soul that the
shrine of prayer, the life of consecration, the vows of the
cloister, were her life's divine birthright by the supreme claim
of vocation. Then, both to her father and to Francesco, she
wrote the eloquent plea of a pure young soul inspired by God
a plea which Francesco ignored and her father refused for
both. The reverend mother had grieved, and Angela's con-
fessor regretted that Don Angelo should oppose his daughter ;
yet neither had mourned like Angela, as one without hope.
They knew that God's will would surely be done, however man
might resist it ; and, after all, Angela was very young. Per-
chance, in spite of her devotional sentiments, the revelation of
her real vocation was yet to come.

With such considerations they sought to console Angela,
but at first she could not be consoled. Her gentle heart was
as the heart of Eve exiled from Paradise. Even in anticipa-
tion the world was a wilderness to her. To send her from the
convent was like tearing up a white rose by the roots, for
within its chapel dwelt the Love of her vestal soul. Later,
however, resignation came to her by grace of " prayer with
tears." She realized that her youth held her in bondage in
God's eyes as well as in man's ; and that filial obedience was
virtually submission to the manifested will of God.

When the reverend mother gently broke to her that in all
probability her summons to Los Angeles implied her speedy
marriage, she spent an entire day in the chapel, and then set
forth upon her journey with a calm, transfigured face. She no

1899-] THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. 331

longer rebelled ; she no longer even wept. A mystical assur-
ance of answered prayer consoled her. She had found the
strength to pray that not her will but God's be done!

Recalling, as he galloped toward Los Angeles from the Mis-
sion, the padre's recent words, Francesco suddenly realized that
if he were five-and twenty Angela must have turned seventeen,
and that already Don Angelo was preparing for her return to
the ranch. Of late the festivities of the town had engrossed
him and he had somewhat neglected the lonely old man ; but
now he was conscious of an eager desire to know just when
Angela might be expected, and how and where he should first
meet her as his bride-to-be, and if the cloister had still its rival
charm for her, and all the legion maiden-things Don Angelo
might have to tell of her. With a pang of remorse for his
recent indifference, he sunk spurs in his horse and sped on to
Los Angeles. Dismounting at the ranch, he suddenly swept
off his sombrero, bowing low with a murmured exclamation of
mingled surprise and admiration. For out in the sunshine,
where the fragrance of lilac was sweet about her and the
breezes fanned her like fluttering angel-wings, he stood face to
face with the beautiful blonde Seuorita Serra his bride-elect,
Angela !

III.

She was a tall, slight, statuesque girl, with great eyes like
violets, and hair like a stream of sunshine, and a fair face lus-
trous in its perfect pallor as a young spring hyacinth sun-
wooed from winter snows.

Don Angelo presented Francesco, excitedly explaining that
the little Angela had but to-day stolen a march upon him,
taken her old father by surprise, arrived at least a week earlier
than he had supposed it possible ; and that even now he had
been about to set out for the Rancho Ferrani, to present to
Francesco his profuse and humble apologies for lack of due
notice of the arrival of his betrothed.

With the conventional salutation, Francesco prostrated him-
self before his bride-elect. Unmoved as a statue, Angela re-
garded him with calm, abstracted eyes, standing tall and
straight and stately. A light laugh broke upon the silence of
the moment. Don Angelo turned toward the corridor, and
presented Francesco to his dead wife's sister, a widow still fair
and youthful Doris, the Countess de I'AbbeVille, who since
her marriage in France had become more Parisian in manner
and speech than even the French themselves.

332 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. [Dec.,

" But you are both so droll," she laughed, as she tripped
daintily down the steps, clad in the tender gray and violet of
resigned widowhood. " Lovers, betrothed lovers, and meeting
like formal strangers ! del, but the cloister-angel is droll
always ! It has been a gay journey. I have laughed, laughed,
laughed, every day and night. It is as if I chaperoned a statue
from her convent chapel. But you, monsieur you, as a cabal-
lero, will be a Pygmalion to your Galatea. Is it not so?"

" But peace, madame," commanded Don Angelo sternly.
He did not love his laughing sister-in-law, though she had been
as an elder sister to Angela. Her ways were too light and
her views of life too frivolous. Nevertheless, the flighty
countess was a good companion for Angela at present just
till her convent-seriousness be laughed away.

The countess flicked his cheek with a spray of lilac which
she had broken from a plant as she walked from the corridor.

" The poor good Angelo," she smiled indulgently. " I will
shock him no more, lest the angel have a new duefta ; and
that would break both our hearts, nest-ce-pas, petite cherie ? "

She fell back from Francesco's side as she spoke, and threw
her arm about Angela's waist. The girl responded with a
transfiguring smile. Francisco caught his breath as he saw it.
Already the statue lived !

Regaining the corridor, the tactful countess monopolized
her brother-in-law, resuming a somewhat painful confidence
upon the subject dearest to his heart. When Francesco's
arrival had interrupted her, she had been breaking to Don
Angelo, first, that Angela's consent to a speedy marriage was
not voluntary but only enforced submission ; and secondly, that
both the reverend mother and the convent physician had con-
fided to her that Angela was pathetically delicate that she
had inherited her mother's fragile constitution poor Don
Angelo shuddered in sudden apprehension ; in short, that her
heart was her danger. She must be guarded from emotion
and shock.

" Dio mio!" groaned Don Angelo, bowing his head to the
railing. He had lost his wife. Was he to lose his daughter too ?

" But mourn not yet, my Angelo," consoled the countess.
" The stress of intense emotion should be feared for her, yes ;
but she is too cold, too reserved, too spirituelle to be in danger.
Even love cannot kindle her. Behold her now, as her beau
amant* woes her. Not a flush of girlish embarrassment on her
cheek; not even the glow of coquetry in her calm eyes. And

1899-] THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. 333

he is handsome. If I were a girl ! But he'las ! moi, I am but
une pauvre veuve ugly and old! Is it not so, beau-frere?"

Her coquettish laugh rang past Don Angelo, to challenge
Francesco's chivalry ; but the challenged did not hear it. He
heard nothing but the voice, saw nothing but the face of his
pale, pure, gentle betrothed.

" I thank you for your beautiful ring, seftor," Angela was
saying, with dutiful courtesy. She twisted it on her finger with
a tender touch suggestive of a caress. " All the girls admired
it," she added, with an air of innocent pride. " Alita Robbins,
who was graduated last year, became affianced too, and returned
to show us her ring, which she had chosen herself ; but I liked
it less than mine. It was of blazing diamonds. For me, I like
pearls best; and after, turquois. And you, seftor ? "

" Call me Francesco," he demanded.

" Ought I ? " she asked after a moment's timid hesitation, a
hint of color fluctuating upon her cheek. " Forgive me. I did
not know. It is a pretty name Francesco ! I " her honesty
struggled with her reserve, but her conscience forced her to
speak out frankly : " I have called you Francesco always, in
my prayers."

A swift smile flashed from his eyes.

"Your prayers?" he repeated. " You have been praying
for me?"

" Why, of course," she answered. " Reverend mother bade
me pray for you always, the night I received your ring. 'To
save men by prayer is the vocation of a woman of the world,'
she told me ; and to fill well our vocation, seftor I mean
Francesco is to do the will of God. She wept because I was
to be a woman of the world, the poor dear mother. She had
prayed that I might be allowed to be a nun. It is sweet to
be a nun the convent-life is so peaceful, and the Lord of
the chapel so near ! I was cruelly disappointed when you did
not answer my letter, Francesco. I prayed that you might no
longer wish our betrothal, since I desired to be free. Now I
am praying that you may find you do not like me; for if you
should say to my father that you refuse to marry me, perhaps
I might be a religious, after all."

A colder man would have smiled at her simplicity, and con-
soled himself with the thought that a young girl's fancy for
the convent was not the most dangerous of rivals. But
Francesco's blood ran more fiercely in his veins, and his pride
as well as his dawning sentiment was challenged.

334 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. [Dec.,

"I did not answer your letter," he said, " because it was a
letter that should never have been written. When my suit was
first proffered, you submitted without protest. You accepted
and wore my ring. To keep your faith is a case of noblesse
oblige. Do they not teach honor as well as devotion in your
convent?"

" Do not blame the convent for my faults," pleaded the
girl loyally. " And * honor ' and ' devotion/ then are these but
human lessons, indeed ? / had held them higher as the teach-
ings of the Divine Master, within one's heart ! "

Francesco flushed. He was surprised by the spirited an-
swer, gentle though it was. He felt rebuked as well as 'de-
feated ; and his humiliation made his resolve the more relent-
less. This gentle rebel should feel his power. He could be
stern as well as kind.

* " I admit to you frankly," he said, " that to answer your
letter favorably was my first impulse. I remembered you as a
charming child, but it was rather in filial obedience than in
personal desire that I sued for your hand. To Don Angelo,
rather than to you, my honor was plighted ; and, as you know,
our marriage is still the desire of his heart. Now that I have
seen you, however, now that we meet again and renew the in-
tercourse dear in the days of childhood, something stronger
than Don Angelo's wishes, stronger even than honor, binds
me to you. Angela, maidens are not like men, and their
hearts are kindled by love more slowly ; but even though you
do not love me yet, do you not already feel the possibility,
the probability, even the shy, sweet certainty of loving me in
the future ? A wife must love her husband, Angela. Love is
the vow of the marriage service. You would not stand before
the altar with a lie on your lips? Then begin to love me now ! "

The face of the girl looked grave and perplexed. " Why,
of course I love you already, Francesco," she answered. " You
and my father, and Aunt Doris ! But I will love you all the
better if you will help me to be a religious. I will pray for
you always, and I am sure that God will bless you all your
life. Only tell my father that you no longer care to marry
me."

With a flushing face and a muttered word he rose.

"You have presented every possible plea for freedom/' he
said, "and having heard them one and all, I refuse it. Do
not repeat this painful scene. When you are older and wiser
you will know that woman-arguments are of no avail against

1 899.] THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. 335

man's honor and love. Understand this, once and for all:
nothing shall prevent our marriage nothing ! "

With a deep bow, which included the countess and Don
Angelo in its ceremonious leave-taking, he strode down the
path, leaving the girl gazing after him, a dawn of trouble in
her childlike eyes.

"Is he angry with me, do you think?" she asked of Doris.

" My dear," laughed that mischievous chaperon, " never
confuse the sentiments. A woman must always discriminate.
Unless my eyes deceive me, the handsome caballero is leaving
you not in anger, but in love!"

" Chut ! " said Don Angelo, taking the troubled Angela in
his arms. " The aunt speaks nonsense. Is it not so, cita mia ?
It is time for the siesta yes? Thy Francesco is not angered,
no. Thou wilt find that he will smile upon thee at dinner."

IV.

Life at Los Angeles was a succession of siestas and festas
and out-of-door pleasures. Doris enjoyed its luxurious languor
and social gayeties, and every day looked younger and hand-
somer ; but Angela scrupled its idleness and enervating self-
indulgence. She had brought Ideals of life from the convent
with her, but she was not able to live up to them. In distress
of conscience she wrote her trouble to the reverend mother,
who answered her that to set aside her own wishes and plea-
sures for those of her father and affianced was now the
supreme and holiest duty of her life. Thereupon Angela felt
more resigned to her butterfly existence, and fluttered in the
sunshine with freer wings ; which made life at Los Angeles
less complex. Gradually it resolved itself, so far as Angela
was concerned, into almost unbroken intercourse with Fran-
cesco. When he was not with Angela he was with Doris or
the Mission-padre, since with both he could talk of her. Per-
haps he was happier talking of, than to her. The line of
formal friendship which her maidenhood had laid down tor-
tured his impetuous spirit, as his love grew. Her aloofness
was invulnerable ; and he fretted under it until his handsome,
brilliant face grew sharp and haggard.

"Caramba!" he would cry, galloping to the padre as to a
refuge. " Is it to punish the sins of my youth that this one
white maiden should not love me ? Penance, my padre, penance
for the errors of the past ! "

But the padre only smiled, and patted his shoulder sooth-

336 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. [Dec.,

ingly. " Patience, my son," he urged. " Love is a flower that
blooms but slowly in a virgin heart. If it blushes not for
thee in time, then the pure white flower is claimed by Heaven,
and thou wilt grant it freely. Is it not so ? "

But Francesco only muttered behind his teeth, and rode
away with gloomy face, to pour out his woes to Doris.

" Can you not help me, you, a woman, to a maiden's
heart?" he cried to her. " Is she asleep, or of childish mind,
or really an angel incarnate, and not a human maiden at all,
this marble Angela, that love cannot touch even her pity,
though it die before her eyes ? "

" Not I," responded Doris firmly. " I wash my hands of
the marriage. I have grown to think it should not be. Break
your troth, Francesco. Console yourself with another, and let
Angela return to her reverend mother. When the vocation
speaks, all is said. Be generous, and tell her father you release
her. She will never be happy, never even contented, outside
of convent walls."

" She shall never return to them," vowed Francesco pas-
sionately. " She is mine ! You hear me ? Mine ! Happy or
unhappy, she shall be my wife when the wedding day arrives. I
will demand of Don Angelo that it be in a month a week."

He strode away with the fierce abruptness that had been
growing upon him with all save Angela. Doris shrugged her
shoulders, as she made a mout after him. If he knew all that
she had not told him, she murmured to herself that he would
speak with less certainty of the wedding day.

On the previous night, after a dance in the sa/a, in which,
as at all other dances, Angela had gently but firmly refused
to take active part, she had stolen with sobs into Doris's room.

The tinkling of Francesco's guitar still floated from beneath
her window, around the corner of the house. He had a beau-
tiful baritone voice, and sang with the utmost abandon and
fervor. All that his heart had come to feel for Angela he
poured out nightly, in his lover's serenade. At first Angela
had taken a simple delight in the blended music of voice and
mandolin, and rewarded him by a rose flung from her window,
after the fashion of her race ; but of late she fled him, even
stopping her small ears from the resonant love-notes that the
sefioritas of the other ranchos would lie awake many nights to
hear but once.

"Aunt Doris," she cried, " his music hurts me! It says to
my heart what it is not mine to hear. The love-songs of men

1899-] THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. 337

are not for me. I feel that I should go to confession to the
Mission-padre as if I were desecrating the sacred something
God put in my heart in the convent chapel when I prayed to
be a nun. Oh, save me from the world, save me, save me !
This human love is not sweet to me, but only terrible. Say
to my father that I cannot obey him. Say to Francesco that
I cannot marry him. Beg of the Mission-padre to plead with
my father, to pray pray pray ! "

She had sobbed herself into a nervous collapse, and sud-
denly swooned back, cold and rigid. Doris sped to Don
Angelo's room for some mescal, which she mixed with the
drug Angela's physician had given her, and forced it between
the girl's pale lips. Then she returned to the door, to which
Don Angelo had anxiously followed her; and speaking in
whispers, told him to send Francesco and his guitar away for
ever, for to stand longer between Angela and the vocation of
her heart would be to lead a lamb to the slaughter. Don
Angelo stamped and raved in rage, vowing by his father's
honored grave that Angela should keep her troth. Francesco
was already as the son of his heart ; and was he, a sonless,
lonely man, to sacrifice for a shy girl's whim the hope and
dream of his life ? Therefore, when with wan face and piteous,
appealing eyes, Angela timidly stole her hand in his, and
sobbed out her petition to return to the convent, he was harsh
to her" for the first time in his life, and told her that he
blushed for her dishonor!

" Thou wilt marry Francesco on the earliest day he will
marry thee, and be his loving, dutiful spouse as thy mother was
to me ; and be this the last of thy hysterical convent-nonsense,
or, by the great God above us, I send to-night for the Mission-
padre and wed thee to Francesco out of hand ! "

So vowed Don Angelo, panting and roaring in one of his
rare rages, in which Angela had not before seen him ; and as
he had intended, the sight awed her. She went from his side
hopelessly. To marry Francesco in spite of all that stirred in her
soul against it must be the irrevocable will of God ! It was her
sin, her sin of pride and contumacy, that even yet she doubted it.

" You have only yourself to blame," reproached Doris, when
Don Angelo told her. " Nothing would suit you but the con-
vent for her, for ten long years. Not even the summer holi-
days with me could be permitted ! Now you think to trans-
plant your cloister-lily to the highway of the world ! It is too
late, I tell you. Of course you can force her to marry Fran-

VOL. LXX. 22

338 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. [Dec.,

cesco ; but if it does not kill her, as I predict it will, she will
still be a failure, and you will live to see the unhappiness of
both. Since you reap but as you have sown, be generous,
and save the girl, at least, from further suffering. Bid her live
out her frail life as she wishes. It will not be a long life,
Angelo. Give her her will."

"I will see her dead before me, first," vowed Don Angelo.
" She shall never be a nun, she shall never live unmarried.
Better her death, both for her and me ! I have said it."

Therefore the bridal preparations went on more hastily, and
Francesco's prayer fora speedier wedding was graciously granted.

The request had been born of wilful impulse and resent-
ment ; and looking into Angela's appealing face, Francesco re-
pented them, and wondered if, after all, the longer probation
might not have been to his advantage ? But Don Angelo was
not the man with whom to trifle. Angela's destiny was written.

Through the days that followed Angela lived like one in
a bad dream. She realized only that she was sorely disturbed
and troubled, and homesick for the peace and purity and sweet
solitude of the convent. She wrote long letters to the rever-
end mother, who answered them kindly and wisely, with frank
exhortations to filial and womanly duty, and submission to the
manifest will of God; but even her prayer for resignation,
though it calmed her, failed to bring her shadowed spirit light.
She did not see her way through the worldly labyrinth before
her, and her panic-stricken soul had lost its trustful hold of
the Divine Hand that would guide her through the dark. She
looked even more fragile than when she had first come to the
ranch ; but she was more beautiful as well, with the maturer
beauty of emotive expression. There had been only the peace
of innocence, the exaltation of devotion, to reflect when she
had first emerged from the convent ; but now her sensitive
face was as a kaleidoscope, vivid and changeful, its pallor
stained by a fitful, feverish glow. She was restless always,
with the startled air of a shy young fawn, and the eyes of a
hunted thing appealing for its life. Her sleepless nights of
vigil and prayer, and the emotional and social strain of her
days, told on her frail physique, and attacks of heart-pain
grew frequent. Doris reminded Don Angelo of the physician's
warning, but the pride and self-will of the man were aroused
and he yielded no quarter. A few weeks previous to the an-
ticipated wedding-day he gave a ball in the lover's honor, and
comma-nded that Angela should dance. Dreaming with pater-

1899-] THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. 339

nal pride of the picture to be made by the beautiful heiress
of Los Angeles, with her cheeks flushed and her loosened hair
enveloping her white-robed form like a shimmering cloud of
gold, he had been annoyed from the first at her exclusion
from the triumphs of the gay and vivacious seftoritas of the
neighboring ranches, who whirled their laces into tatters, and
their dusky hair down from its combs and pins, dancing with
racial fervor ; and on this her last social appearance until she
should stand forth a bride, he insisted that she should honor
Francesco. She obediently gave him her hand for the contra-
danza, and her gentle grace and swaying, willowy motion
evoked the admiration of the rancheros and the envy of the
rivalled sefloritas, among whose brunette ranks Angela stood
like a tall white lily, her hair its coronal of gold.

After the dance she stole to her room, where she sank on
her knees before her little altar. The spells of the music and
dance were upon her, and with youthful scrupulousness she
resisted their subtle charm as a sin, and fled to God as her
refuge from temptation. The awful thought that her tempted
spirit was already failing his call, or that in the worldly life
to be forced upon her she would weakly yield to temptation,
tortured and terrified her. Her slender form quivered and her
face was stained with tears as she cowered under her burden
of potential guilt. The waltz tunes floated to her from the
flutes and harps and guitars in the corridor. Along their
melody her inarticulate murmurs sobbed like the broken echo
of a minor song.

"Father, in Christ's Name, pity thy child!" she petitioned.
" I am not strong enough for the temptations into which evil
days have led me. The snares of the world are around me,
and I cannot see thy face. Deliver me, O God, from the pit-
falls that surround and daze me! Guide me back to the
prayer and toil, the peace and purity, the hush and solitude
of the blessed cloister. Deny me not the chalice for which
my soul's love thirsts ! Quench not the flax that burns for
God alone ! Crush not the reed that clings to Christ ! Mary,
my mother, rend the chains that drag me from thee! Jesus,
in Mary's name, reject not the service of my poor life ! "

She was weeping still when Don Angelo came for her. In
a voice of thunder he commanded her to dry her tears, re-
arrange her disordered toilette, and return with him to the
sala. An undulating Mexican waltz was just beginning. He
called Francesco and cast her roughly into his arms. The re-

340 THE FLIGHT OF AN ANGEL. [Dec.

volt of her blue eyes, the whispered plea of her trembling
lips, maddened Francesco. Why should she shrink from waltz-
ing with him? Had her father not given her to him? Was
she not his affianced bride? He crushed his chivalrous im-
pulse to yield to her maiden wishes, and resolutely drew her
into the mazes of the dance. The pace of the waltz grew
swifter. The emotional fervor of tropical races pulsated in its
rhythm. The lights blurred and the world whirled for the
maiden meshed in the toils of pleasure. She seemed to see
the dove of her white ideals departing, and faced, in its place,
the angel with flaming sword ! The conflict of God and man,
of earth and heaven, was waged before her eyes, and her vir-
ginal heart quailed shuddering from the conflict.

" O God ! " sobbed the prayer of her soul " O God, I am
thine, thine only! Holcl me from all save thee ! I have
vowed thee my life! Cast me not to thy creature! Succor,
thou great God, succor!"

Francesco felt her form sway and quiver, and saw her lips
whiten as her eyes closed above them. The waltz tune ended
and his arms released her. She fell back palely. The dancers,
with cries of surprise and pity, crowded about her; then made
way for Don Angelo, who approached with a face of dread.

" Dio mio" he screamed, " but she is going like her mother!
But no, no, no, it shall not be so ! She shall live, I say, to
do my will, and marry! Angelacita ! Angelacita! Angelacita!"

" Hush, dear ! " sobbed Doris. " The way of the world was
not for her. She is the bride of Heaven ! "

Murmuring of the padre, a dozen devout rancheros mounted
their steeds and spurred them toward the Mission ; but already
the padre was making his way through the sala. Beyond the
corridor, in the lonely darkness under the stars, he had been
hearkening to the music the passion, half joy, half sorrow, of
his heaven-haunted soul!

"What has happened?" he asked of Francesco, waving
back the others, and laying his gentle hand on the head of
Don Angelo, sobbing over the prostrate body.

"But I have killed her, I who loved her, /," raved Fran-
cesco. "Only a dance against her will, and she was dead in
my arms, padre dead ! "

" She was an angel," sighed the padre, " and her white
wings fled from thee to heaven ! Did I not warn thee, my
son, not to stand between the Creator and his creature ? God
has but claimed his own ! "

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

BY GRACE V. CHRISTMAS.

T is Christmas time, and there is a sense of stir
and excitement in the crisp, cool atmosphere.
The pavements of the " Eternal City " are trod-
den by people of varied nationalities speaking
in various tongues, and the shops are gay with
glittering baubles.

" Plum puddings for sale." The printed notice attracts the
eye from the windows of the " English Tea-Rooms," and the
English and Americans, as they pass to and fro across the sun-
lit Piazza di Spagna, seeking souvenirs of the season for " the
old folks at home," discover suddenly that the prosaic an-
nouncement is invested with a touch of poetry and pathos
under an Italian sky ! Scarlet hollyberries gleam amongst the
purple violets and many-hued chrysanthemums at the flower-
stalls, and Christmas cards may be purchased on every side.
The native shop-keeper has fully grasped the situation, and
finds both pleasure and profit in supplying the national wants
of the lavishly disposed forestieri within his gates.

Regarded from a Roman point of view, however, Christmas
Day is not so much a family festa as is the case in other
countries. It is celebrated with all possible pomp and magni-

342

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

[Dec.

ficence as one of the greatest, feasts of the church, but the
presentation of useful or ornamental gifts plays no leading part
in the programme.

With regard to edible presents it is another story. Sausages,
plump capons, and other delicacies are bestowed upon absent
friends and relatives, and hundreds of " panettoni " are de-
spatched by parcel post all over Italy. These somewhat insipid
cakes are apparently held in high esteem, though the reason
for this predilection is far to seek. They are unwieldy to pack,
and they are not particularly palatable, being composed of
eggs, flour, and yeast, forming a sort of very light dough, with
here and there a solitary currant separated by a painful dis-
tance from its companions. Such are the "panettoni," and yet
every postman staggers under their accumulated weight, and
aunts, cousins, mothers in-law, and uncles send them with
monotonous regularity to various members of the family, fre-
quently receiving the self-same souvenir in return. One of the

unwritten laws of Italian
etiquette demands that up-
, on the receipt of a gift the
of gratitude shall be
promptly paid by
a present to the
giver, with the
evident inten-
tion of shaking
off the irksome
load of obliga-
tion and crying

debt

A VENDER OF MISTLETOE.

"quits" as
soon as possi-
ble. " Pan 'gi-
allo," the Ital-
ian substitute for plum-pud-
ding, and "pan forte" are
also greatly in request as
tokens of amity. This lat-
ter dainty, of which it may
be said that a little goes a
long way, resembles soft
hard-cake, and pounded al-
monds enter largely into
its preparation. It occu-

1 899-]

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

343

pies at this season a promi-
nent place in the confection-
ers' shops, which are well
worth looking at from an ar-
tistic point of view, with their
ethereally tinted bonbons in
gaily-colored satin bags, and
their variety of cakes frosted
over with sugar icing in pink
and white.

The exception to the lack
of Christmas presents is found
within the walls of the Quiri-
nal Palace. Queen Marghe-
rita is extremely lavish in her
ideas, and enriches her maids
of honor and particular friends
with a variety of splendid
gifts, thereby gladdening the
hearts and filling the pockets
of the shop-keepers on the
Corso whom she elects to
patronize on these occasions.
King Humbert, of the melan-
choly visage, is also not be-
hindhand in this respect, and
his nephews come in for a
large share of his munificence.

Christmas gifts of a more ideal character flow from the
outstretched hands of the saintly Prisoner in the Vatican in
the shape of practical assistance to God's poor, who are also
provided with several Christmas dinners through the charity of
the various Catholic societies in Rome.

In sunny Italy, by the way, the Christmas dinner is not quite
such a solemn function as it is in England and Germany ; still
the natives of this fair land are well able to appreciate the
delicacies of the season. The huge sirloin of beef, and the
flaming plum-pudding, whose memory is apt to linger in the
form of indigestion, are unknown items in an Italian dinner,
their place being usurped by a capon stuffed with chestnuts,
and the gala dish on all festive occasions, " panna montata,"
or whipped cream. The following is a fairly typical menu of
a Roman dinner-party on the 25th of December. It varies

344

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

[Dec.,

according to tastes, but this
is the general order of the
f- courses : Clear soup with
,. " capelletti " floating in it,
; viz., little hat-shaped pieces
:, of maccaroni filled with
forcemeat. This is followed
\ by the "lesso," or meat of
which the soup has been
made, an inevitable feature on the majori-
ty of Italian tables, and served with a
piquantfsauce and vegetables. The next
course is the " fritto misto," a dish of
brains, liver, potatoes, and various vege-
tables, all fried that rich golden color which
seems to be only obtainable in a foreign
frying-pan. Bologna sausage, a specialite
of the season, is then partaken of ;
no Christmas dinner being consid-
ered complete without its some-
what garlicky presence. Now ap-
pears the capon in all its substan-
tial glory, surrounded by siffets of
fried bread and pounded anchovies, and ac-
companied by a fresh green salad. Then fol-
low the sweets, ices, and " panna montata,"
etc.

Notwithstanding the fact that Christmas
Eve is a black fast, the evening meal on
that solemn vigil partakes somewhat of the
nature of a festa. The changes are rung on
"WHEN SHEPHERDS FROM THE roast boi i ed and fried fish, and the piece de

ABRUZZI MOUNTAINS MADE .

THEIR APPEARANCE IN THE ^^istance consists of a. dish of stewed eels.

CITY OF THE SAINTS TO HER- Many of the quaint customs which for-
BIRTH OF CHRIST." medy distinguished a Roman Christmas
have in these modern days unhappily fallen into disuse. Time
was when, during the nine days of the novena which pre-
cedes the feast of Christmas, picturesquely clad shepherds
from the Abruzzi mountains made their appearance in the
"city of the saints" to herald the Birth of Christ. The
" Pifferi," as they were termed, played carols on their bagpipes
before .the shrines of the Madonna which adorn so many
of the old Roman streets, and on payment of a few " soldi ^

1 899.]

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

345

their services could be obtained in private oratories for family
devotion.

We have considered Christmas from a material and gastro-
nomic point of view ; now let us glance at the spiritual side
of things.

It is Christmas Eve, and
the broad flight of steps
leading to St. Peter's is
thronged with a cosmopoli-
tan crowd. Inside the vast
basilica the first Vespers of
the feast are being sung,
the sweet voices of the Sis-
tine Choir rising and fall-
ing in melodious cadences,
and blending together in
waves of harmony which
echo through the lofty

PLAYING CAROLS BEFORE THE SHRINES OF THE MADONNA."

34^

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

[Dec.,

ROME ON HER SEVEN HILLS LIES BATHED IN SUNSHINE."

dome. Now they
are singing the
" Magnificat," and
a procession,
headed by the
cardinal-secretary
of state with his
scarlet robes and
dignified presence*
passes on its way
to the altar of the
Blessed Sacra-
ment a gorgeous
procession of er-
mine-coped can-
ons and students from the Vatican Seminary in their deep pur-
ple cassocks.

On this Christmas Eve of 1899 begins the solemn year of
Jubilee, and the " holy door," closed for so long a space of
time, is to be thrown open by the Holy Father, as a sign that
the " Anno Santo " has begun to run its course.

There is no Midnight Mass within the walls of this grand
basilica, but the office of Lauds is chanted, and an exquisite
" Pastorelle," sung by the Sistine Choir in the "wee sma'
hours "before the dawn, and the first High Mass on Christmas
morning is celebrated at five o'clock A. M. In every college
and convent chapel in Rome, however, and in many of the
churches, the Holy Sacrifice is offered up at midnight, and the
joyful tidings " In terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis " once
sung by the angels are repeated over and over on earth and
are echoed in heaven. . . . It is Christinas morning. Rome
on her seven hills lies bathed in sunshine, and overhead stretches
a canopy of cloudless, unfathomable blue. Bells are pealing
gaily from many a gray old belfry and lofty tower; the
churches are decked with silken hangings of gold and crim-
son, and waxen tapers gleam on every altar, and shed their
light beside the Crib of the Babe of Bethlehem.

Let us ascend the historic flight of steps leading to the side
entrance of the Church of Ara Cceli. We are treading upon
haunted ground haunted by the spirits of the pagan past. Here
Tiberius Gracchus met his death in front of the Temple of
Jupiter, and at the summit is the spot where Valerius the
consul fought with Herdonius for the possession of the Capitol.

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

347

Here also but these memories are incongruous with the joyful
festa of to-day.

The picturesque old church is thronged with worshippers,
and the brown-clad sons of St. Francis are singing the " Gloria
in Excelsis." There is no touch of modernity in this spacious
building, where the dust of centuries lies on the mediaeval
tombs, and time has laid a heavy hand on the once gorgeous-

IN A ROMAN GARDEN.

ly tinted frescoes of Pesaro and Pinturicchio, and on the rich
gilding of the lofty roof. It presents, in fact, a certain dim,
dingy appearance ; but, as it has been happily described, it is
" the dimness of faded splendor."

Let us turn to the Chapel of the Presepio, where the cele-
brated image of the Bambino d'Ara Cceli lies in His Mother's
arms. It is but fitting that the most beautiful crib in Rome

348

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

[Dec.,

should be found in a church of the Franciscan Order, for it
was the Seraphic Friar of Assisi who first conceived the idea
of a representation of the stable at
Bethlehem.

In the foreground the life-size
figures of our Lady and St. Joseph
are placed in a grotto, and immedi-
ately behind them we see the ox
and the ass. On one side shepherds
and kings are kneeling in adoration,
and overhead the Eternal Father is
surrounded by smiling cherubs and
angels "harping on their harps." In
the background is seen a pastoral
landscape, in which the perspective
is admirably executed. Shepherds
are reposing under the shade of palm-
trees, and sheep, made of real wool
and cotton wool, are feeding near a
crystal fountain, while women bear-
ing baskets of oranges and other

" IN THE BACKGROUND is SEEN A PASTORAL
LANDSCAPE."

fruits on their heads are approaching the
grotto. Diamond pendants sparkle in the
ears "of the Virgin Mother, and the Bam-
bino, swathed in gold and silver tissue,
glitters with precious gems.
A temporary platform is erected opposite the Presepio from
which every day during the octave juvenile orators deliver
eloquent sermons on the Incarnation. It is most amusing to

I 899.]

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

349

watch the gestures and the varying expressions of these tiny
preachers, as they stand surrounded by a group of admiring
relations. The quality of shyness is usually conspicuous by its
absence from these performances, and whenever a trace of it
does appear it is invariably in a little boy!

Space will not allow us to dwell upon the history of the
Bambino d'Ara Cceli. Hare describes it as the " oldest medical
practitioner in Rome," and many are the miraculous cures at-
tributed to it. There is a very pretty legend concerning it
which, if not true, is at least " ben trovato." A woman had
cast covetous eyes upon the wonder-
working image, and, having feigned
sickness, begged that the " Bambino "
might be brought to her bedside.
As soon as she was alone with her
prize she dressed up another image,
with which she had provided herself,
in its garments, and eventually re-
turned it to the Ara Cceli, retaining
the original in her own possession.
That night the sleeping friars were
aroused from their slumbers by a
violent ringing of bells and thunder-
ing knocks on the west door of the
church, and hastening thither, saw a
tiny pink foot peeping through a
crevice. They opened the door,
and there stood the little naked
figure of the true "Bambino,"
shivering in the wind and the
rain.

Since then it has never,
under any pretext, been left
alone with those who demand
its presence. On the Epiph-
any it is carried in procession
round the church, accom-
panied by priests and
people, Tertiaries in their
brown habits, gendarmes
to guard the diamonds,
rubies, and emeralds with
which it is encrusted, and

350 CHRISTMAS IN ROME. [Dec.,

a band of music. The great west door is thrown open, the
golden glory of the sunset gilds the mosaic pavement, and
the " Bambino " is raised high above the crowd to bestow
its blessing upon the " Eternal City." The scene on this
long flight of a hundred and twenty-four steps leading to
the west door has been well described in Roba di Roma :
" Here ape to be seen all sorts of curious little colored prints
of the Madonna and Child, little bags, pewter medals, and
crosses stamped with the same figures, all offered at once for
the sum of one soldo. Here also are framed pictures of the
saints and of the Nativity. Little wax dolls clad in cotton
wool, to represent the Saviour, and sheep made of the same
material, are also sold by the basketful. Children and ' conta-
dini ' are busy buying them, and there is a deafening roar all
up and down the steps of " Mezzo soldo, bello colorito, Diario
Romano, Ritratto colorito Bambinello di Cera un soldo ! "
None of the prices are higher than one soldo, except to
strangers, and generally several articles are held up together,
enumerated, and proffered with a loud voice for this sum.
Meanwhile men, women, children, priests, beggars, soldiers, and
' villani ' are crowding up and down, and we crowd with them."

In the afternoon of Christmas Day all Rome flocks to
Santa Maria Maggiore, on the Esquiline Hill. Solemn Vespers
are sung by the Sistine Choir, and at their conclusion the
" Holy Cradle," in its crystal and gold case, is carried in pro-
cession, followed by canons, priests, and acolytes, the cardinal
titular of the basilica bringing up the rear.

Apart from the religious ceremonies Santa Maria Maggiore
is a rendezvous for friends and acquaintances on Christmas
afternoon. One must have arrived at a very high pitch of
spirituality to be able to follow undistracted the never-ending
psalms as rendered by Rome's sweetest singers. Those, there-
fore, who are still clinging to the lower rungs of the ladder of
perfection walk up and down the spacious edifice waiting for
the procession, or stand about in groups of twos and threes,
exchanging the greetings of the season. That " great endings
have small beginnings " is an aphorism which is truer than
mo^t. Two conversions to Catholicity within our knowledge,
and possibly many others, have originated in a few chance
words spoken on Christmas Day in the old historic church of
Santa Maria Maggiore. In one case, by the way, the instru-
ment chosen by God for a soul's salvation was a young man,
then studying for the priesthood at the North American Col-

1 8 9 9-]

CHRISTMAS IN ROME.

lege, and who is now laboring in his own country for the good
of his fellow-creatures. And she who was led by his influence
into the one true fold of Christ has gone to receive her eter-
nal reward in heaven.

The Epiphany, or " Befana," is pre-eminently the children's
feast in Rome, and the day on which they reap a fine harvest
of presents. It is a time of family rejoicing especially.

This year the beautiful custom of having the " Quarant'
Ore " all night long will be observed in every church in Rome
on the eve of this feast to usher in the new century.

Vespers are over on the feast of the Epiphany ; the last
verse of the " Magnificat " has died away upon the incense-
scented air ; the momentary twilight has faded and the stars
are beginning to glitter in the southern sky. The festa is at
an end, but it leaves behind it deep and lingering memories,
and though it may be that we shall celebrate succeeding an-
niversaries of the birth of Christ in other lands and amidst
other surroundings, the' recollection of our Christmas in Rome
will be stamped for ever on the tablets of our minds.

352 THE ETHICS OF REALISM. [Dec.,

THE ETHICS OF REALISM.

BY REV. THOMAS J. HAGERTY, A.M., S.T.B.
I.

HE key-note of sound reading is struck by no
less a master than Mr. Ruskin when he tells us,
in his Fors Clavigera : * " You ought to read
books as you take medicine, by advice and not
advertisement." He, in sooth, is a rash man
who swallows cyanide of potassium for a headache because
its color catches his eye ; and he is unwise who reads the novels
of Zola on the plea that the publishers advertise them in such
charming morocco binding. The harm done in either case is
likely to be more lasting than color or binding. It is the
power of this truth which is slowly pushing Catholic books to
the front. The faithful need remedies against the ignorance
and bigotry and lying whose germs are everywhere. The very
air, in places, reeks with prejudice against the church. Mis-
representation of religion is rife in pulpit and platform, in
histories, books of travel, novels, and magazines. The most
sacred things are travestied.

Within our own century worthy men like Sir Walter Scott
and Washington Irving make merry with monks hankering
after paltry pelf, and large-minded men like Tennyson prate of

" The poor man's money gone to fat the friar."

Even the gentle Longfellow must needs strain his harp to
harsh notes in telling how the portly abbot abused the gift of
Vogelweld, the Minnesinger. So well informed and clever a
writer as Israel Zangwill speaks in one of his American novels,
The Master, of the poor Indians trying to scrape together
enough money for the yearly remission of sins at the hands of
the priest ; and Lionel Decle, in his Trooper 3809, besmirches
the loving ministry of the Sisters of Charity. These things,
were they done in a clumsy fashion, would die of their own
awkwardness ; but the guise of fair-mindedness and the witchery
of diction wherewith they are garnished keep them alive in
the world.

* Vol. i. p. 274.

1899-] THE ETHICS of REALISM. 353

II.

The age in which we live is no respecter of persons, be
they churchmen or laymen. It will heed no man who speaks
to it with uncouth tongue or faltering knowledge. It views
with scornful eye all who skulk in dark corners and who can-
not bear the search-light of science. It circles

" Thro' new spheres of thought
Still moving after truth long sought."

The thinkers of our age have been quick to note, and to
take advantage of, the age's thirst for things new. They see
that the old, prosy forms of teaching pall on its palate ; and
they are ever in quest of wells of water with strange flavors to
tempt its relish. The atheist, the agnostic, and the socialist no
longer write heavy essays and lumbering dissertations. They
set their theories to the music of easy-flowing rhyme or subtly
weave them into the warp and woof of romance. The can-
kered nature-studies of Thoreau are examples to the point.
Thoreau was as much a decadent in his own way as Le Gal-
lienne or Verlaine of later times. To him Buddhism was better
than Christianity, and the flowers and ferns along the Concord
and Merrimac rivers of more moment than religion and the God-
head. Worship and ritual seemed to his narrowed thinking "like
the beating of gongs in a Hindoo's subterranean temple." He
had high words of praise for the coarse, phallic deities of Greece
and Rome, and little but scorn for what he was pleased to call
" the Christian fable." He possessed a wondrous genius for
bodying forth the woods and waters and glens, though his pic-
tures are blotted by sophistry and the smudge of unbelief.
The calumnies of George Borrow's classic, The Bible in Spain,
and the flippant falsehoods of Henry Seton Merriman's In
Kedars Tents in less winsome array would strut and fume upon
the world's stage to small purpose ; while the sensualism of
Madame Grand and her kind, if put into blunter phrase, would
shock the thickest-skinned reader.

Most Catholics are quickened into protest by such things as
Lea's labored tricks with the history of indulgences; "but if
a tone of friendliness is affected ; if the hackneyed calumnies
are carefully discarded ; if insinuations and innuendos are sub-
stituted for direct attack ; if, under the garb of literature or
science, plausible misrepresentations are stealthily introduced,

VOL. LXX. 23

354 THE ETHICS OF REALISM. [Dec.,

the ordinary reader is thrown off his guard. . . . He is not
shocked by the grossest blasphemies because they are clothed
in decorous language ; he accepts the merest sophisms as argu-
ments because they appeal to his vanity; and, before he is
aware of it, he is half won over." *

III.

In fact, there is a looseness about many present-day books
which passes for broad thought among the reviewers, and he
is indeed a bold wight who dares run full tilt against their
judgment. To be abreast of the times one must see in the
unlawful loves of the average novel types which bring him in-
to touch with the weakness, the yearning, and the world-pain
of our common blood. He must find a repressed power in the
writer who shows him/' the naturalness of the man and woman
who are trying in their different blind ways to do right, and
.yet with whom everything nevertheless goes wrong."f If he
blush at the coarseness of D'Annunzio or sicken from the read-
ing of Grant Allen, he is no better than a witless churl whose
mind has never gone beyond the pages of Jane Austen ; and
he is driven out of the tents, an Ismael, if he hold that there
is no helpfulness in the wild passions, the mad liaisons, and the
animalism of such tales and psychologic studies as we get
from Thomas Hardy, Hall Caine, and, betimes, from Marie
Corelli.

The glib phrase, " Honi soit qui mal y pense," will not
answer when we set ourselves against a realism which gloats
over woman's shame and man's dishonor ; for virtue cannot be
abashed by the charge of squeamishness nor deafened by the
blare of publishers' trumpets. The setting up of wrong stand-
ards of art in the high places of literature has the same effect
as the making of t false gods had upon an earlier people. A
falling off from true ideals is a serving of idols, whether it be
in religion or letters. No darker portrayal of the consequences
can be found anywhere than in the fourteenth chapter of the
Book of Wisdom: "All things are mingled together, blood,
murder, theft, and dissimulation, corruption and unfaithfulness,
tumults and perjury, disquieting of the good, forgetfulness of
God, defiling of souls, changing of nature, disorders in mar-
riage, and the irregularity of adultery and uncleanness."

It may not be urged that the novelist does not create these

* American Catholic Quarterly Review, Oct., 1897, p. 675.
t The Bookman, Jan., 1897, p. 469.

1899-] THE ETHICS OF REALISM. 355

conditions but only mirrors them, for the reflection of them
multiplies them all the more in the minds and memories of
his reader. Criminologists like Desjardins, Garofalo, and Ferri
recognize such literature as a factor in the evolution of crime.
Henry James's What Maisie Knew belongs to it as much as
Victorien Sardou's Theodora. It plays its part in our divorce
courts and it steals into the houses of men. Henry James's
book is read by hundreds who delight to wallow in the mire
over which Maisie passes with clean feet, and who care not a
straw for the cold intellectual treatment, the psychology, and
the vestal purity of Mr. James.

IV.

The shallowness and double-dealing, the greed and lust,
which so fill the horizon of the extreme realism are no proofs
of any lack of depth, frankness, and pure manhood in every
avenue of life. Blemishes strike us more forcibly than perfec-
tions only because of the comeliness which heightens them.
The eye is quickly arrested by a blot in the heavens, the
while it may be unmindful of the sky of soft, changing colors
which stretches away from. it. Good needs no bugle-notes to
sound its presence. It is everywhere. We breathe it in with
the very air. Evil, on the other hand, is self-assertive. It is
more noticeable only because it is froward and noisy; but it
has no right to a hearing in every ear in virtue of its loud-
ness. Evil, it is true, has its lessons just as garbage-boxes
have their uses, though no man wants them in his kitchen or
drawing-room. And so, even when the novelist of the day
offers things not bad in themselves, but merely vulgar, he
should have no guest-favors in the castle of the soul.

Maurice Jokai and Catulle Mendes may do well enough on
the dissecting-table of the critic, but they are ill-suited for the
cleaner clinic of the home. It were a bootless task to look
for moral antiseptics against the diseased fancies which swarm
through their pages. To read them is to become infected by
them. No physician will admit that to the healthy all things
are healthy; and no moralist will grant too wide a range to
the words of St. Paul: "To the pure all things are pure."
The text has been twisted out of its merely local meaning, and
is grown into a shibboleth in that shadowy Bohemia which is
the modern Babylon of literature.

Sin and wretchedness may be made to serve as foils to vir-

356 THE ETHICS OF REALISM. [Dec.,

tue, but when they are crowded to the front they darken the
light and befoul the air. Strychnine, for example, is a boon
to nerve-wasted bodies, though it is the curse of death to the
normal man. And thus it is with books. Realism in literature
is " of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." It need not,
however, be of the earth, earthy ; for the cloud-tints which
make the welkin a vast ceiling of Mexican onyx have as much
reality in them as the gaudy posters which flaunt their colors
from fence and barn-side. There is realism in perfume as well
as in stench ; and although naturalness is not of itself un-
righteousness, yet we do not take our drinking-water from the
ditches any more than we draw our morals from the slums.
The world has still warmth enough to be independent of the
success or failure of Dean Swift's projector in extracting sun-
beams from cucumbers ; and there is ample food to be had
without imitating that other projector of the Great Academy
of Lagado in his mawkish experiments.

Doubtless Gulliver had a strong stomach ; but were he to
go through Gabriel d'Annunzio's Triumph of Death he would
come out of it with gastro-enteritis. The book is typical of its
sort. The play of satire does not save it from the refined lewd-
ness which wantons between the lines. Power there is in it
and art, though the power is unto evil and the art runs riot.
Small wonder, too, since D'Annunzio is the chief of that school
which clings to the hedonism of Aristippus, and whose high-
priest is Omar Khayyam:

" Ah, fill the cup : what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our feet?
Unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them, if to-day be sweet ?" *

Art for art's sake, and not art for truth's sake, is the meas-
use of their writing. Whatever stirs the nerves with new pleas-
ures and thrills the senses with rare movements gives the
needed tint and tone to life. It matters not whether it be
right or wrong, but it must be dainty and soothing. Honest
husbands and pure wives are too commonplace to fit nicely
into this system. Its influence does not make for righteous-
ness. It seldom finds that exquisite passion which intensifies

* The Rubaiyat, Fitz-Gerald's Translation, xxxvii.

THE ETHICS OF REALISM.

357

the passing moment save in nastiness. And yet virtue is to the
full as stirring as vice. The truth that

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power/'*

is as fragrant with dramatic possibilities as the doctrine of
hopelessness, passion, and distrust. Even Sophocles, pagan
though he was, asked :

" Shall Judgment be less strong than Sin ?
Shall man o'er Jove dominion win ? " f

Shall Tolstoi's vague economy take the lead of Dr. Egan's
clearer guidance in The Disappearance of John Longworthy ?
Shall Beatrice Harraden's The Fowler crowd Josephine Marie's
Let no Man put Asunder from our book-shelves ? Shall we
join in the literary heresies of Andrew Lang and admire Marie
Corelli, the while we neglect Gladstone's praises of Rosa Mul-
holland ?

False realism and wrong idealism are extremes of iniquity.
There is a middle ground where purity of thought and fresh-
ness of heart are not sullied nor soured ; and it is large enough
for the play of the quickest minds. The development of self-
hood must be a growth in the open where the air and sunlight
are untainted. To venture beyond it is to be caught in the
meshes of darkness and guilt.

* Tennyson,

f Antigone.

358

THE ROYAL BABE.

[Dec.,

BY CAROLINE D. SWAN.

BLUE-BLACK sky, alive with stars!

O patient expectation past !
O earth, forget thy battle scars,

Thy King is come at last.

A tiny hand, a rose-leaf touch,
A Babe, whose silence is Divine :

Thou, who hast sinned and suffered much,
That hand is laid on thine.

It crowns, it pardons. Grieve no more !

It lies divinely on thy heart.
Arise and shine ! His grace adore,

Whose heritage thou art !

He comes in love. His infant smile
Its primal blossoming reveals ;

His Blessed Mother kneels the while
Its sweetness o'er her steals,

O Bud of Heav'n, unfold Thy rare,
Ensanguined petals to the light !

Bright Babe of Bethlehem, how fair
Thou dawnest on our sight !

The world is in Thy little grasp,
Still lingering with delicious thrill ;

Oh, keep it in Thy tender clasp,
And mould it to Thy will!

1899-] TOTAL ABSTINENCE AND NON-CATBOL2C MISSIONS. 359

TOTAL ABSTINENCE AND NON-CATHOLIC
MISSIONS.

BY REV. T. F. BURKE.

OR some years the Catholic Church in America
has taken a prominent stand upon two matters
which may at first appear to have but little in
common. These two matters are her work in
the cause of total abstinence and her preaching
of Catholic doctrine to those not of her fold. In all parts of
our land where non-Catholic mission work has been attempted
it has met with success greater or less. Not only those per-
sonally engaged in the work but all Catholics who love reli-
gion must feel that any good action which may tend to further
such a noble undertaking as the conversion of America to the
Catholic faith, deserves most serious consideration.

Now, to some who have been laboring among non-Catholics
it has become evident that the practice and the preaching of
total abstinence are most influential factors to the furtherance
of non-Catholic mission work. And this for two reasons. In the
first place, the cause of total abstinence, as defended by the
church, presents her to the minds of men, in a plain, public
way, as she is always, the defender of Christian morality. In
the second place, through the powerful influence which her
stand upon any moral question exerts upon the social body,
she helps, by her preaching of total abstinence, to remove
one of the most serious obstacles to religious thinking, and
thus more efficiently to prepare the way for the acceptance of
all Catholic truth.

He who to-day would blind himself to the existence of the
drink-evil in our land and to the necessity of adopting some
stringent measures to abolish it, is untrue to the best interests
of his country and of religion. He who would hesitate to see
in intemperance an evil which has an intimate bearing, in
its unseemly power, upon social, political, and religious life,
at the best confesses his ignorance of existing facts. Let him
study the reports of police courts, and the records will compel
him to admit that the majority of crimes take their root in
intemperance. Let him honestly consult medical statistics, and
he must confess that no other vice has laid to its charge so

360 TOTAL ABSTINENCE AND NON-CATHOLIC MISSIONS. [Dec.,

many fatal diseases. Let him know, as lately was acknowledged
by the head of an insane asylum in which were twenty-six
hundred inmates, that over one-third of the madness in our
land is caused by drink, and his reason will force him to op-
pose the evil with all his power. Let him go down to the
lower depths of life, and witness the awful misery of children
and of mothers; let him behold the poverty and the inhuman
wretchedness that drink by its magic conjures up ; let him
come as close to all this as, for example, the Catholic
priest must come, and if there be a spark of love for man
within his heart, it will set him on fire in his efforts to put
down the evil.

These facts are sufficient to applaud the efforts which result
from the practice of total abstinence ; but if any are looking for
another motive, they can find it in the assistance which this prac-
tice gives to the spread of Catholic truth. The best outside of
the church have recognized the evil of drink; and, it must be
confessed, have at times done far more to oppose it than Catho-
lics themselves. Perhaps they have, not infrequently, made mis-
takes in the methods of their opposition, but such mistakes
can be easily forgiven and easily rectified. One of these mis-
takes has been their failure to distinguish between the Catholic
Church and the personal faults of some of her members. "By
their fruits you shall know them," they say. And then, judging
by the lives of some bad Catholics, they illogically conclude
that the church is responsible. Drawing conclusions from
some unfortunate instances which have come to their notice,
they have not hesitated at times to point to the Catholic
Church, the church which we love, as to the supporter of the
liquor-traffic. Furthermore, seeing some who lead drunken
lives, they have asked themselves and others : How can that
church be the true Church of Jesus Christ ? We can, indeed,
distinguish between the teachings of the church and the
immoralities of individuals ; we can draw the line between
what she commands and what her members do ; we can see
the nobility, the purity, the sobriety which she inculcates
manifested in lives which are perhaps little heeded by those
outside her fold. But non-Catholics judge her by the public
standing of her members in the community. They judge her
by the names above saloons, by the names in the records of
police courts, by the names that figure in the histories of crime
reported in our daily papers.

So it is our duty, not only by our teaching, to present the

1 899.] TOTAL A BSTINENCE A ND NON- CA THOLIC MISSIONS. 36 1

Catholic Church as she is, but also by our lives. If we would
be her true missionaries, we must show her to the world as the
church of the purest morality ; we must show her in all her
truth, her beauty, and her glory ; we must show her as she is,
the Church of Jesus Christ, the church made for man, the bul-
wark of the true interests of human society, the defender of
the sacredness of the marriage tie, the protector of the holy
rights of childhood, the church of purity, of temperance, and,
when conditions demand it, the church of total abstinence.

When those outside the church become acquainted with her
stand upon this matter of intemperance, they listen with a
readier ear to her voice. When, for instance, they learn that
Pope Leo XIII. , in view of the conditions existing in our land,
has recommended total abstinence to his spiritual children,
they realize that the Catholic Church is alive to the moral in-
terests of humanity. When they come to know that the high-
est ecclesiastical authority in America, the Plenary Council of
Baltimore, has recommended the practice to clergy and laity,
they understand that the bishops of the Catholic Church in
this country have taken an unequivocal stand upon the drink
question. Morality and religion are closely allied. Every
moral problem has its bearing upon religious progress. If non-
Catholics are thus led to understand that the Catholic Church,
far from putting any obstacle in the way of total abstinence,
is always ready to support and to further it, they will be led
also to listen more willingly to what she has to say on other
matters. An instance in point came to our knowledge lately.
During a Catholic mission a goodly portion of a Protestant
congregation attended some of the sermons. One night they
listened to a sermon on total abstinence. With what result ?
They talked of it among themselves, and as a consequence,
during the non-Catholic mission which followed, about half of
that congregation attended regularly. We feel that like results
can be brought about on a larger scale, as the practice of
total abstinence becomes more wide-spread among our people.

When, therefore, some Catholics ask: Why should we be-
come total abstainers, and fail to find sufficient motives in the
reasons ordinarily presented, here is a motive worthy of the
acceptance of all. We love our country. We pray for the
conversion of our fellow-citizens to the Catholic religion. In
the success which has attended the work thus far we see
visions of greater triumphs. We hope that one day America
will be Catholic. To bring about this result is an extraordinary

362 CONVERSION. [Dec.

undertaking. Its accomplishment requires the use of extraor-
dinary means. Total abstinence is an extraordinary means ; but
if in the least it can help along such a glorious work, and who
can doubt it, is there any Catholic who will hesitate at the sacri-
fice ? To some extent the drink evil is as a mist hiding the
truth of Christ's religion. The sooner this mist is raised and
the pure atmosphere of sobriety prevails, the sooner will the
beauty of Catholic truth be seen. We need Catholic men and
women to take the strongest stand possible against the evil of
intemperance. The stronger our stand, the quicker will the evil
and its attendant drawback to religion disappear and the quicker
will be realized our prayer for the conversion of our country,
when America shall be the first Catholic nation of the world
and the brightest gem in the crown of Catholic glory.

CONVERSION.

BY LUCY GERTRUDE KELLEY.

LAD in the armor of a Disbelief,

My soul sent challenge to Eternal Power ;
Unrest sought combat, Sorrow a relief,

Blind Pride stood upright where the angels
cower.

The balm of Pleading left a wound unhealed ;

I could not see, and did but dare to doubt ;
So, robed for war, with Bigotry as shield,

I journeyed forth to seek the Mystery out.

I saw no guide, but felt a mighty Will
Compel my steps along the darkened way

Into a cave, where, rippling thrill on thrill,

Sweet strains of wondrous music seemed to stray.

A voice spoke in my heart, " Here shalt thou find
That One against Whose Power thine anger cried ! "

I found Him, knelt and wept, no longer blind,
"The Infant Saviour smiled and darkness died.

ChRISCinJIS
PROPOSAL

BY EDWARD F. GARESCHE.

I FIRST met Miss Agatha Jocelyn in rather a singular way.
It was of a cold November morning one of those cloudy,
sharp, unpleasant days which remind one of a man with a
disagreeable temper ; so uncertain, so disconcerting, so apt to
blow into one's face, or trip up his heels when he least ex-
pects it.

The streets were covered with a thin, smooth sheet of ice
the result of a rain and freeze the night before, which made
walking, to say the least, dangerous. But I ran recklessly down
the steps and started up the street, with the luck of fools,
safely. And all went well until I came to the second corner.
That corner, you must know, is a trap especially laid by the
Fiend to supply him amusement in winter when business may
chance to be dull. It slopes, an insinuating slope, clear down
to the gutter, and once upon it on a slippery day there is no

364 A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. [Dec.,

salvation you must go down. On any other morning when I
was in my sane mind I would have taken the street, but that
day I must needs essay the walk, and I received my deserts.

Have you ever experienced the hopeless, helpless sensation
of walking on a slippery slide? The frantic struggles, inevita-
bly tending towards defeat ; the odd gyrations which bring the
sweat of fear to your forehead, but make the onlooker roar
with laughter ? All this I felt for what seemed an age as I
wriggled on that insidious slope. But, horror ! how were my
anxious griefs redoubled when I saw coming around the cor-
ner, on the duplicate of my tormentor for both streets sloped
equally towards the crossing a charming young lady who was
in precisely the same predicament as I, performing the same
swift and hopeless gyrations, and tending to the same inevita-
ble goal the slushy gutter of the street. For an instant the
chivalrous idea darted through my mind of casting myself at
length upon the sidewalk, and so eluding the fair one ; but the
picture of my sprawling and ignominious discomfiture arose be-
fore my mind's eye and deterred me. So with a hopeless hope
we slid swiftly forward, and, though we had never met, fell
instinctively into each other's arms ! Then I stepped gracefully
into the slush, gained a firmer footing, helped her past the
deadly space to safer ground, and with a few blushing apolo-
gies hurried away.

This trifling incident, which should have vanished at once
from my thoughts, did not, but lingered there and worried me.
All that day I saw the blushing face of my fair comrade in
misfortune and the picture of the awkward part that I had
played on that blessed slope.

That afternoon my friend Billy Jocelyn, who is as sociable
as I am retiring, and who can talk pleasant inconsequences to
a girl by the hour, when I would grow sleepy and stupid, and
think longingly of my study-table and its comfortable lamp, my
friend Billy, I say, bustled into my office and said : " Confound
you, you old sleepy head, why don't you ever come around
and see us? My cousin, Miss Agatha Jocelyn, a charming girl
from New York, has just arrived to pay us a visit. If I don't
see you around at the house to-morrow night I '11 come and
break your infernal old study to pieces, lamp and all!" And
the energetic Billy disappeared as suddenly as he had come.

Although a book and a quiet smoke had indefinitely more
attractions for me than Miss Agatha Jocelyn, and indeed the
whole Jo'celyn galaxy, still I was always a martyr to duty and
to friendship. Therefore on the ensuing night I clad myself

1899-] A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. 365

in the sombre garb of ceremony, buttoned my ulster close
around my ears, cast a sad, longing glance at the little lamp
in the study, and fared forth into the biting wind towards
Billy's. Whew, but it was cold ! I remember yet with what
tingling cheeks and chilly fingers I entered the warm and
pleasant atmosphere of the Jocelyn dwelling. But, ye gods!
how uncomfortably hot I suddenly grew as Billy led me into
the parlor and said, " Cousin Agatha, my friend, Mr. Matthew
Reade!" for Billy's Cousin Agatha was my partner in misfor-
tune of the day before. " I think," she said, her eyes spark-
ling charmingly, " that Mr. Reade and I have met before " ;
and she proceeded to tell the story of our encounter. Very
prettily, too, and giving me far more credit than I deserved for
the " dexterity and courtesy with which I delivered her from
that dragon of a slide." Actually, as I listened I began to be-
lieve that I had played quite a heroic part ; and when she
finished by thanking me I blushed with pride I who had
always esteemed myself so far superior to flattery! But alas!
how is a man to distinguish oftentimes between flattery and
a just estimation of his merits? After all, one may be too
modest ! So that I did not feel at all offended, but sat down
and talked to Miss Agatha Jocelyn with an equanimity which
soon grew to interest, which rapidly ripened into real pleasure ;
for she, with due respect be it said, was not an ordinary girl.
She did not talk incessantly of persons, as some of the gentler
sex will do, until one is so wearied of hearing of Willie this,
and Bobby that, and Grace the other, that one's mental facul-
ties droop. She did not ask me if I knew a thousand inconse-
quent individuals, who were at best mere names to me and
devoid of all manner of interest. She did not talk of fashion
nor of the giddy swarm who swing in the mazes of the Jiaut
ton the aristocracy of folly of our republican nation. She did
not rave over actors, nor authors, nor heroes toys of the
shifting conceits of the hour. She did not but a truce to her
negative virtues ; let me begin the catalogue of her perfections.
Her eyes were of an honest blue and clear as mountain
springs. Her voice was soft,

" Soft and low, soft and low,
As the laughing streamlets flow,"

I said to myself as I. listened to it. She made a display
neither of ignorance nor affected erudition. She was extreme
neither in wisdom nor in folly. She punctuated her speech
O rare and admirable accomplishment in woman ! with elo-

366 A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. [Dec.,

quent pauses. In fine, as my rhythmic brain again remarked
to itself afterward :

" In very queenly grace she stood
O'er her humbler sisterhood ;
In form, in mind, in mien endowed
Far above the common crown ! "

After that evening Billy had no further cause to complain
of my lack of sociability.

A month afterwards you see that I omit, out of pure consi-
deration, all the delightful events which intervened I was er
enchanted with Miss Agatha Jocelyn. In fact, matters had
gotten to such a pass that Billy grinned meaningly every time
we met, and said "She's very well, thank you?" with a humor-
ously labored air, which, to say the least, was tantalizing. My
study-lamp was so unused to being lit that it spluttered in-
dignantly when I occasionally sat down for a night's comforta-
ble writing or reading. Assuredly such enchantments as mine
are decidedly prejudicial to solid, productive work. My volume
on "The Causes of Decadence in Nations, Ancient and
Modern " suffered woefully. I found myself wandering off into
dissertations on the affections in the chapter on Patriotism,
and treating of platonic love under the head of "Civic Vir-
tues." In short, I was getting into such a desperate state that
I had to destroy reams of manuscript, and unconsciously
scrawled " Agatha Reade " over the margins of nearly every
page that I wrote. And down at the office for in the day-
time, you must know, I am a lawyer of the gravest and most
respectable sort I actually came very near losing the business
of one of my most valuable clients by delivering a lecture,
when he disclosed his intention of suing for a divorce, on " the
necessity of mutual fitness in the marital relation." In short,
something had to be done, and done quickly, to restore my
mental equilibrium.

But what ? After going to see Miss Jocelyn on three suc-
cessive nights, and spending four subsequent evenings in staring
into my study-fire, I resolved to propose. Having taken which
resolution, I arose, covered the fire with ashes, as is my wont,
and going to bed slept soundly for the first time in four weeks.

The next morning as I walked down town I eyed the
treacherous corner with affection and inwardly reproached my-
self for having presented a memorial to the street commissioner,
which had elicited from that prudent man an immediate
promise to raise the grade proportionably. For was it not

1899-] A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. 367

because of that blessed slope that she had fallen, as it were,
into my arms, at our first encounter ? Happy omen ! I walked
more briskly at the very thought. But as I chuckled inwardly,
wondering at the acuteness with which I had slain all my diffi-
culties at one fell stroke by resolving to propose to Miss
Agatha Jocelyn, a thought occurred to me which made me
wince and groan. From the lofty pedestal of superiority I
had always, publicly and in private, sneered at the moony and
humiliating character of lover. How I had derided the timid,
sentimental role of him who proposes for a lady's hand. How
I had jested, ah! how cruelly, I now realized, with certain good
fellows of my acquaintance who had proposed with, alas ! no
favorable consequences. In fact, shocking to think, my first
real success in a literary way was a humorous essay which
the editor of " The Weekly Hades " had inadvertently ac-
cepted (in a moment of absent-mindedness, I was sure, because
my former articles had resembled nothing so much as well-
trained homing pigeons they inevitably returned to their birth-
place !), which had for its subject, I remembered it with re-
morse, " How to Propose " !

In my desperation I ran over its various heads in memory.
I recalled that I had commenced by treating of the methods
of primitive man : the offering of the fruits of the chase ; the
fierce war to the death with rival braves, the final victory, the
joy of the dusky bride at being the wife of such a warrior.

Utterly inappropriate, though, to our ultra-civilized, hope-
lessly conventional times! Then I had described the ceremony
of the African savage ; the approach of the ardent lover, driv-
ing his quota of fat kine, in just compensation to the parents of
his intended. Equally barbaric ! And what gift would be ade-
quate to her value?

Then I had descended to more cultured times. I described
the methods of Greece in her glory, of Rome in her power.
In order, I unfolded the eruditions of the scholars upon the
manners of the Goths and Huns, the Vandals and the Albi-
genses those savage, yet chivalrous hordes, whom the Church
of Rome moulded into the knights of the Middle Ages true,
noble, generous, loving, " Sans peur et sans reproche ! " And
lastly, I had descended a sad descent, indeed ! from the fair
and courtly gallantry of the chevaliers of old to the sad de-
generacy and utter lack of romance of our dull and sordid
times. " It remains," I had concluded, " for some keen, noble,
and enterprising spirit of our day to break asunder the absurd
and ridiculous traditions of the times, which must needs have

368 A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. [Dec.,

every ardent swain breathe his passion in cold and awkward
speech into the lady's reddening ear. What a false boast
must our national ingenuity appear, if it cannot suggest some
newer, more fitting, less ludicrous manner of making so poetic
and lofty a thing as a proposal of marriage ! "

Alas ! these words, written in jest, returned to reproach
me. I recalled how I had received for them, from the absent-
minded editor, an insignificant note which I threw away, and
a check, which I kept. But the confounded thing had had
some success, and was not yet entirely forgotten. It was only
a week ago I winced at the thought that some coy maiden
had told me that she would like to hear how I would really
make a proposal, since I could write one so prettily. In short,
taking all things into account, I decided that I must do the
thing artistically, and in a novel way. But how ? Genius of
Invention, How? My mind was destitute of ideas; my spirit
faltered at the task before it ; when, raising my eyes from the
ground, I saw for I had gotten well into the business district
a window, gorgeously decked out, in which was represented
good old Santa Claus distributing all manner of resplendent
Christmas gifts. Happy inspiration ! Could I not propose by
means of a Christmas gift ?

Thereafter I haunted the windows of stores devoted to
alluring wares, by the hour. I went through the whole cata-
logue of Christmas possibilities, one by one. I tried the pa-
tience of the most suave and obliging clerks of both sexes, by
remarking to each of their suggestions, " too personal " or " too
familiar," as the case might be, leaving them to puzzle their
brains angrily as to what was familiar about a diamond brooch,
or what was personal in a golden scent-bottle. And I was
annoyed by the smiling amusement which my acquaintances
bound most probably on a similar errand displayed when they
saw me poking over cases of women's trifling jewels. They
little dreamed of the brilliant coup that I meditated.

At last, desperate, after a week of such torture, I decided
upon a ring.

True, a ring is the most common and conventional of
lovers' tokens. But mine was redeemed from the common-
place by the inscription which, with much hesitation, I ordered
carved within it :

" Will you be mine ? " explaining to the astonished clerk
that " it was er a jest!" as if one jests with rings of price!

Let me pass over, in silence, the various emotions which
wrung my soul during the short week which elapsed before

1899-] A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. 369

the time arrived at which to present my gift. Suffice it to
say that on Christmas Eve I wrote, in a too trembling hand,
on a card :

" While the Christmas choirs sing,

Look within the magic ring ! "

this being the last desperate effort of a fortnight's struggle
to produce a couplet worthy of the occasion. Then I called
a messenger boy faithful and ready servant ! and dismissed
him with the precious packet. And then I waited.

The night wore on. From my study window I could see
the houses of my neighbors, lit, and swept, and garnished for
the feast. On the street the crowd of festive wayfarers, laden
with bundles and joy, ebbed and vanished into their various
snug harbors. I saw a Christmas-tree being decked for the
morrow, and realized how lonely is the bachelor's lot ! I fell
into a reverie on the joys and genial mirth of the merry and
holy season, and grew actually cheerful; then sighed to think
how inappropriate it all might be. Finally I went to bed, and
after ages of ages fell asleep.

I awoke with a start. Was it time for the postman yet ?
Not for three hours. I arose and strolled out into the air.

The postman came and passed and entered not. I cursed
his forgetfulness and hallooed after him, but he had nothing.
I went to the post-office nothing there. Nothing, that is, save
the proof-sheets of " The Causes of Decadence in Nations, etc.,"
which ordinarily would have given me the keenest pleasure,
but now filled me with deep disgust. What did I care about
the decadence of nations? But I took it home and after going
to church, where I prayed with fervor for a certain Christmas
gift, I returned home and worked steadily all of Christmas
day at the proof-sheets, slashing them so that the printer
must have stared. In fact, -I believe that it is to my savage
humor on that day and the following that the book owes its
commended incisiveness of style.

The next day I continued pegging away viciously at the
proofs, and as before, the postman passed unregarded.

Then I grew desperate. I searched out that messenger boy
and denounced him. But they showed me a receipt written in
Billy's sprawling hand. My last hope gone, I went down
slowly to the office, a saddened and a broken man. Old Dr.
Burdy met me and asked me if I didn't think I needed a
tonic ! Biffins, the insurance man, crossed my path, and for
the first time in five years didn't beg me to take out a policy
VOL. LXX. 24

370 A CHRISTMAS PROPOSAL. [Dec.,

in the " Crumbling Insecurity Co.," " safest on earth." I
reached the office at last and stared at one spot on the ceiling
for a solid hour. Then a brisk step sounded in the corridor,
the door snapped open, and Billy rushed in. Billy never
comes and goes, he always bursts in and rushes out. " Hello,
old fogy! " said he, ''look as sick 's if you'd swallowed a frog.
Brace up, man; your bank hasn't failed, has it?" I turned a
dull eye on him, and he resumed: "I'm awfully sorry that I
didn't get around sooner to tell you, but the old man has
been sick, and I," and Billy's form grew more erect, "am run-
ning the business, three hundred men under me (lower floor,
you know), and I couldn't ; but Miss Jocelyn's uncle died
suddenly, and she is gone."

"Gone!" said I hoarsely, jumping up and seizing his arm
in a frantic grasp. " Did she get my present ? "

"Ouch!" said Billy. "No that is, yes, I suppose she has
by this time. It came after she left, and I mailed it to her.
Why, what is the matter with you ? " For I had fallen back
in my chair, and was mopping my face with my handkerchief.
" Don't you trust the mail, you idiot ? " yelled Billy. " Why
what was that the Koh-i-noor ? Anyhow, I registered it ; it
can't be lost ! "

" No, no, Billy," said I faintly, " it 's not that. I was
afraid " just then the office door clicked open again, and a
messenger boy briskly entered. " Telegram for you, sir," said
he; "sign here, please!" I took the yellow envelope, while
Billy sprawled a signature on the boy's book.

One look at the telegram was enough ; I was transported.
It said :

" Yes.

" AGATHA JOCELYN."

Oh, crumpled, yellow telegraph blank, spattered with ink,
marked by oily fingers, you were far more delightful in mine
eyes than the golden pages of poesy or the yellow wealth of
kings! Dear Agatha!

" Billy," said I, beaming brightly upon that surprised young
man, " congratulate me, my boy ; I'm going to be your cousin! "

Now there are two who love the little lamp in the study,
which burns steadily above them, night after night. From
where I write, within the circle of its rays, I can see that very
ring, glittering merrily on her finger.

Magic ring ! you did your errand well.

1 899-] I HE FIRST JESUIT. 371

THE FIRST JESUIT.*

BY REV. JOSEPH McSORLEY, C.S.P.

MARVELLOUS narrative is the history .of the
religious communities of the Catholic Church.
They display most strikingly her far-seeing wis-
dom, her infinite versatility, her fathomless re-
source, her never-ending advance through epochs
and crises that test but weaken not her eternal vitality. Their
story is often the story of a great transition, of a marked de-
velopment in that organism which must go on living and grow-
ing unto the end of time ; and many times their foundation,
besides meeting an urgent need, brings to the church herself
an increase of beauty and strength, an addition of treasure, a
new grace or characteristic that becomes embodied in her and
lasts on for ever as portion of the heritage common to the
faithful of all ages. So it was when, amid the profligacy and
confusion of a degenerate century, the builder of Monte Cas-
sino initiated a spiritual regeneration, combined the lofty mys-
ticism of the early anchorites with community life, a stable
abode, and a definite Rule, and made the quies Benedictina to
the Catholic Church what the Pax Romana had been to the
old pagan civilization. And so it was in a later century when
the Minorites and the Friars Preachers appeared, each to con-
tribute to the transformation of their age and leave behind
their legacies, the one stamping a new and indestructible fervor
on the personal love and imitation of Jesus Christ, and the
other lending an impetus to intellectual activity and theologi-
cal research which was to attain its splendid consummation in
the immortal paragon Aquinas.

Thus always has God provided for the critical moments in
his church's life. Three centuries ago came a day dark and
menacing, when it seemed as if weakness and treachery within
were to combine successfully with external hatred and power
in effecting the church's ruin. But again appeared the provi-
dential counter-influence, again the danger was passed, and
again the church resumed her path of progress. It is, of
course, to the Protestant Reformation and the counter Catholic

* Saint Ignatius of Loyola. By Henri Joly ; with a preface by George Tyrrell, S.J,
New York : Benziger Bros.

3/2 THE FIRST JESUIT. [Dec.,

Revival that we are referring. No honest student will for a
moment deny that the age which succeeded the great Western
Schism was one full of the gravest abuses, corrupt and de-
generate ; in the parish churches, in the cloisters, in the courts
of prelate and of prince, sin and scandal had made dreadful
inroads ; and when her enemies sounded the call to arms, a
thousand influences seemed to promise the speedy and irre-
trievable ruin of the ancient faith. A single generation saw a
new religion triumph in half the states of Europe, with fair
hope of soon controlling almost the whole civilized world.
But at this moment come the men who have been chosen as
the instruments of destiny. The victorious march of Protest-
antism is checked, and in the struggle that goes on for the
possession of remaining doubtful territory the church is suc-
cessful in every instance ; nor has she failed to maintain her
conquests even to the present hour.

Now, among the means providentially employed for the
compassing of this end, the Society of Jesus undoubtedly
stood in a position of marked prominence. There were, in-
deed, a series of military victories, a group of powerful and
devoted royal champions, a succession of pontiffs full of faith
and fervor instead of selfish ease and elegance. Among the
Reformers was visible a growing indifference together with
a predominance of vice and foolishness. An oecumenical coun-
cil met, noted for successful accomplishment of almost its
every end. A new impetus came in the field of prayer and
penance, as of education and charity. But when all is re-
counted, the work of Ignatius stands out as most wonderfully
effective in the preservation of the church's existence and
activity. For assurance of this we need look no further than
the pages of that distinguished Protestant essayist who, hiding
vanity and unfairness beneath the gloss of sweeping style and
rounded periods, must perforce indicate the hated Jesuit as
the actual, historic figure pre-eminent in the story of the Catho-
lic Revival. Nor did the labors of Ignatius cease with the
stemming of the torrent then deluging Catholic Europe, for
from that day to this a long series of splendid achievements
has put his name and work for ever beyond the possibility of
oblivion. Apostles and martyrs have followed in the train of
Francis Xavier and Peter Claver. Theologians like Suarez and
Bellarmin, preachers like Bourdaloue and Ravignan, scholars
like the Bollandists have been but the leaders among a whole
army of students, confessors, missionaries, and saints; until
the bare mention of that illustrious order, which has been the

1899-] THE FIRST JESUIT. 373

church's Old Guard, summons up at once the vision of holiness
wedded to learning and zeal made fruitful by self-denial.

And to say "the Jesuits" is to say Ignatius; for surely
never was leader happier in organizing a movement destined
to be the outcome and reproduction of his own personality,
borrowing its success and its glory, under Heaven, from his sole
inspiration. This is the man whose latest biography is men-
tioned above, and what has just been said will serve to re-
mind us of the wonderfully deep significance of his career, and
make us welcome every new attempt further to diffuse sympa-
thetic appreciation of his marvellous character. And hence our
satisfaction at seeing a new contribution from one known far
and wide as the general editor of a biographical series intended
to meet the demands of this present age, to promote the intelli-
gent study and temperate eulogy, and practical common-sense
imitation of our saints, too often, alas ! by being misconceived
and distorted, robbed of their power to inspire.

Besides, there is a most particular reason for rejoicing at a
new popular life of the great Ignatius.

" For many reasons, intrinsic and extrinsic, he is perhaps
one of the least knowable and least known of the saints in
any intimate sense of the word ; for he has been a sign of
contradiction as few other saints have been, and has suffered
much doctoring from the hands of friends and foes ; and
along with this, he has it in common with all men of tran-
scendent power to be slowly comprehended in the lapse of
time ; to be, perhaps, better appreciated in the age he divined
and prepared for than in the age he lived for."*

It has been imagined sometimes that the Society of Jesus,
at the bidding of the pope, sprang from the soil fully armed,
and rushed at once to the conquest of a formidable enemy.
But the perusal of our saint's life will show how vastly dif-
ferent is this fancy from the actual facts of history. " He was
not a ' leader,' if the word is taken to mean one who draws
the multitude on without revealing to it all that is required
of it, and who, simply by means of his contagious enthusiasm,
causes it to credit delusions which are later scattered by time
and by visible ill-success. The author of the Exercises did not
address himself directly to the crowd. He sought out the
best among those who appeared capable of understanding him,
he invited them to make in retirement a thorough examination
of conscience, to study spiritual things deeply, to practise the
Exercises with due reflection, and, although this may seem

* Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Preface to English edition by George Tyrrell, S.J., p. xi.

374 THE FIRST JESUIT. [Dec.,

strange at first sight, it was chiefly when he had imbued them
deeply with his spirit that he required obedience from them."'
Sometimes, as in the case of Francis Xavier, it was despite
considerable obstacles and even utter lack of initial sympathy
that he attracted his disciples, but eventually he did win them.
Then would he draw them aside as spirits akin to his own,
drilling, schooling, forming, moulding them day by day, until
finally their very pulses throbbed in unison with his, until they
saw with his eyes and judged by his canons.

Hence, let us remark again, the wonderful value and sig-
nificance of his personality as being the essential element of a
movement which ranks as a most momentous influence in the
history of the Christian world. Be it remembered, too, that
in order to obtain a proper understanding of his life, it must
be regarded as a unity. From first to last, both in his char-
acter and his plan, there is evident an orderly development,
and it is a succession of pictures alone that can claim to be a
portrait worthy of attention, that can exhibit each character-
istic in true perspective, that can enable us to gauge the man.

What cannot but impress us as predominant in Ignatius is
a striking originality. The line of his activity was altogether
novel. The charge that he was an innovator was as a matter
of fact unanswerable, and instead of denying it he challenged
his accusers to abide by the test of truth. "Tell me whether
what I have said is true or false ; let me know whether you
approve of it or disapprove of it." And again : u I do not un-
derstand your forbidding me to treat this question when you
found nothing wrong concerning it in my writings." f He could
not be brought to consider that novelty was as wicked as error.
So to him, as to every innovator, there came a long his-
tory of suspicions, misunderstandings, condemnations, failures,
and many a day of bitterness and. gloom, through all of which,
nevertheless, and by means of which, doubtless, he worked out
that personal sanctity and objective system of perfection which
in God's providence was to live immortal. For him the dun-
geons of the Inquisition were the cells of a second novitiate.
His real greatness can be understood only by due considera-
tion of the tremendous obstacles that he was obliged to
face : the selfishness of the wicked, the inertness of the indif-
ferent, the blundering, well-meaning, but almost fatal suspicion
of the good and virtuous with whom traditional stood for or-
thodox., and custom for morality. This last and bitterest trial
was the one that came nearest of all to wrecking the hopes of

* Saint Ignatius of Loyola, p. 255. *t Op. cit., pp. 83 and 84.

1899-] THE FIRST JESUIT. 375

the wonderful genius, and it is his final and successful triumph
over this which stamps him beyond denial as a man of tremen-
dous strength of character, of far-seeing, accurate, and original
mind, and of invincible will-power ; qualities which, co-operating
with grace, produced results so magnificent and so enduring.

Let us understand well that in the economy of Divine
Providence the church has been made a powerful conservative
influence in the world's history. Nor is the benefit of this
fact far to seek. The heavy hand she lays upon each new
thing will stifle its life out if it be not from God ; but if the
divine inspiration is there, then by his power it will finally
force its way through all opposition and triumph, even though
after many days and much anguish. " She is jealous of even
what seem the most legitimate developments in the sphere of
devotion, or again, of new revelations, or sanctuaries, or places
of pilgrimage, however apparently authenticated by signs as it
were from Heaven. The same may be very well exemplified
in the history of the modifications which the church has, from
time to time, admitted in the principles on which she insists
for the sanction of new religious orders or congregations. In
case of anything new in this kind, it must be expected that the
church will proceed with great circumspection, and that, as
human lives do not last on like devotions, or like shrines,
there will be at least some whose attempts fail altogether
before the principle at which they aim can succeed."* And
so the damning cry of Ille Novator, hurled though it may be
at a good man, will work in the long run for the common
weal, false and diabolical as it may seem in the narrow
sphere of the individual's interest.

From first to last Ignatius, true to his lights, followed the path
Providence had pointed out, until indomitable energy had tri-
umphed over doubt, hatred, the spirit of compromise, the persecu-
tion of foes, the solicitations of friends, and the agony of soul
inseparable from hope deferred. But it was a long and weary-
ing journey that stretched between the battle-field of Pampe-
luna and the little chapel of La Storta, and no ordinary nature
would have withstood the fearful tests undergone by the saint.
Nor were his trials at an end even then when his Society was
once founded and approved by authority. There was still
ground for alarm among the foes of progress. "It cannot be
doubted that among the innovations which the church so hap-
pily sanctioned in the period of which we are speaking, those
which were involved in the Constitutions of the Society of

* The Life of Mary Ward, preface by Henry Coleridge, S.J , p. xxx.

376 THE FIRST JESUIT. [Dec.,

Jesus were not the least conspicuous. In many important re-
spects the Society embodied a new idea. It was new for re-
ligious men to have no distinctive habit, not to be bound to
cloister, to be exempted from the rule of choir, to have no
regular public austerities, and to be governed by a superior
elected for life." " For generations after its first foundation the
great successes of the Society were never unaccompanied by
jealous criticisms on its organization criticisms not always
simply jealous and envious, nor always confined to the most
narrow-minded and captious of its many enemies." But " it was
always, also, looked upon with some fear and suspicion by
good men, ill-informed as to its principles, and unable to under-
stand the divine wisdom of many of its apparent innovations."*

But it was not alone the striking novelties in the Jesuit
Constitutions which brought down misunderstanding and oppo-
sition on the devoted Loyola. Long before his work had as-
sumed any such prominent public character, he was made to
suffer for not thinking and not speaking as men had been
used to speak and think, for disregarding custom and preju-
dice in his method of presenting religious truth, for presuming
to evolve a system of spiritual training, a method of prayer,
unfamiliar to men grown old in the religious life, members of
ancient orders, masters in theology he being meanwhile but
a converted soldier, a spiritless mendicant, disgraced at the
University, hounded by the Inquisition, an alien in spirit to
the dryness and subtlety of the prevailing philosophy, f

As has already been said, there was little encouragement
awaiting a man who should set out boldly to serve a noble
cause, reckless of long-standing prejudice and time-consecrated
blindness. "It was impossible for Ignatius to take up his
abode in such surroundings without being speedily brought
into conflict with the narrowness, hardness, and paltriness
which then marked the church in his own country. "J . . .
" The Spanish Inquisitors ought at least to have moderated
their passion by a spirit more in conformity with that of the
Gospel ; but as they were frequently plunged into this office
through political ambition, and with no preparation for it
beyond a pile of scholastic formulas, they displayed in its dis-
charge the scrupulous, narrow, cruel folly of the official, who
is resolved at all costs to find out transgressions where no one
else perceives them."

They made the servant of God pay the cost of an inspira-
tion that had 'not been submitted to their approval. If the

f Saint Ignatius of Loyola, p. xxii. * Op. cit., p. 102. % Op. cit., p. 71. Op. cit., p. 76.

1899-] THE FIRST JESUIT. 377

final flowering of his hopes was a glorious one, it was the out-
come of a long and painful process of growth. The physical
suffering which weighed heavily upon him in the beginning,
the scruples and temptations which harassed his soul at the
time of conversion, were but faint intimations of the long pur-
gation which preceded his reward. Arrived in Jerusalem
after terrible hardships and aglow with enthusiasm, he is driven
away under threat of excommunication, unable either to convert
the Mussulman or to gain the martyr's crown. Inclined to
enter an order, he finds neither light nor opportunity to de-
cide on his vocation. Teaching the Exercises to ladies of high
rank and assisting in the reform of a convent of Dominican
nuns, he draws down upon himself a load of scandal, abuse,
and personal violence, nearly costing him his life. The narrow,
scrupulous officialism which posed as the organ of Divine
wisdom, while overlooking a thousand disgraceful abuses,*
pounced upon this poor enthusiast, accused him of interfering
in a clerical monopoly by discoursing of spiritual things, arrested
him three times, all but burned him at the stake, and bade him
in future abstain from all novelties. This is in Spain. Later
in France he is put upon trial as a sorcerer, and years afterwards
he again faces the Inquisitors in Venice. Notwithstanding, he
continues his mission, bent on obeying God rather than men ;
even men who could cloak narrowness and cruelty under the
garb of authority and, in the name of religious zeal, hound
down a saint the very echo of whose teaching on obedience
has been as a wall of iron and a pillar of brass in the Church
of God.

Asked how he could teach without having learned, Ignatius
replies boldly to the Inquisitor, appeals to the objective accuracy
of his opinions, and is promptly put in irons. When finally re-
leased on condition of silence, he declares he would rather leave
the town at once, and does so. Returned to Spain after years
of absence, he begins to preach though still a layman, and
answers reproaches and objections only by making converts,
reconciling enemies, and founding public charities. Finally,
when at Rome, he is the object of such suspicion and the
victim of so many cabals that, under God, he owes his escape
only to his own consummate prudence and the simultaneous
presence of many men able to bear witness to his past life
and record. His tireless energy in founding asylums and
institutes wins for him the lively hatred of the apostles of

" Whilst relentlessly pursuing such offences, the Inquisition allowed a swarm of abuses,
which were ihe disgrace of the Spanish church." (Op, cit., p. 76.)

378 THE FIRST JESUIT. [Dec.,

moderation, and the boundless activity of his many-sided
genius brings him to the very border-line of the domain oc-
cupied by vested interests ; for the sick, the famine-stricken,
outcast women, orphan children, Jewish catechumens are all
alike objects of solicitude to the man whose Paul-like zeal
can conceive of no obstacles or limits except those made to
be overcome and surpassed.

What now of that great work, which is his bequest to all
generations ? Surely his Spiritual Exercises needs little comment,
for its fruits have made it known. Whatever Ignatius may
have gathered from older saints, whatever debt he may owe to
Bernard, Bonaventure, A Kempis, for suggesting the theory of
the Exercises, whatever growth in spiritual science may have come
to him through intercourse with Dominicans, Cistercians, and
especially Benedictines, Ignatius it was who developed, systema-
tized, and propagated the method of mental prayer which has
been as a portal of the higher life to countless thousands of souls,
and around which there has grown up a literature unique in
its kind and wonderful in its results. To what, indeed, shall
we compare that masterpiece of spiritual doctrine which has
been during centuries what its framer designed it to be, all
things to all men ? The sinner it has checked in his course
and converted to God, the wavering soul it has strengthened,
the darkened it has inspired, and those destined for the
farthest heights of the Holy Mountain it has equipped and
directed on the journey. Of the men formed in its mould
Saint Teresa said that never yet had she sought a director in
the houses of their order, and gone away unsatisfied. That
the Exercises have been instrumental in advancing meditation
pure and simple rather than contemplation is doubtless a fact,
as stated by the Capuchin whom M. Joly cites;* but that is
because they have been in existing circumstances directed
toward that particular end. To say that they diminish the
part played by contemplation would be something like saying
that the theology of the Apostles' Creed is not complete.
Certainly, nothing in the Exercises will prevent advance toward
contemplation, and undoubtedly, applied by a Lallemant, an
Alvarez, a Surin, a Caussade, they would be a proper and
effective beginning for a life of the purest and highest prayer.
Let a saint praise a saint, and one master of holy prayer bear
witness to the work of another. Speaking of and extolling
spiritual retreats, St. Francis de Sales calls them "a holy
method and ordinary among the ancient Christians, but since

* Saint Ignatius of Loyola, p. 60.

1899-] THE FIRST JESUIT. 379

almost entirely left off till that great servant of God, Ignatius
of Loyola, brought it into use again."*

But the Exercises, naturally enough, lead us on to think
of the illustrious company to whom they have been as a
nursing mother. And surely, when all has been said, we must
needs go back again to contemplate as the very triumph of
Loyola's genius the heaven-inspired foundation of one of the
most active, most enduring, most surpassingly perfect organ-
izations the world has ever seen. After years of collaboration,
in the spring of 1538, those whom he had associated with him-
self in the prosecution of his various labors began to entertain
the idea of founding a religious company. The work was the
work of Ignatius from the start.

To him it owed its very name ; he became its first superior,
and for well-nigh ten years he labored at the composition and
elaboration of its Constitutions. The plan drawn up by him
never underwent more than modification of detail, in accordance
with his own ideas, inspired by his own spirit, and to a great ex-
tent either suggested or approved by himself. The Society,
therefore, in its grand history of successful achievement reflects
his image, bears ever the stamp of his personality, increases and
multiplies his desert of admiration. It was he who steered
it through the storms, who obtained official recognition and
authorizations one by one, who superintended with unusual
sagacity and foresight its first ventures in the active field.
And its early history was not a smooth one. Its members, as
We have already remarked, cut out new lines of work and new
methods. They studied their surroundings that they might
accommodate themselves to current needs, they rejected the
obligation of choir and public austerities, they dared to de-
liberate for a long time as to whether they should or should
not add the vow of obedience to those of poverty and chas-
tity, fearing lest they might hamper a freedom of plan and
action which they were anxious jealously to guard. It is not to
be wondered at, then, that the first years of their history should
have fearfully tested the wisdom of their innovations ; that priest
and prelate, king and pope, should have dealt hard blows at them
and uttered bitter words ; that the Bishop of Paris, constituting
himself the mouth-piece of common complaint, should have
made out a long declaration of grievances, and provoked an
outburst to which prelates, monks, lawyers, and men of the
people insisted on contributing at all costs. Small wonder, like-
wise, that when there came to the Papal throne a man violently

* Treatise on the Love of God, Book xii. chap. viii.

380 THE FIRST JESUIT. [Dec.,

prejudiced against the Society, he made no secret of his
suspicions and his threats, but having accused the Jesuit order
of hostility to his own party, displayed an inclination to exam-
ine it closely and require very serious modifications of its
existing institutions. But through every trial, great and small
alike, the Institute of Ignatius passed triumphantly, lasting
to carry his spirit and his achievements to other generations
and lands, and to stamp upon the succeeding centuries the im-
press of new struggles, new misfortunes, new triumphs.

There remains little to be said except to voice the hope
that the volume before us will conduce to better appreciation
and new love of a man often misunderstood in death as he
was in life. One thing more than any other, perhaps, it is
desirable that men should begin to realize : namely, that our
saint was not an advocate but " an opponent of the theory
which divorces intelligence from will in the work of sancti-
fication." * He realized clearly as any man " that there is
no connection between sanctity and stupidity." And the conse-
crated phrase " blind obedience," when distorted into an in-
sinuation that we obey best when we'exert our will without using
our intellect, is something utterly foreign to the ideal of Ignatius.

" Blind obedience," says Father Tyrrell in a recent volume,
" is the best on certain occasions, but it is not the best in
itself ; it is not the better for being blind. In itself, and when
practicable, an intelligent and sympathetic obedience is better,
such as was the obedience of Christ to his Father's will.

" Ignatius Loyola, whose doctrine is ignorantly supposed to
be extreme and exceptional in this matter, says rightly that
when the judgment is not in sympathy with what is com-
manded the obedience is very imperfect (valde imgerfecta) and
cannot be relied upon. Furthermore, such obedience is not
educative, as it does not teach the subject to guide himself
independently when the guidance of authority cannot be had ;
since he does not see the principles and reasons of the com-
mand given. Yet, when for one reason or another he is not
capable of seeing the reasons, and prompt action is required,
this blind obedience is relatively the most reasonable."

"St. Ignatius uses 'blind' in an unusual sense. Commonly
an obedience is called ' blind ' when, as in a secret society,
one acts without knowing why or wherefore, as an automaton.
This is military obedience, and is not educative in any sense ;
i. e., it does not make the subject capable of independent
judgment when guidance is withdrawn. But St. Ignatius calls

* Nova et Vet era, by George Tyrrell, S.J., Preface, p. v.

1899-] THE FIRST JESUIT. 381

obedience blind in so far as in accordance with the principles
of sound reason and fair-mindedness we strive to bring our
judgment into agreement with that of a superior so as to see
as he sees, not indeed doing violence to truth, but doing
violence to the narrowing bias of egoism and self-will. As
dying to one's selfishness is the secret of living, so being
blinded to one's prejudices is the secret of seeing."*

No doubt this new life of the saint, with its study of his charac-
ter, his principles, and his opinions, will throw new light on
many popular misconceptions which have served as the basis of
calumny and opposition to Ignatius, hated only because mis-
understood. May it teach men to realize that he was great
with an undeniable greatness, because he saw and adapted
himself to the particular needs of his age, winning his victory
with weapons unused and unknown in older days and different
situations. The primary aim of Providence in Ignatius seems
to have been the introduction of that martial spirit which is
always indispensable when invasion is to be repelled or turbu-
lence suppressed. Discerning the need, Ignatius, with the skill
of a trained strategist, bent his energy to the safe-guarding of
divine authority in the external order against the assaults of
foes without and mutineers within the camp. He realized that
the attempted " Reformation " had actually thrown the church
into " a state of siege," and it was his grasp of the situation
which made his defence instantly and lastingly efficacious for
the saving of the true religion. Were his actions thus inter-
preted in the light of history, we should be over and done
with the charge of narrowness and tyranny, justified only by
a superficial and misleading interpretation of his words, pre-
serving the letter thereof rather than the spirit.

Great reason there is, then, to hope that the new volume
will be as a sweet savor of godliness to those who have long
since learned to love its hero, and a ray of illumination to those
who have been used to pour the concentrated essence of hatred
and bigotry on the Society of Jesus, as representative to their
minds of everything characteristically Catholic, and on Loyola
as the personification of everything attributable to the organ-
ization which is the fold of his spiritual descendants. Follow-
ing the incidents of his life step by step, may they learn to
admire and profit by the story of this wonderful man, wonder-
ful in his personal characteristics, in his measureless success, in
the tireless activity still displayed in every age and every land
where God has gathered together his children.

* External Religion 1 : Its Use and Abuse, by George Tyrrell, S.J., p. 133 seq.

382 FATHER SALVATOR'S PENITENT. [Dec.,

FATHER SALVATOR'S PENITENT.

ONG years ago Agnes la Garde had come to
St. Charles with the roses of summer. And
after that, every summer she and the roses had
come back together. The village loved her,
from the chestnut hair on her beautiful head to
the little real lace ruffles on her white gown. St. Charles was
a proud little village, and some of its good sons, with good
swords, even dared to love Agnes with a passion which asks
requital. But she was busy with the parish affairs, with the
christenings and the funerals, the altar and the Vesper choir,
and she seemed to be blind to all the world besides.

When Father Salvator came to the children's fete his kind
old eyes searched the lawn until they rested on her and her
eyes met his, while a momentary pallor brushed over her face.
The good priest seemed to be making the sign of the cross in
the air, and Agnes, knowing the blessing was for her, bent
her head in reverence, and went on playing with the children.
" I do not understand Father Salvator's spell over you,
mademoiselle," said a young soldier who was garrisoned in
the village. " The priesthood is rated too high. How you
look at him with your great eyes and yet, I have just brought
you these red roses ! "

" Perhaps you have never needed the priesthood," answered
Agnes, with deep softness. " You do not know whereof you
speak, my friend. Besides " she smiled upon the red roses
"red roses are for war; white ones are for peace, and Father
Salvator has brought me many white roses."

" I will know the truth, mademoiselle. I will not let my
heart eat itself out in silence. If you do not answer me to-
night, I will go to Father Salvator and wring the truth from
him, by word or sword."

"Hush! Father Salvator fears neither word nor sword,"
Agnes said chidingly, and walked away, dropping her red roses
at his feet. In swiftest penitence he carried them to her. She
turned her face from Father Salvator's to his, and the light
from the old priest's eyes shone upon him in benediction.

"This evening, when the Angelus rings, Monsieur Desmond,
meet me at the sacristy door."

1899-] FATHER SALVATOR'S PEN IT EXT. 383

And saying this, she laid her red roses in the chair be-
tween him and Father Salvator, and once more crossed the
garden alone.

Edward Desmond waited at the sacristy door. At the first
stroke of the Angelus she came to him there, like a tall twi-
light lily.

He stood with his hat in his hand.

"Is it not sweet to hear the bell?" she murmured; and he
might have seen her tremble at each stroke.

" It may be sweet or it may be sad as one listens," said
the young soldier.

"It may be both," murmured Agnes la Garde. "Ah, I
wish we were two peasants, like those Millet has so divinely
painted ; two toil-worn peasants, bending together to our
Angelus, knowing no life beyond these purple hills ! "

Edward stretched out his hands. "You are not a prin-
cess nor I a prince, mademoiselle. Are we not, then, two
peasants ? "

" No ; it was a vain wish, but it will pass with the night.
I am very brave by day. When I am a soldier like you,"
she wreathed her pure face in smiles, " tell them to let me
fight in the sunshine. But you need not tear the veil from
Father Salvator's confessional. I will tell you all, as I prom-
ised."

He watched her with wide eyes. She stood on the rotting
steps which led to the sacristy. The door was open and the
incense swept out in fragrant gusts. From the old gold cross,
which kept a trembling place on the wooden church-tower,
two pigeons came down and fluttered about her. In the long
silence the young soldier could see the wild flowers folding the
dew in their fragile hearts. In Agnes's eyes was the look of
joy and pain together with which saints received the Viaticum.

" Monsieur Desmond, I am a woman and young. You must
have pity on me and pray for me, and you must never speak
to me again of love.

" It is now ten years since a young Spaniard, just from his
own country, saw me and loved me, and we were married. I
was but sixteen and I did not know what love was. That day
he left me.

" It was long before I heard from him. At last a letter
came. He loved me, he said ; but he had done wrong, for
when he saw me he was already married to a little Italian lady,
and he would never see me again.

SNOW-FLAKES.

[Dec.,

" That is why I need the good father to help me. It is
hard, when one has a human heart, to have passed by time and
to be living in eternity.

" Father Salvator has told me always that love would come
to me at last a love all pure and holy and that then my
human heart would cry out in answer. Father Salvator knows
me as he knows his own breviary, and he has prayed that he
would be near then to hold out his hands and help me.

" He is in there " she pointed to the sacristy " and I am
going to him.

" Monsieur Desmond good-by! "

SNOW-FLAKES.

BY REV. W. P. CANTWELL.
I.

RITHEE, tell me, mother mine," spake a child of four,
"What are snow-flakes? Whence come they? Tell

me, mother mine ! "

Tossed she back a saucy curl that had stolen o'er
Her white shoulder tauntingly. "Tell me, mother, do!"

II.

Thus with sweet insistency spoke the tiny elf ;
But the mother, silent still, busy in her heart
"Are they rain-drops strayed away,

Naughty rain-drops, lost at play ?

Are they blossoms from the trees,

Orchards shaken by the breeze ? "
Answered not, but tearfully dreamed within herself ;
Brushed the tear, and pressed the child closer to her breast.

SOLDIER SEMINARIANS RENEWING THEIR CLERICAL PROMISES.

SEMINARIANS AS SOLDIERS.

BY MILES CHRISTI.

HE Freemasons, who practically have a great
influence on the government of Catholic France,
succeeded some ten years ago in obtaining from
the French parliament a law by which all the
seminarians of any religious body recognized by
the state would be obliged, as well as other citizens, to spend
one year in the barracks as soldiers. " The great principle of
equality demanded it," they said. In fact it was nothing less
than a disguised persecution, another application of Gambetta's
principle : Le cle'ricalisme, cest rcnnemi. Some Catholics, how-
ever, did not join in the violent opposition which at first met
this law. They thought that, in spite of the perverse inten-
tion of the legislator, some good might result from such a
decree, and, little by little, people accepted this new situation
created for the younger French clergy, so that now this law
is rather popular among many.

One of the most characteristic features of the French tem-
perament is the facility of adaptation to any circumstances or
situation. Very soon, indeed, the seminaries of France were
ready to face the difficulties springing from this military law.
Among the many solemnities of the liturgical year a new one
VOL. LXX. 25

386 SEMINARIANS AS SOLDIERS. [Dec.,

of a strange character was then introduced. It is called the
Messe du depart. It takes place about the end of October. A
month has been spent in the seminary where, besides the ex-
ercises of a spiritual retreat, the future soldiers are prepared
by a special course of apologetics to answer the current ob-
jections against religion which infallibly will be one of the
favorite topics of the conversations in the barracks. And now
the time has come when they must repair to the caserne. A
last and solemn gathering takes place in the chapel, before the
Blessed Sacrament. At St. Sulpice, in Paris, Cardinal Richard
presides at the touching ceremony and gives the benediction ;
the soldiers, dressed in black cassocks, being grouped around
the altar, nearer to God, whilst their confreres in full choir
dress sing and pray, asking our Lord, our Blessed Lady, and
the Holy Angels to preserve these souls of future priests from
the contamination of the world.

What a change for the young cleric when passing from the
pure and warm atmosphere of the sanctuary to the severe
barracks, where cold indifference, rank impiety, or awful cor-
ruption are too often the salient features of young men who
boast of being more criminal than they are in reality ! Then
come all the tiresome trials of the first days, numberless in-
spections, distribution of clothes, first exercises of the military
tactics, first contact with men naturally hostile to the seminarians.
The sky is dark indeed. It seems that the surroundings are
calculated to quench the sacred fire which burns in those
sacerdotal souls.

But to no purpose. The spirit of charity and obedience
which is their precious gift very soon bears its fruit. His
officers as well as his comrades learn how to appreciate and
love the seminarian. They see in him a higher education ;
consciously or unconsciously, they admire his self-respect and
self-denial ; they wonder at the faithfulness with which he con-
stantly aims at higher ideals and nobler aspirations. Indeed,
it would be a dream to think that soldiers will change their
conduct, and amidst that promiscuous assemblage of young
men they live like angels, because some angels pass among
them. This dream, however, has sometimes become a reality,
and converts have been made by seminarians. But the main
result is that the men who have witnessed those angelic lives,
who have never seen amidst the most unpleasant discussions a
shadow of anger or hatred, conceive a loftier idea of the
priesthood. They may say what they like, but they believe the
priest has a divine mission, and at least at their death-bed

SEMINARIANS AS SOLDIERS.

387

they will call for him who has been so kind and so charitable
a comrade-in-arms.

Generally the garrisons are in large cities where there is
also a seminary. From 5 to 9 P. M. this latter becomes the
refuge of the soldier-cleric. There he finds consolation after
his trials, a heavenly calm after the storm, spiritual food after
the famine ; so that when he leaves those sacred precincts he
hears in his soul heavenly music, he feels in his heart fortitude
and purity. It is at such moments that he remembers more
vividly the friends who are dispersed in the different garrisons,
and, like the Jews on the Babylonian shores, for them he likes
to sing. The following stanzas were composed in such cir-
cumstances and dedicated to my soldier friends in camp.

PRAISES OF ST. CECILIA.

Ad amicos milites.

Alleluia ! Alleluia !

Voces tandem laetitise Et ecce stabat angelus

Dare licet, Caecilise In virginis lateribus

Festum agentes hodie. Cum ea ludens fidibus

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Alleluia!

A patre data marito
Corde fundebat invito.
Christo preces in secreto.
Alleluia ! Alleluia !

Alleluia !

Cum in cubiculo fletus
Deo daret cum precibus,
Intravit Valerianus.
Alleluia ! Alleluia !

Alleluia !

Dixit ille : " Puercula,
Tua desine carmina.
Ad sponsarum solemnia!
Alleluia! Alleluia!

Alleluia !

Mox trahitur ad praelium :
Cruore fuscatur collum ;
Sic evolavit in ccelum.
Alleluia! Alleluia!

Alleluia !

Ubi nunc, pulsans organa
Per angelorum agmina
Divina regit carmina.
Alleluia! Alleluia!

Alleluia !

Gementes sub militia
Fove, dulcis Caecilia,
Fecunda tua gratia.
Alleluia ! Alleluia !

Alleluia !

Non volo nubere tecum,

Amicum habens angelum

Qut custodit corpus meum.

Alleluia ! Alleluia !
Ex castris apud Bernacum, nono Kalendas Deccmbris.
In festo beatce Cecilia virginis et martyris.

Alleluia !

Trinitati laudatio :
Moestis restet pulchritudo,
Unica consolatio.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen."

388 SEMINARIANS AS SOLDIERS. [Dec.,

It would be wrong to imagine that those young men always
pass through the fire without any injury to their divine voca-
tion. The flesh is weak, and when in the whirlwind of the
passions, if there is no strong arm to show the grandeur of a
victory and to help against the enemy, if there is no clarion
to call for the fight, a defection is to be feared. In fact, there
have been defections ; more, perhaps, than one may imagine
who has not known the hardship of such a life. But, in spite
of the devil's designs, those defections have often a good
result. They constitute a normal process of elimination from
the ranks of the clergy of young men who would have proven,
later on too late then that they were not fit to fight in the
army of the Lord. Unfortunately, those desertions are some-
times a scandal for the narrow-minded, who cannot understand
that a seminarian who recognizes that he has made a mistake
in entering the sanctuary, should leave it when his conscience
tells him he is unable to bear the sacerdotal burden. And if,
perchance, this poor young man, discouraged and disheartened,
abandons even his Christian practices, there are only too many
ready to generalize and reflect on all the clergy the ancient
sophism : Ab uno disce omnes.

An evidence that the general result has not been so bad as
it was supposed to be is in the fact that for the past few years,
almost in every diocese, the number of seminarians has in-
creased. And perhaps for many who have safely returned to
the seminary this year of trial has strengthened their good
dispositions, and changed into a manly character the boyish
dispositions with which they had entered. With joy, indeed,
those would mingle with their confreres on the feast of the
Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, and after them step towards
the altar in' their military attire to renew their clerical promises,
and repeat to the Faithful Virgin from the bottom of their
heart :

" Ergo nunc tua gens se tibi consecrat ;
Ergo nostra manes portio, tu, Deus,
Qui de Virgine natus
Per nos saepe renasceris."

1 899-] " HOLLY-EVE." 389

'HOLLY-EVE/'

THE VIGIL OF ALL HALLOWS (ALL SAINTS.)
BY E. M. LYNCH.

:T was dark in the cabin but for the red glow of
the turf fire. The " clay "walls of the big chim-
ney came into the room, like a wigwam with an
uncommonly large entrance. Biddie sat, in the
great chair that had been her old father's, close
up to the ashes on one side, and Norah had a " creepeen "
(a board on three legs, like a milking-stool) at the other side
of their rude inglenook. A table, set for one, stood in the
shadowy part of the room. Flames from a fresh sod of turf
would sometimes dance on the polished delft, the tumbler, and
the tall bottle. There was a brown teapot and a cup, too,
" for Mattie was iver the sober bhoy ; but what way it 'ud be
now wid him, alannah, there's none can tell," said Biddie, in
her own dismal way ; so they decided to lay the table for
" sperrits an tay," with the white (not brown) sugar ; fresh
(not salt) butter ; baker's bread, instead of home made oatmeal
cakes; and a "rasher," too, with a plate turned over it; in
short, "everythin* av the best."

"But how '11 we ever cook the bit o' bacon for him,
acushla ? " sighed Biddie.

It was near nine now, and they had sat there ever since
dusk: Biddie praying, and keeping a clean hearth; Norah also
praying, and sometimes crying quietly, and trying hard to ply
her knitting-needles all the time in the ruddy dimness.

Biddie might have been the grandmother, so worn, bent,
weak, and old did she seem. But, as she said herself : " I do
be iver very dawny," or " dunny " (ailing). She could not have
been thirty years older than the step-sister she mothered so
carefully, despite her Blocks. Norah was described variously by
the neighbors as " a gran' colleen "/ " a sweet slip av a gurrel " ;
and " Norah, the nate."

The boisterous wind outside was warmer than many a sum-
mer breeze. It bellowed in the wide chimney, and Biddie
would groan in response : " Let's say another pathr V avvy,
agra ! (God give the child courage!)"

390 " HOLLY-EVE." [Dec.,

The gusts sometimes bore strange screaming sounds upon
their wings, for " they do be havin' gran* doin's at the crass-
roads," on Hallowe'en ; and the blind piper and Thady, the
fiddler, were playing for the dancers, who whooped at the
wildest parts of their jigs.

" Glory be ! " moaned Biddie, as the loud wind roared by,
rattling all October's dry twigs and leaves in a mad whirl past
the cabin. She rocked herself to and fro ; and, though she
was dry-eyed, her sad face twitched with emotion.

" 'Tis just the night for the dead to walk" she said, in an
awe-struck voice.

" Arrah, mebbe Mattie 'd rather have a hot griddle-cake
nor baker's-bread," cried Norah, starting up.

" Thrue for ye, chiidie," said the old sister. "Go get the male."

And Norah, in feverish haste, mixed water and meal and a
pinch of salt, set her cake on an iron plate, and both upon
the hot embers.

It was ten o'clock, and the night rougher than ever. The
wind would thump upon the door, shaking the latch ; and the
watchers would grow pale, and turn to look through the un-
glazed square in the side of their " clay " tent, to see if no
ghost was crossing their threshold. " Living soul " would never
come, they knew; for all the neighbors would be too con-
siderate to visit a house on the first Hallowe'en after a be-
reavement. Even a drunken man, they thought, would know
better than to do such a thing!

" 'Tis turrible late ! " sighed Biddie. Norah's cake was
finished "done to a turn."

" Ah, thin, isn't it the gran griddle-bread ? " Biddie said,
in compliment.

Work is exhilarating, and successful work is a great tonic.
Norah's hope flickered up anew. " Sure, mebbe Mattie's alive
not dead. Didn't he tell me, an* he goin' down to the dhrill,
that I'd see him again dead or alive?"

" Ach, 'tis only this wan night they can walk, Norrie !
Wiit, alannah ! Sure he has till twelve strikes," sighed the
melancholy elder.

It was in '67, and Mattie, "the broth of a bhoy," was just
the one to be enrolled among the first by the Fenians. He
attended the midnight drillings most punctually never dream-
ing of advancement for himself, and aware of his small military
knowledge or aptitude, but ready, like every fine fellow of his
acquaintance, to " fight for the good cause."

1 899-] " HOLLY-EVE" 391

Biddie had said, for two or three years : 4t I 'm not long for
this wurruld ; but av I'd on'y marrit the girsha wid a dacint
bhoy, the Lord knows, I 'd die aisy."

Norah had plenty of suitors, but " never a wan o' thim
she 'd look at," said Biddie, with a melancholy pride, till
Mattie declared his passion. He was already "sworn-in," and
he felt he " cudn't bear her not to know his heart, whativer
happened."

Some one, however, besides Norah and " the bhoys," came
to know about Mattie's connection with the Fenian Brother-
hood : to wit, his father's first-born. (" Didn't they know ivery
mortial thing, away up in Dublin, in the poliss ? ") Larry
wrote to Mattie : " 'Tis nabbed ye '11 be, ye aumadhaun, av ye
goes to th' dhrill this night.'-' He added the name they had
all used as children for the very spot to which the " lead-
ing spirits " of the countryside were bidden. The scrap of
paper in a sealed cover was put into Mattie's hand by a
strange gossoon^ in the dusk of a February afternoon. Mattie
turned the matter over In his mind for a long half hour. It
was impossible, he felt, to warn each man separately. Some
would be setting out even now for the meeting-place. It was
certainly Larry's writing. Larry would knew the exact truth.
And the drill must be stopped for that night. But how to
do it?

There were some sympathizers among the fishermen. He
*' would give the word to them," and they could spread it.
Then, their coracles, under the cliff to seaward of the rendez-
vous, might afford a means of escape for some of the " bhoys."
He ran off to the coast village a long three miles whisper-
ing a word to a comrade here and there ; and then he doubled
back to Biddie's cabin. Holding a hand of each of the sisters,
he said: " The poliss is never coming fur to 'nab' me be me-
self. Sure, I can't be sartin-sure of stoppin' th' whole lot av
th' min, aven av I go meself fur to do it."

" Mebbe they 'd listent to an owld crayther like me ? " haz-
arded Biddie. " Avick, lave me take yer place!"

"An* how 'd ye iver get there, Biddie-wuman," he objected.
" Sure, I must be makin' the great thracks now, though it's
meself that's in it."

" An' Norah?" she asked, trembling.

" Well, Norah might be takin' a ring 'round, far out, be
way av th' bog," he said, pondering, 4t to warn the late-comers,
mebbe. But there's work for the two av us!"

392 " HOLLY-EVE:' [Dec.,

And it was then that he gave his promise : " Dead or
alive, sure, ye '11 see me agin " ; and " wid a squeeze av th'
hand to the both av us," as Biddie always added, when she re-
peated the story of that dreadful night, "he ran aff wid him-
self. An' niver, from that day to this, did we sot eye on
him !"

He must have run nearly twenty miles in the next three
and a half dark hours, for so many men lived to tell where
he had turned them back, and when! But he could not warn
everybody, and the police made some arrests ; while of those
who had been hunted to the edge of the cliff and over it
the coracles carried away as many as they could hold.

41 A beggar man, wid an American ahksint an him an' 'tis
no lie I'm tellin' ye," Biddie would say " toult Norah he seen
Mattie, a tur'ble long way aff, two days afther St. Pathrick's
Day; but mebbe 'tis what he wanted to get tJi saft side
av her" she would add, faithful to her doleful view of
things.

Perhaps there would have been more authentic tidings but
that Biddie and Norah, from that night, became "suspects."
Those who wished them well would not, for anything in the
world, do what might incriminate them (and it was held to be
dangerous even to know where an ex-Fenian might happen to
be !) Perhaps letters with tidings of Mattie's well-being were
intercepted. Many a letter "went asthray " in the spring and
summer of '67 in Ireland. . . .

And still they watched hoping, yet trembling with all
things set ready for Mattie's ghost, should it come (as enjoined
by tradition) to take a Hallowe'en meal under a loved roof-
tree.

It was long past eleven o'clock. There was a lull in the
storm, and through the comparative stillness a lengthy, rattling
noise shook the cabin's window-panes.

" Mother o' Mercy, what's that ? cried Biddie. Norah
sobbed aloud ; but, after a minute's speechless agony, she
asked: "Wouldn't it, mebbe, be the mail-car ?"

Soon, through the renewed soughing of the wind, midnight
struck upon the church tower, and then came the sound of
rapid steps steps of feet in brogues ; brogues, too, with nails
in them ; no ghostly tread !

The latch lifted ! Biddie fainted outright in her high chair.
Norah knelt on the floor, with hands raised and lips moving

1899-] " HOLLY-EVE" 393

in prayer. And big, handsome, slightly-awkward Mattie stood
framed in the doorway !

" Is it yerself or yer ghost, Mattie, jew'l ? " whispered the
white-faced girl.

"Tis meself that's in it, Norah ; for why not ?" cried Mat-
tie lustily. Then glancing, somewhat startled, at the Hallow-
e'en table, he said: "Sure, I never recollectit 'tvvud be still
to-night whin I 'd git here, else I 'd have waited tull th' holi-
day. But who had yese to lose?" he asked, puzzled. "Who's
dead, Norrie ? "

" Arrah, what 's the matter wid Biddie ? " wailed Norah.
"Sure, 'twas for yer ghost we was watching, Mattie!"

They turned to the unconscious Biddie, and were busy with
tender ministrations "bringing her to" for the next few mo-
ments. When she had recovered consciousness, and it was safe
to joke a little, Mattie said : " Will we make her a drap av
this ghost's tay?" and a little while later he was sharing with
the still nerve-shattered women the refection that had been pre-
pared for his spirit, telling them, as they sipped their tea, how
" the poliss " had closed round the men who were making for
their drill-ground that February night, and had driven them in
from all sides; but (where he could) he gave the word: "Fur
the cliff and the coracles." He was half way down that cliff
himself, when he saw that the last frail boats were already
over-full ; and he crept into a cleft in the rocks which he
knew well since his boyish days, when he went sea-birds'-egg
hunting. There he waited till, literally, " the coast was clear,"
when he worked his way by the sea-shore towards a Welsh
trawler which took him on board. Spring, summer, and autumn
he had labored for Taffy. He poured out the golden coins he
had earned in exile to cheer Biddie's drooping spirits.

" I had it from Larry that it was safe to come home," he
said. "Never heard the wurrud tull las' Sathurday ! D'ye
think we need be waitin' fur the Shruvven, Norah!" he asked
shyly. (The " Shruvven " is Shrovetide, the great season for
weddings in rural Ireland.)

"A-why did ye niver write, avick, to tell us ye were alive?"
asked Biddie.

" An' sure, an' I did write, Biddie. But won't she give me
e'er an answer about the Shruvven ? " Mattie persisted.

"The girsha who'd be too quick wid her Yes isn't Norah,
ma bouchal ! " Biddie responded with much dignity.

And Mattie was quite satisfied with that answer.

394 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS.

BY ELIZABETH RAYMOND-BARKER.

'HE tragedy whose final act has just closed at
Rennes, in a nation claiming to be the centre
of civilization and the chartered exponent of
" Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," makes it
especially interesting at the present time to
consider what has been the general action of the Holy See
throughout the ages in regard to that ancient race so deeply
hated, and yet, to every thoughtful mind, so deeply interesting
the race which gave the world the Twelve Foundations of the
Church, including "the Rock" on which it is built, the spot-
less MOTHER, and, through her, the DIVINE FOUNDER Him-
self: the race of ISRAEL.

JEWS TOLERATED AT ROME.

The Jews, although more or less rigorously persecuted
throughout the Middle Ages in all European countries, and
even in Arabia and more distant regions, were tolerated at
Rome itself, the capital of the Christian world. This tran-
quillity and security, writes the learned Emanuel Rodocanachi,*
which they were nowhere else permitted to enjoy, they found,
at least relatively, under the immediate shadow of St. Peter,
shielded by the representative of Christ upon earth. The san-
guinary reprisals for strange and incredible crimes imputed to
thi Jews, the wholesale banishments, legal spoliations, and
burnings at the stake, so common in other countries, were un-
known at Rome. By no other sovereign were they treated
with the moderation shown them by the popes.

It is true that at Rome as elsewhere the Jews were despised,
obliged to live in their own quarter of the city, and, as a rule,
co npslled to wear a distinctive badge or color, although this
rule had many exceptions, and fell at times into abeyance.
Moreover these universal money-makers and money-lenders
often found themselves the involuntary creditors of great per-
sonages, popes included ; still, to the student of history, there

*Le Saint Stege et les fuifs. Par Emanuel Rodocanachi, Secretaire de la Societe des
Etudes Historiques. Paris : Firmin Didot. 1891.

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 395

is no doubt that amidst the intolerance and barbarities of the
Middle Ages and the times succeeding them Rome set a great
example of moderation.

Indeed, throughout Italy the Jews had much less to suffer
than elsewhere, for although cruel persecutions arose against
them at Naples, Chiesi, and Trani, these, as in other Italian
towns, were essentially local and transient. Owing to the in-
cessant feuds and rivalries between one town or state and its
next neighbors, it was sufficient* for the Jews to be banished
from one to find a ready refuge in any other with which it
was fighting.

THEIR PRESENCE IN ROME IN EARLIEST TIMES.

It does not seem possible to ascertain the date of the first
arrival of the Jews at Rome, but it is certain that they were
there in the time of Pompey, who brought with him many
Jewish captives to swell his triumph. These captives, freed by
Caesar, formed from that time a separate caste, the Libertini.*
St. Paul found at Rome an important Jewish colony, among
whom the Christians were comparatively few. Still, both alike
despised the gods of Rome and were alike hated by their
worshippers. The pagans saw that where there were Jews,
there also there were Christians ; the New Law was growing up
in the shadow of the Old, and both must perish.

From the time of Nero to that of Constantine the Jews
were persecuted with the Christians. It is only from the time
of Constantine that their history as a separate race comes into
clear relief, and is comparatively easy to follow, especially at
Rome. One of the first acts of this emperor was a repressive
measure against the Jews, between whom and the Christians
the divergence was by that time as apparent as it was pro-
found. He made it penal for Jews to insult or injure converts
to Christianity, forbade the adoption of Judaism by Christians
as apostasy, and the blending of the distinctive rites and
doctrines of the two as heresy. Jews were not to have Chris-
tians in their service, nor to eat with them, nor share their
pleasures, nor bless the fruits of their land ; above all, they
were forbidden to make proselytes.f

Julian the Apostate, who hated the Christians, favored the
Jews ; Jovian oppressed them, Valens treated them mildly,

* At the murder of Cassar, their liberator, the Jews of Rome watched weeping for several
nights around the ashes of his funeral pile.

t See Eusebius, De Vita Constantini, lib. iv. cap. xxvii.

396 THE HOL v SEE AND THE JE ws. [Dec.,

Theodosius and Honorius with rigor. They were no longer
allowed to exercise any public function, or build new syna-
gogues, and Christians were scrupulously to avoid all contact
with them.

At Rome, nevertheless, the tradition of toleration was
maintained. There the Jews might observe the ceremonies of
their worship in peace, and were even permitted to exercise
certain magisterial functions. Although they were not allowed
their independence, their religious scruples were not interfered
with. Proof of this exists in the Acts of the council held
under Pope Zachary [A. D. 741] at Rome.

From the time when no longer the emperors but the popes
became the absolute rulers of the Eternal City, the history of
the Roman Jewry becomes distinct from that of every other,
and is particularly interesting, since it furnishes the criterion
of the dispositions of the Holy See throughout the ages in re-
gard to the entire Jewish race. Elsewhere the action of
bishops, provincial councils, or sovereigns, were more or less
substituted for that of the popes, or it interfered with or dis-
torted it, but the Jews at Rome were under the immediate rule
of the Sovereign Pontiff, and thus their vicissitudes faithfully
mirror the attitude of the church at every period in regard to
the race of Israel.

THE POLICY OF THE HOLY SEE.

These vicissitudes were numerous. The Jewish question
which agitated the Middle Ages was to thoughtful men a
source of much perplexity, nor is it, as we have good reason
to know, by any means a matter of indifference to our own
times. Our forefathers were at a loss how to treat these heirs
of a venerated tradition and of a detested name. Legem
probo, sed improbo gentem, were the words with which some at
least of the popes, on the day of their coronation, received the
homage of the delegates of the Jewish community. But how
could they treat with severity the representatives of the ancient
Law without in some measure infringing the Law itself?
Each pope who ascended the Throne of Peter had his personal
and traditional views on the matter, and hence arose a diversity
of treatment on their part, although this diversity was less real
than apparent. That which strikes the student of history as
the most remarkable and potent characteristic of the policy of
the Holy See is its unity. Men are ambitious of a thousand
different Ihings : the church desires but one, and this is always

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 397

the same the eternal welfare of her children. Her methods
may vary, but her motive, never. All the popes in succession
have pursued the same end in regard to the race of Israel,
although the difference of times and circumstances has called
for diversity of action. There have been three periods mark-
ing this diversity.

VICISSITUDES OF THE RACE.

While the Papacy was triumphant and its rule unques-
tioned it sought, not to subjugate but to win the Jews. This
may be called the First Period. But when the popes saw
their work threatened, attacked and almost compromised on
every side, they ceased, during what may be called the Second
Period, to oppose in their wonted degree their moderation
to the popular fury, and made their authority the more strong-
ly felt the more it was contested. It was the Reformation
which assured the triumph of the Inquisition. Paul IV.
published the bull which separated the Jews from the rest of
mankind at the time when Luther was subverting Germany,
and Calvin France and Switzerland, with their heresies. By a
remarkable Nemesis the victories gained by the enemies of
the Holy See cost most to those who hated it most.

In the Third Period, which followed wheji calm was some-
what restored, and the progress of heresy seemed for a time
arrested, the Sovereign Pontiffs relaxed the severity to which
the force of events had constrained them, and turned their at-
tention more fully than before to the catechumenate, and the
instruction of converts from Judaism. The First Period extends
from the fall of the Empire to the accession of Eugenius IV.,
in 1431.

While the later emperors, with the zeal of recent converts,
were persecuting them, the popes sheltered the Jews with their
protection. St. Gregory the Great forbade that any should be
compelled to abjure, be deprived of the right of possessing
house or land, or of cultivating the soil. ."It is," he said, '"by
gentleness and kindness, by persuasion and exhortation, that
unbelievers must be led into the bosom of the church." *

It was in vain that the provincial councils of Toledo,
Rheims, and Meaux did their utmost by harsh decrees to force
the illustrious pontiff and his successors beyond the limits they
had laid down. They none the less persisted in treating the

* " Praedictos vero Hebraeos g;ravari vel affligi contra ordinem rationis prohibemus,"
etc. See Epist. lib. i., Indict. ix.,~Epist. x., and many other passages in St. Gregory's Letters.

398 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

Jews as wanderers, not criminals or enemies; as sheep gone
astray, to be won, not driven by force into the true fold.

Nevertheless, it sometimes happened that at Rome as else-
where a sudden catastrophe or other great calamity was re-
garded as a sign of the wrath of Heaven against the " perfidi-
ous Jews." Thus, when, after the alarms inspired by the year
1000 were appeased, an earthquake in 1020 caused widespread
terror and dismay, the Jews were declared to have occasioned
the divine displea'sure, and as they had done before, during
the famine in the time of Theodoric, so again for the earth-
quake, the populace attacked and burnt the synagogue. In
other countries the Jews themselves would have been burnt.
But the deeds we have related were rare in Rome, where the
Jews were, as a rule, allowed to vegetate in their own quarter
in tranquillity and almost ignored, as despised and somewhat
suspicious strangers, but still not pariahs.

POPES RECEIVE THE HOMAGE OF THE JEWS.

This alien community had been wont to salute the emperors
on great occasions, and so also at the coronation of each pope
the representatives of the Roman Jewry were in the foremost
rank among the deputations assembled to congratulate the
newly elected pontiff. They also, for a long period, went an-
nually to salute the pope at Easter. In fact, rather than fail
in demonstrations of fidelity to the Holy See, they were care-
ful during the sad period of the Schism to render homage at
the same time to the true pope and to the anti-pope, wherever
the latter might be. Thus Callixtus II. and Gregory VIII., In-
nocent II. and Anaclete (in 1330), received almost simultane-
ously the homage of the Jews. In Pope Anaclete, indeed,
they saw one almost of their own race, his grandfather, the
Israelite Leone, having embraced Christianity; and it was
made a matter of reproach to the pope that his features bore
too strongly the stamp of his origin.*

This homage rendered by the Jews was doubtless sincere,
for they knew the popes to be their best protectors. Alexan-

* Natali, in // Ghetto di Roma, relates an extraordinary legend of a German Jew. This
Jew it says, being raised to the Papacy, led a holy life, devoted to his high calling, and
would probably have died in the odor of sanctity but for an unfortunate incident. He was
famed for his skill at chess, the only recreation he allowed himself. One day there arrived
from Germany an aged Jew who was said to have no equal as a chess-player. He was in-
vited to try his skill with the pope, and when on the point of being beaten, made a move of
which he alone possessed the secret, but his adversary out-manoeuvred him. On seeing this
the old Jew recognized " his blood," and springing up, embraced the Holy Father, calling
him his son. " And thus, adds the legend, the pope won the game but lost the tiara.

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 399

der III. (1159) employed a Jew as his treasurer, Innocent III.
(1198) declared that, "following the example of his prede-
cessors, Callixtus, Eugenius, Alexander, and Clement, he would
be to the suppliant Jews a shield of defence."* Honorius III.
(1216) openly protected them.f Gregory IX. (1227) remon-
strated and legislated, but in vain, against their persecution in
France and Germany, and in Italy forbade them to be injured
or put to death without trial, or molested during the celebra-
tion of their solemnities, or that their dead* should be disin-
terred under pretext of compelling payment from the living \
Nicholas IV. (1288), although far from showing himself invari-
ably favorable to the Jews, yet on hearing that they had been
molested at Rome, commanded his vicar to keep careful watch
that their property as well as their synagogue should be re-
spected. Innocent IV. (1243) himself usually treated his Jew-
ish subjects with much kindness, although he was the first
pope to absolutely prohibit the reading of the Talmud, that
vast and extraordinary compilation in which so strange a min-
gling of half-heathen myth and fable, cabalistic lore, wise pro-
verbs and examples, together with doctrines tending to the
subversion of religion and morality, side by side with parables
full of truth and beauty, had accumulated in the course of
ages. I This prohibition, repeatedly violated, was repeatedly
renewed, and always in vain. " The Talmudic Jew, with his
intense pride of race, and scorn and hatred of other nations,
was a difficult person to deal with."T[ It was through Tal-
mudic influences that the Jews in Spain were more in sympa-
thy with Islam than the religion of Christ, and assisted the
Moors in the eighth century to conquer the country and de-
stroy the kingdom of the Visigoths.

When Benjamin of Tudela, between 1159 and 1167, visited
Rome, he had remarked with surprise on the liberty there en-
joyed by the Jews in comparison with those in other countries.
But this, which may be called the golden age of the Roman
Jewry, was not of long duration. There is no question that

* Raynaldus, Annales Ecclesiastici, 1199, liv. It was Innocent III. also who obliged the
abbot of St. Mary de Pratis, Leicester, to provide for a Jew who had fallen into poverty (ib.
1205, Ivii.)

fin the Bull " Sicut Judaeus non debet," November 7, 1217, but at the same time the
Jews are prohibited from the exercise of public functions.

\ Bull of March 5, 1233 : " Sufficere debuerat perfidiae Judaeorum."

Bull " Impia Judaeorum," May 9, 1244.

I See an article by the present writer, "On the Scope and History of the Talmud," in
THE CATHOLIC WORLD MAGAZINE for June, 1891.

H See The Catholic Dictionary, under the heading "Jews."

400 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

the spirit of proselytism among the rich and influential Jewish
families was becoming a real and serious danger. The bulls
issued by Clement IV. (1265), Gregory X. (1271), and Nicholas
IV. (1288) testify to their anxieties on this account. Martin
IV. and Honorius IV., also, on ascending the Papal throne,
in 1281 and 1285, had felt it necessary to issue repressive
edicts, which closed the liberal professions and certain trades
to Jews, but left them, outside their own quarter, the sole re-
sources of commerce on certain lines, and of banking trans-
actions and management.

The last pope whose accession was saluted by the Jews
before the exile of the Holy See at Avignon was Boniface
VIII. , in 1295, when, assembled near the tower of Serpietro,
and headed by the rabbi, bearing the sacred book of the Law,
they craved his clemency. " O nation beloved of God, and
now his enemy," exclaimed the pope, pausing on his way,
"who hopest in an uncertain future and closest thine eyes to
the light of faith, holding aloof when the peoples of the earth
draw near, for thee Christ shed his blood, and thou refusest
to acknowledge him as thy Redeemer." And after receiving
the book, he returned it to the hands of the rabbi.*

This presentation of the Pentateuch had become a custom
from the time of the accession of Eugenius III., in 1145, when
the pope in acknowledgment of this mark of respect, allowed
the Gospel to be read before him in Hebrew instead of, as
previously had been the custom, in Greek or Latin. The same
ceremonial was observed in 1163, on the coronation of Alex-
ander III.

THE POPES AWAY, THE JEWS SUFFERED.

The absence of the popes was the cause of much suffering
to the Jews of Rome, no longer shielded by their restraining
hand from the oppressive barons and turbulent people. If
Pope John XXII., who was naturally clement, burnt the Tal-
mud, it was doubtless to save the Jews from being burnt for
reading it. He undertook their defence against tyrannical
sovereigns, and was the first to forbid the seizure of a man's
goods on his conversion to Christianity.! This extraordinary

* Piazza, p. 755, quoted by Rodocanachi, gives the following answer as made by some of
the popes on receiving the sacred volume : " We praise and venerate this holy Law given by
God, through the hands of Moses and your Elders (maggiori), but we blame and condemn
your observance and vain interpretation thereof, seeing that you are still expecting the
Messiah, whom the Holy Catholic Church declares to be already come, even our Lord Jesus
Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father to all eternity."

f Raynaldus, 1320, xxiii., Bull " Cum sit absurdum," June 19, 1320.

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 401

custom had been introduced early in the Middle Ages into
almost every country in Europe, but was never allowed at
Rome. Under the plea that the neophyte in renouncing his
errors was also to renounce everything relating to his past
life, he was required to give up everything he possessed, and,
as it were, begin his life over again. The rich, who chiefly
profited by the spoils, and the poor, who came in for a share
of them, highly approved of this process, though it certainly
was not of a nature to encourage conversions. On the publi-
cation of the bull prohibiting the practice, Charles VI. of
France, Jayme II. of Aragon, and Enrique of Castile, issued
edicts commanding their vassals to respect the papal decree,
but with indifferent success, and so late as 1542 Pope Paul
III. found it needful to reiterate the injunction.*

At Rome, as we have said, nothing of the kind was per-
mitted. There the popes paternally protected the converts,
and it was doubtless for this reason that such large numbers
of Jews travelled great distances to Rome,f to make their act
of submission to the church under the benevolent guardianship
of the sovereign pontiffs.

"We are bound," said Pope Paul III., "to behave with
consideration and kindness to the heterodox who come to us ;
not to ill-treat them, but to stretch forth a helping hand, and
smooth the way for them.";); At the same time the popes
strenuously forbade compulsion to be used with a view to con-
version. " For he is not truly a Christian," said Urban V.,
41 who comes for baptism not of his own free will, but because
he is forced thereto."

Clement VI., who ascended the Papal throne in 1342, would
fain have adopted the^jaild treatment approved by John XXII.
in regard to his Israelitish subjects, but the awful scourge
called the Black Death was then devastating Europe ; and as in
post-reformation England every great calamity was laid at the
door of the Catholics, so in mediaeval Europe it was attributed
by the populace equally as a matter of course to the Jews.

* " Cupientes Judseos " ; bull of March 21, 1542.

t In 1388 these arrivals were so numerous that the pope was obliged to make special
arrangements for their reception.

\ Clement XL, in 1700, in the Bull " Propagandas per Universum," enacted that if a Jew
become a Christian, the portion of his father's goods falling to him shall not be withheld by
the family on account of his conversion. But he is not allowed to disinherit his other
brothers-a proceeding enacted by the penal laws of Protestant England, according to which,
i-f the younger son of a Catholic land-owner became a Protestant, he could take the whole
estate and reduce the rest of the family to poverty.

Bull of Urban V. (1362), " Sicut Judaeis."

VOL. LXX. 26

402 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

At Rome the misery was appalling, and the popes being
absent from their too-turbulent capital, the lawless barons mal-
treated the people without scruple or pity, while the Jews, a
prey to the violence of both alike, fared worst of all.

It was not until the year 1404 that they joyfully acclaimed
the return of the pontiffs to Rome, when they did homage to
Innocent VII. On receiving the Pentateuch from the hands
of the rabbi, the pope returned it to him " without confirma-
tion or derogation."

Only a year later took place the accession of Gregory XII.,
who, instead of returning the sacred book to the chief rabbi,
desired to keep it ; and from that time it became the custom
at each coronation to present the new pope with a richly
adorned copy of the Law.* Martin V., whose election in 1417
happily put an end to the period of anti-popes, not only pro-
tected the Jews from unjust treatment by sovereigns abroad or
the populace at home, but remitted certain taxes, and allowed
them again to be employed as physicians and as professors in
the schools.

THE PERIOD OF STRICTER MEASURES.

Pope Eugenius IV., with whom begins the second period of
greater severity, although this severity was very intermittent,
decreed the withdrawal of these favors, but did not enforce
the fulfilment of his edict, which was allowed to remain rather
as a threat than as a law. Callixtus III. and Nicholas V.
allowed it to remain a dead-letter. At the coronation of Cal-
lixtus, in 1455, when the Jews, as he was passing Monte
Giordano, presented a splendid copy of the Law, the populace
riotously struggled to seize it. From that time, therefore, they
were allowed to do homage at the astle of Sant' Angelo,
protected by the Pontifical Guards. Pius III., in 1503, received
them in a hall of his palace.

There was, nevertheless, at that period an increased animus
against the Jews. This had been strongly manifested in 1472,
when Sixtus IV. had sanctioned the cultus of the little Simon
of Trent, whom, it was affirmed, they had martyred. f Still, at
Rome, they lost no opportunity of proclaiming their fidelity to
the Holy See, and on the enthronement of Leo X., in 1513,
rivalled the Christians in enthusiasm, and in the magnificence
they displayed in his honor.

* There are several superb copies of the sacred books, dating from the last two cen-
turies, in the library of the Vatican.

t Basnage de Beauval, Hist, des /ut/s, La Haye, 1716.

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 403

With regard to the little Simon of Trent, and similar cases,
it is known that none of the supposed victims of the Jewish
blood-ritual have ever been formally canonized or even for-
mally beatified. Little Simon of Trent is s'tyled " Blessed "
simply because he appears in the* Roman martyrology, but
that is only equivalent to a recognition of cultits. The same
holds for the case of Andrew of Rinn, whose cultus was sanc-
tioned, without any examination of the cause, by Benedict XIV.
But all this is by no means the same as formal beatification,
much less canonization.* The alleged martyrdom by Jews of
Christian children has repeatedly been disproved on examina-
tion of the facts of the case, and the so-called " confessions,"
extracted by torture, have as often been emphatically retracted
by the sufferers at the moment of death. The use of blood,
taken from some innocent victim, really did enter into the
magic spells of professors of the black art, and as there is no
doubt that sorcery was much practised among the Jews, it is
possible that some sorcerers may at different times have com-
bined this evil magic with their religious beliefs.

INJUSTICE OF ACCUSATIONS.

Still, Judaism as a system can certainly not be held re-
sponsible for these outrages, (i) There is absolutely no trace
of any such rite in the Talmud or any Hebrew religious book.
(2) Nor is there any such injunction or recommendation handed
down by oral tradition ; this is declared by numberless learned
Jews of the highest character. (3) Several of the Roman pon-
tiffs and other ecclesiastical authorities, after careful examina-
tion of evidence, have formally exonerated the Jewish people
and religion from any such imputation. f

For instance, Innocent IV., July 5, 1247, in a document
addressed in duplicate to the bishops of France and Germany,
says : " Although Holy Scripture . . . forbids the Jews to
touch a dead body of any sort at the festival of the Passover,
there are people who falsely charge them of partaking in com-
mon at this festival of the heart of a child whom they have
killed. They believe that the law of the Jews enjoins this
upon them, although precisely the contrary is the case, and if

* I am indebted to the kindness of the Rev, Father Thurston, S.J., for this information,
and, for full particulars on the subject, would refer to his valuable article, entitled " Anti-
semitism and the Charge of Ritual Murder," in The Month for June, 1898. (Longmans, and
Benziger Brothers.)

t This and the following page are largely taken from Father Thurston's article in The
Month for June, 1898.

404 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

a dead body be found anywhere, the Jews are maliciously
accused of having committed a murder."

The pope then goes on to speak with indignation of the
outrages to which the Jews were subjected in consequence of
these fabrications. He alst>, in a letter to the Archbishop of
Vienne, a few months previously, recounted the atrocities per-
petrated against the Jews of Valreas, who were accused of
crucifying a Christian girl, and frightfully torturing her,
although absolutely innocent of the crime.

Gregory X., in a bull of October 7, 1272, repeats the state-
ment of Innocent IV., and declares the falsehood of the accu-
sation that the Jews use human blood has been proved to him
many times by Jewish rabbis and others converted to Chris-
tianity. This pope even established a rule that the testimony
of Christians alone is not to be received against Jews unless
some Jew confirm it.

Later on, Martin V; again forbids any such " false and
calumnious charge " as that of ritual murder, or that of poison-
ing the wells, to be made against the Jews. So again, Paul III.,
in a letter of May 12, 1540; to the bishops of Hungary, Bo-
hemia, and Poland, emphasizes the letters of former popes in
regard to the falsity of these accusations. At the same time
the non-existence of ritual murder does not imply that isolated
outbreaks of fanaticism, and possibly of vengeance, may not
have been attended with the murder of an innocent victim
in odium fidei, but such had nothing whatever to do with
Jewish ritual, and was reprobated with horror by thoughtful
and educated Israelites.

All favors and concessions granted by preceding pontiffs
were confirmed in 1534 by Paul LI I., but these were again re-
stricted by Julius III., in 1550, when various parts of Europe,
seduced by so-called reformers, were fast falling a prey to
heresy and schism. Paul IV., who became pope five years
later, resumed and codified the previous repressive edicts, en-
forcing the seclusion of the Jews in their own quarter, the
Ghetto, and the wearing of a distinctive color or badge; for-
bidding them to employ Christian servants, especially as nurses,
and this for very sufficient reasons, if we are to credit the
records of the time. The same edict prescribes the precau-
tions to be taken , Against usury and unjust charges, and pro-
hibits the sale -of articles left in pawn until the expiration of
eighteen months. The practice of medicine, in which some of
the rabbis excelled, was no longer permitted them except as

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 405

regarded their own race.* But notwithstanding the verbal
severity of his bull, Paul IV. almost immediately instructed
his vicar to modify its application. This custom of mitigating
by " explanation " an ordinance of acknowledged severity gave
a great elasticity to the edicts of the Holy See, which were
thus far less rigorous de facto than de jure.

Pius IV. (de' Medici) proclaimed a general amnesty for the
misdeeds which had occasioned the severity of his predecessor
in regard to the Jewish community. Among other favors he
allowed them to have shops outside the precincts of the Ghetto,
on condition that they were closed on Sundays and great
festivals of the church, and that the holders returned within
the Ghetto at night. Pius V., while refusing them the right of
owning houses outside the Ghetto, allowed the rental of shops
for the display of their merchandise, except in streets through
which religious processions were accustomed to pass.

In 1558 a general feeling of resentment against the Jews
led to their expulsion from Ravenna and Palestrina, and in
the following year from the Papal States, with the exception
of Rome and Ancona. They were commonly accused not only
of ruining the rich and stripping the poor by exorbitant usury,
but also of the darkest crimes and sacrileges. Even St. Charles
Borromeo, who was full of compassion and charity, must have
considered that there was some reason to credit these accusa-
tions, when he advised the princes of Christendom to expel
them from their dominions, as constituting a danger to their
Christian subjects. f

In spite of the popular hatred and mistrust, Sixtus V. and
the three succeeding popes treated the Jews of Rome with
great moderation and kindness. This continued until Clement
VIII., on his accession in 1592, beheld the enemies of the
Holy See sweeping away the ancient landmarks of the faith,
and, like a destroying flood, apparently carrying all before
them. Protestantism under Elizabeth had taken definite pos-
session of England; a Huguenot king w.as on the throne of
France; Bohemia, the Netherlands, and Germany were tainted

* Innocent VEIL, in his last illness, was assured by a Jewish charlatan of recovery by the
transfusion of blood from the veins of three youths. The youths died, and so also did the
pope. The practitioner fled. Still, this was quite an exceptional case. Among .the popes
who were attended by Jewish physicians were Boniface IX , Martin V., Eugenius IV., Inno-
cent VII., Pius II., Julius II , Paul III., Julius III., Sixtus V., and Leo X.

t We know from Seckendorf, one of Luther's apologists and admirers, what was the
treatment advised by the heresiarch in regard to the Jews: "Their synagogues ought to be
destroyed, their houses pulled down, their books of pfayer, the Talmud, and even the Books
of the Old Testament, should be taken from them, their rabbis forbidden to teach, and com-
pelled to gain a living by hard labor."

406 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

with heresy, and Italy and Rome were in a state of ferment
and unrest. This did not seem to Clement a time to encour-
age an alien community of misbelievers in the heart of Christen-
dom, and besides renewing the Bull Cum nimis absurdum of
Paul IV., he commanded the Jews to quit the States of the
Church, with the exception of Rome, Ancona, Naples, and
Avignon ; but this, which was their last expulsion, was never
fully carried out, the pope recalling them in the following
year, 1593. At the same time, on account of the popular ani-
mosity against them, he renewed the edicts forbidding that
they should be ill-treated. Any person throwing stones at a
Jew or tearing his garments, or otherwise molesting him, was
sentenced to be whipped and fined, these penalties being in-
creased in severity as time went on.

THE PERIOD OF CONCESSIONS AND OF MILDNESS.

During the third period, from the time of Clement VIII.,
who began his reign in 1592, the condition of the Roman Jews
was increasingly ameliorated by the Holy See, which, while
maintaining strict discipline, allowed much of the old legisla-
tion to fall into disuse.

In the mild reign of Paul II., in 1464, a custom had been
inaugurated which, though at first harmless, had in the course
of years, owing to the animus of the Roman rabble, become a
source of much affliction to the inhabitants of the Ghetto.
This pope, a Venetian noble of high rank, and accustomed to
splendor and refinement, knowing the love of his Roman sub-
jects for amusements, and disliking the brutal combats with
wild beasts and other sanguinary spectacles so dear to them,
resolved to replace these by less savage forms of entertain-
ment. It was he who introduced the Carnival as it has for
three centuries been observed at Rome. Among the sports
indulged in races formed an important item, and indeed these
races gave its present name of the Corso to the ancient Via
Lata On the first day, ran Roman youths ; on the second,
Jews (" not fewer than eight "), and on the third, sexagenari-
ans. It is certain that there was at first nothing humiliating
in this participation in the carnival games by the Jews, but it
gradually became an occasion of raillery, ridicule, and violence
on the part of the crowd. At the approach of the carnival
the Jews, for many years, went year by year to ask the pope's
protection, and he had on every occasion issued an edict to
shield them from ' insult and injury, sentencing offenders to

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 407

severe penalties.* Clement IX. put an end to these abuses by
an edict of January 28, 1668, in which he decreed that the
Jews were no longer to take part in the races or other carni-
val games.

THE SPANISH INQUISITION .AND THE JEWS.

For reasons given at the outset, we have o!welt chiefly on
the action of the Holy See in regard to the Jews of Rome.
Before concluding, it will be of interest, as briefly as we can,
to notice it with reference to their treatment in Spain, and
especially by the Spanish Inquisition.

And first it must be allowed that long before the time of
Ferdinand and Isabella the Jew of Spain had become an ele-
ment of danger to the country.

During the religious wars with the Moors the Jews suf-
fered greatly from the zealous violence of the Spanish knights,
and in those stormy times it was the popes and the clergy
who were their best protectors. In a brief of Alexander II.
to the Spanish bishops he praises them for having prevented
their massacre, commending for the same reason Viscount
Berengar of Narbonne, and at the same time censuring the
archbishop for not having duly shielded them. Pope Honorius
II., one hundred and fifty years later, also protected them
from brutal treatment.

At the same time the popes did not allow Jews to hold
power over Christians, either as masters or judges. The Jews
had their own judges and were tried by their own laws and
rights, often to the prejudice of the Spaniards. They had cer-
tain privileges not shared by Christians, such as that of not
being imprisoned without express command of the king. We
even find them obtaining at times so much power that they
practically held the reins of government.

During the fourteenth century the Cortes and other coun-
cils often sent remonstrances to the government, since the
existence of so many privileges in their favor produced re-
peated civil commotions. t

But while the real Jews had monopolized a great part of
the national property and commerce, a far greater danger arose
from the multitude of pretended converts. These threatened
to uproot not only the Spanish nationality itself but also the

* Amongst other prohibitions (although in carnival time every one, Jew or Gentile, is
pelted promiscuously) it was forbidden to pelt a Jew with anything harder than " fruit " ;
whereupon a certain Marchese del Grille laid in a large supply of fir-cones by way of ammu-
nition in their regard.

t See the Life of Car din // Ximenes, by Dr. Von Hefele, Canon Dalton's translation, from
which source we have largely drawn in these latter pages.

408 THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. [Dec.,

Christian faith,- some being raised to bishoprics and other
ecclesiastical dignities while secretly undermining the faith they
professed to believe and teach, so that in the time of F'erdi-
nand the Catholic the proselytism carried on by the Jews had
reached an alarming degree.

It is important to bear in mind that it was these false con-
verts that the Tnquisition afterwards punished, and not the Jews
properly so-called, a distinction too often forgotten by Protest-
ant controversialists. " Neither the unbaptized Jew nor the un-
baptized Moor could be brought before the Inquisition, but only
those of these two creeds who had relapsed " (De Maistre).

After the conquest of Granada, in 1492, Ferdinand and
Isabella, feeling the impossibility of suppressing crypto-judaism
so long as the Jews remained in Spain, issued a decree for all
the Jews who up to the 3ist of July refused to be baptized
to leave the kingdom. The indefatigable proselytism of the
Spanish Jews aimed at nothing less than the Judaizing of the
whole of Spain, and this decree was hastened on by various
overt acts on the part of the Jews. They were accused of
having defaced crucifixes, profaned consecrated Hosts, and, at
La Guardia, of having crucified Christian children.

RECOURSE TO ROME.

Notwithstanding these imputed crimes, it is a fact well
worthy of attention that, at the time of the greatest rigor
against both pretended or suspected converts, and Judaizing
Christians, persons accused or threatened by the Inquisition
hastened to take refuge in Rome. The number of causes
commenced by the Inquisition and summoned from Spain to
Rome, especially during the first fifty years of the existence of
that tribunal, is countless, and it must be added that Rome
always inclined to the side of mercy.* " I do not know,"
writes Balnez, "that it would be possible to cite one accused

* See Balmez, History of European Civilization, ch. xxxvi. The Spanish Inquisition
was instituted in the first place as a barrier against the encroachments of Judaism and
Islamism, but it was in a very important degree for political reasons that the Spanish kings
upheld an institution which, though apparently of an ecclesiastical nature, was constantly
complained of and combated by the popes and bishops. It was, as is stated by Ranke (vol i.
p. 248), used as the means of completing the absolute authority of the king. Count Alexis
de St. Priest, in his history of the banishment of the Jesuits from Portugal and their barbar-
ous treatment in the prisons of Lisbon, observes with reference to Pombal, the chief mover
in this persecution : " This minister, the destroyer of the Jesuits and apostle of absolutism,
an enemy of Rome and the hierarchical power like no other, recognized in the Inquisition
the best means for the accomplishment of his plans," and made it his tool accordingly, as
also, later, did Philip II., to a marked extent See also Life of Cardinal Ximenes, pp. 313-335,
containing valuable evidence of the Papal action in regard to the proceedings of the Spanish
Inquisition.

1899-] THE HOLY SEE AND THE JEWS. 409

person who by appealing to Rome did not ameliorate his con-
dition. The history of the Inquisition is full of contests be-
tween the kings and popes, and we constantly find on the
part of the Holy See a desire to restrain the Inquisition within
the limits of justice and humanity."

Again and again do we find the pope interfering to miti-
gate the lot of the appellants, and also not unfrequently com-
plaining that the indulgence he had granted to accused persons
had not been sufficiently respected. In fine, after several other
admonitions, he observed to Ferdinand and Isabella that
" mercy towards the guilty was more pleasing to God than the
severity it was desired to use"; and gave the example , of the
Good Shepherd in regard to the wandering sheep.

It was, indeed, because they were sure of finding clemency
there, that "the accused so constantly had recourse to Rome.
We have proof of this in the number of Spanish refugees con-
victed at Rome of having fallen into Judaism. Two hundred
and fifty were found at one time, and yet there was not one
execution. Some penances were imposed on them, and when
they were absolved and reconciled they were allowed to re-
turn home, without the least mark of ignominy. This took
place in 1498.

The Roman Inquisition, as Balmez states, was never known
to pronounce sentence of capital punishment, even when the
Apostolic See was occupied by popes of extreme rigor in their
civil administration. While in all parts of Europe, he writes,
scaffolds were prepared to punish crimes against religion, and
scenes which saddened the soul were everywhere witnessed,
Rome was an exception to the rule Rome, which has been
represented as a monster of intolerance and cruelty.

We conclude this imperfect notice with the words of the
Calvinist, Basnage de Beauval, written in 1716. "'Of all
sovereigns," he says, " there have scarcely been any whose rule
has been milder towards the circumcised than that of the
popes. Even when persecuting contumacious Christians, they
showed favor to this race, . . . and left them full liberty
of conscience. Some few popes, it is true, have shown them-
selves their enemies, for it is impossible that, in so long a
succession of Bishops of Rome, all should have had the same
temperament, or have followed the same method. Still, even at
this present time, the Jews continue to live in greater tran-
quillity under the domination of these heads of the church than
under any other."

FATHER HECKER'S MAXIMS FOR THE APOSTO-
LATE OF THE PRESS.

The following principles were written out by Father Hecker more than
thirty years ago at a time when he had the personal management of the edito-
rial department of this Magazine, which he founded in order to be a rule of con-
duct for its management as well as a guide in adopting policies of defence.
They have ever since been posted up in the editorial office. No statement can
be framed that will better reflect the spirit of loyal devotion to Holy Church, or
of filial and humble submission to her decrees.

i.- 1 - ABSOLUTE and unswerving loyalty to the authority
of the Church, whenever and wherever expressed, as
God's authority upon earth and for all time.

2. To seek in the same dispositions the true spirit
of the Church, and be unreservedly governed by it as
the wisdom of the Most High.

3. To keep my mind and heart free from all attach-
ment to schools, parties, or persons in the Church (Hec-
ker included), so that nothing within me may hinder
the light and direction of the Holy Spirit.

4. In case any conflict arises concerning what Hec-
ker may have spoken or written, or any work or move-
ment in which he may be engaged, to re-examine. If
wrong, make him retract at once. If not, then ask, Is
the question of such importance that it requires defence
and the upsetting of attacks ? If not of this importance,
then not to delay, and perhaps jeopardize the progress of
the other works ; and condemn Hecker to simple silence,

5. In the midst of the imperfections, abuses, scan-
dals, etc., of the human side of the Church, never allow
myself to think or express a word which might seem to
place a truth of the Catholic faith in doubt or to savor
of the spirit of disobedience.

6. With all this in view, to be the most earnest and
ardent friend of all true progress, and to work with all
my might for its promotion through existing authorities
and organizations.

Uo jfatber "ffsaac TL Ibecfeer,

(Born December /<?, /c?/?; <&'<?</ December 22,

roost rare of souls tDose few elect who know
Cbe Spirit's two=fold aduent : first in lot>e
Chat wooes to mpstic sanctities tDe doue

Its Dolp symbol ; tftcn in tongues ihat slow

With blaze of soul anncaiins flame, and flow
In Pentecostal streams of zeal through will
find kindling heart : souls high on Carmers hill,

Pet spent for brothers on the plain below.

Such tbou, mp master ; father, Prophet, Seer,
6od's Own ! Chp soul a oirgin, chastelp=white,

his spouse resplendent ; thp true heart the dear
flbode of big affection ; and of Right

Cbivalric lover* Be thp fame as clear
fls shines thp candid spirit in God's sight !

W. . S,

412 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC Crisis [Dec.,

REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS IN
ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

BY REV. C. L. WALWORTH.

XIII.
HOMEWARD BOUND.

DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND TO JOIN THE NEW PROVINCIAL.
GATHERING OF OUR PARTY AT PARIS. SIGHT-SEEING STIR-
RING SCENES AT THE FRENCH ASSEMBLES. : LACORDAIRE'S
PREACHING. SAINT SULPICE. SEMINARY OF THE MISSIONS
ETRANGERES. ROOM OF THE MARTYRS BRIEF WORDS OF
FATHER BERNARD.

HAVE already, in the beginning of chapter xi.,
opened the doorway to a great event in my life
far enough to give an outlook across the Atlan-
tic. On some day now forgotten, about the
middle of January, 1851, or later in that month,
Father flecker and I were called from our respective stations
to Clapham, in order to make this voyage. Arrangements had
been made for us to meet the Rev. Father Bernard and other
companions of his party at Paris and take ship with them for
America from Havre de Grace.

A stormy passage from Dover carried us to Calais. A
rapid railway trip brought us to Paris. At the Paris station
police officials snapped us up as if we had been government
freightage properly labelled, and transported us promptly to the
Hotel de Paris. There we found our new provincial and the
rest of his party waiting for us. They were old friends of ours
whom we had known in the Studendate at Wittem, in the
Limbourg. The names of this party we give as follows:
Father Bernard Hafkenscheid, of Amsterdam ; Fathers Land-
sheer, Kittel, Wirth, and Dold ; also three students not yet
ordained, Hellemans, Giesen, and Mu'ller.

I may not have any convenient occasion to speak again of
Father Kittel, and therefore add a few words more concerning
him. This young man was an excellent scholar, a classmate
with me in the Studendate at Wittem. He was a native of

1 899.] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 413

Silesia in Prussian Poland, a noble and apostolic young priest,
and would have made a successful missionary. It was God's
holy will, however, to call him home to himself before his
first year in America was ended.

Father Ludwig (Lewis) had been my predecessor at Hanley
Castle. He had also been predecessor to Father Hecker at
Scott-Murray's. Murray was an excellent Catholic gentleman
and great friend and patron of Redemptorists. He had a
Catholic chapel nearer London. Ludwig was already a pro-
ficient in English, and had had great success in preaching at
both places and in receiving Protestant converts into the
church. He followed us into America during this same year,
but not in the same ship. He was a great auxiliary in Father
Hafkenscheid's endeavor to establish English missions in the
New World, aiding Father Hecker especially in giving the
early morning instructions and those which were connected
with the recitation of the Rosary before the evening sermons.
He afterwards became rector of a parish on Staten Island, at
the Narrows opposite Fort Hamilton. Another thing endeared
Ludwig to both Hecker and me. He was nephew to our be-
loved novice-master at St. Trond, Father Othman ; and through
him we often received communications full of kind remembrance.

Father Le Fevre, who had been my companion in Eng-
land, both at Clapham and at Hanley, kept constant company
with us during our stay in Paris, and helped us in many ways.

I will not stop here to dwell upon the individual charac-
teristics of others of these Liguorians, all of them afterwards
notable " religious " in various convents of their order, and
most of them endowed with much of that apostolic spirit
which characterized the great leader under whose guidance
they were travelling into the western world. It will be enough
for me in this place to pause before the stately figure of Father
Bernard Hafkenscheid himself. From the first moment when I
came under his care I felt myself standing, so to speak, at the
base of a lofty tower. The Swiss Alps have their Mont Blanc,
their Jungfrau, and other giant peaks to the south and east of
these, but amongst them all is the lofty summit of Mont Saint
Bernard with a history leaning against its snowy cone which is
not likely to be lost while time endures. If this language
seems too strong to any of my readers, they must pardon it
to me. It is to Father Bernard, to his ' teaching and example,
that I owe my latest and deepest lesson in regard to my own
vocation. I thought I knew it well enough while living in

414 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Dec.,

England happy and contented as a missionary there. I was
mistaken. I had much to learn yet. I am confident that
Father Hecker would say the same if he were still living and
able to testify. So would many other disciples of the same
great master, more than I am able now to name and number.

During the few days that our party remained in Paris we were
allowed to separate into different bands and visit such places
in the great city as attracted us the most. Some were particu-
larly anxious to see the zoological collections. Admission was
very easy into the Luxembourg Gardens. Carrying no dogs
with us, we were not alarmed by the inscription over the prin-
cipal gate intended as a warning to sportive Englishmen:
" No Boule Dog Allow in Here."

Some of us took an early opportunity of visiting the high
monument where once stood the famous Bastile. Others went
to the Assemble, or Chamber of Deputies, in order to see, if
possible, the Bishop of Orleans or Lacordaire or the unhappy
De Lammenais, once the intimate friend and teacher of the
other two. Of these only De Lammenais was present in the
crowd of members, although at the time a great crisis was
imminent, namely, the great " Coup d'etat" of Napoleon,
President of the Republic. The Assemblee seemed deter-
mined to attend to no business except that of listening to mes-
sages from the President, which were arriving in rapid succession.

We were much interested and amused to see how impossi-
ble it was for any member to get possession of the tribune and
maintain it. Many, indeed, endeavored to do this, and their
friends added their help and encouragement, by remonstrances
against the confusion which was caused by constant walking,
loud talking and laughter, to say nothing of earnest gesticula-
tion. As different speakers one after another got possession of
the tribune friends cried out : " Mais ecoutez ! ecoutez ! "
There was always a momentary hush, but so soon as the mem-
bers perceived that the tribune was occupied only by some
speaker of little eloquence or weight of character the con-
fusion recommenced. "Silence!" cried the presiding officer of
the Assemble. He struck the bench before him violently with
his hammer ; but knowing that the hammer was of as little
account as himself, he generally yawned as he did it, and
bedlam carried the day. I have never witnessed a confusion
worse confounded, unless when looking down upon the Stock
"Exchange in Wall Street.

LaccJrdaire lectured from the pulpit at Saint Roch. We all

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 415

wanted to hear him, of course. The church being crowded,
places were given us among the stalls of the sanctuary. Father
Lacordaire came in just in time for the lecture, and walking
past me with a sort of rapid nonchalance, almost brushed my
sleeve with his own as he passed by, so that I got a good
look at him notwithstanding his hurry. It was a frequent and
well-known saying of his, when obliged to meet an objection,
that his arguments were much too deep for .many of his
hearers : " Je ne preche pas pour les Jemmes" He felt that his
true and peculiar vocation was to preach to the young men of
Paris, who understood the language of philosophy even when
their philosophy was wrong.

It may not be amiss in this connection to give an anecdote
of Father Passerat. This venerable man was once vicar-general
for all the houses of the Redemptorist Order outside of Italy,
that country being reserved for the immediate jurisdiction of
the rector major, whose residence was at the convent estab-
lished by St. Alphonsus at Naples. One week while Father
Passerat, whose residence was at Vienna, was on a visitation
to our convent at Wittem, or Wilre, Lacordaire was lecturing
at Louvain. His audiences were mostly made up of young
men from the university in that city. Others, however,
crowded in from other localities in Belgium. A number of
inmates of our convent at Wittem gladly availed themselves
of a permission to go and hear him. At the head of these
was a prominent professor, an official presiding over the
second, or junior, section, consisting of students who devoted
themselves to the sj:udy of philosophy and the humanities. In
the absence of the rector he sometimes taught moral theology
to the first section. This was Father Konings. Some years
later he came over to America and was teacher at the Studen-
date at Ilchester, Md. On returning from Louvain he enter-
tained both sections of students with a vivid account of
Lacordaire's appearance, arguments, delivery, and elocution.
He amused us very much by relating the remarks of a lady
who was a fellow-passenger with him on his return.

" That 's the man for me," she said. "I never before heard
morality preached with such power."

The idea of Lacordaire being a famous preacher of morals
was simply ridiculous. He was eminently a controversialist, a
champion of the church against the false philosophies of the
day. The venerable Father Passerat was present and listened
to all this with a most serious attention.

416 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Dec.,

" Do his discourses bring sinners to confession and Com-
munion?" he inquired.

"Well, no," was the answer. "I cannot say he is remarka-
ble for that."

" What good does his preaching do, then ? "

" His peculiar vocation," explained Father Konings, " is to
bring back young men to the Faith. His success in this way
is simply wonderful."

"Alas!" the old man persisted, " that alone will not save
their souls."

" There are others, my father, who know how to do that.
At Paris there is Father Ravignan. In Belgium, at the Con-
vent of Liege, we have our own Father Des Champs. In
Holland and all the Netherlands we have Father Bernard and
many more."

"It may be so," acquiesced the objector. "Time will tell.
We shall see. No doubt the gifts of God are various."

Let us now return to St. Roch, and to Lacordaire's lec-
ture in that church. The pulpit was quite distant from the
stalls we occupied ; it was about half way down the church.
This made me feel uneasy. I feared I would lose much of
what he said. My fears proved to be needless. I had forgot-
ten what power men so gifted have to enforce silence. They
will not even begin speaking until silence reigns. Lacordaire's
first words were low and slow, and well calculated to bring
about that familiar intercourse which a great orator is able to
establish between himself and his audience. In it the speaker
becomes a listener, and the hearers speak . back again to the
orator. The speaker spreads his mantle over every head, and
under that mantle all is rapt attention. His pronunciation has
been so long and so well studied that he studies it no longer.
Every consonant is easily pronounced and not a vowel is
mute. Let me give an instance of this in Lacordaire. I do
not remember the exact title under which his subject at St.
Roch's was announced, but I understand it to mean a society
initiated at the University of Paris, and under the leadership
of Frederick Qzanam, now known as the Conference of Chanty
under the patronage of St. Vincent of Paul.

When nearing the end of his lecture the great orator ceased
to reason. Shaking his wings free like an eagle preparing for
flight, and planting himself firmly upon the ground which he
had made solid under his feet, he threw his head back; he
cast His eyes about him like a man who finds himself lost in a

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 417

vision and hears the tread of a multitude of busy feet passing
to and fro through streets and over highways on visits of
charity. He called upon all slanderers of the church and of
Christian charity to be silent and to listen. " Silence ! " he
shouted. Every consonant in the word was reverberated from
the walls of the vast edifice and from the cavities of the
groined ceiling. The last e in the word Silence! which is
generally supposed to need no pronunciation refused to be
mute. To those of our party who sat in the stalls of the far-
off sanctuary that final e dropped like the music of a tiny
bell. The effect of that unexpected appeal to the conscience
was magical. His arms were extended as he made the appeal,
and it seemed as if his very fingers reached us. The effect of
this coup de langue comes back to me at this moment fresh
and green, associated with a wise word well remembered which
fell from the lips of an old friend, a singing master and or-
ganist in my own choir at St. Peter's, Troy. He afterwards
officiated in the same capacity at St. Paul's, in Fifty-ninth
Street. Hearing a priest say that a preacher ought always to
let himself down in language and style to the level of his
audience, he demurred.

" I do not agree with you, father," he said. " It is better
for the preacher to adopt all that belongs fairly to the art of
oratory and lift the crowd up to his own level."

Lacordaire was the master of this great art. Any one who did
not feel lifted up when listening to Lacordaire was dull indeed.

For my own part, let me here say that I watched this great
Dominican most eagerly to see if there was anything consti-
tuting a part of his power that I myself could use effectually.
Some such things there were, and yet I never felt that I had
any vocation to preach like him. I never felt that I had a
vocation to preach like Newman, but he gave me good points
which I shall not forget. My model preacher sat beside me
in the sanctuary at St. Roch's. It was Father Bernard Haf-
kenscheid. He taught me how to be a missionary, and to give
real missions, and not retreats. I never knew my missionary
vocation fully till I knew him. Here let me say once for all,
without enlarging upon the matter, that Father Bernard made
a thorough study of me and of Father Hecker, and later on
of Father Hewit, Father Deshon, and Father Baker, as indeed
he did of all who came under his influence, and trained us up
so far as he could to be missionary apostles. How far he was
conscious of being another St. Liguori I cannot say. That he
VOL. LXX. 27

4i 8 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Dec.,

aimed at this I know as a certainty. From him, amongst
other things, I learned during this homeward voyage that it
was an important part of my own personal vocation to be not
only a missionary but an American, and that this planting of
me and of the other American pupil of the same master was
a call from heaven. To establish the preaching of American
missions in America was from this time, at least, the foremost
thought in Father Bernard's mind and the central wish of his
heart. To establish an English house for this purpose I doubt
not was already a part of his plan. This part of the plan
proved ultimately a failure. No matter how it came about. I
do not believe that any man whose hopes are firmly fixed on
God can become broken-hearted. Broken down in some sense
he can be. I have lived to see Father De Held laid upon the
shelf at Clapham, all beautiful in a sorrow that had its own
joy. I made my confession to him there and he pressed me
to his heart while hearing it. Father Bernard's grief was
greater, for his insight into the situation had been deeper and
his hopes larger. Both have passed away to their reward.
God does not punish a failure to succeed, but the true apostle
always aims at success and hopes for it.

While, as I have already said, Father Hafkenscheid left us
free to group ourselves into separate bands in visiting the
places which interested us most, there were some places in
Paris to which he led us without inquiring into our wishes.
He took us to visit the remains of St. Vincent of Paul. St.
Vincent and St. Francis de Sales are the two typical saints of
our day. The one, a princely nobleman and perfect gentle-
man, the other a plain, practical peasant, shrewd yet simple,
loving obscurity, yet bearing himself boldly in the presence of
nobles, princes, and cardinals. Although the two Borromeos,
Charles and Frederick, were coeval with these and intimately
associated with them, I do not put them in the same class.
These two brothers belong to all ages and to no peculiar part
of the world, and their ways and manners seem to fit all coun-
tries and all times.

Father Bernard led us also to St. Sulpice. There we saw
in the rough bricks which floored the corridors that the spirit
of poverty reigned in this noble society, where the means of
acquiring wealth could not be wanting. It was a happy sur-
prise to meet there two Sisters of Charity from the United
States, and to join in conversation with them and with Father
Etienne" about affairs in America and especially at Baltimore.

1899-] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 419

The most memorable visit which we made under the con-
duct of Father Hafkenscheid was to what is called " Le Smi-
naire des Missions Etrangeres." If anything in Paris was cal-
culated to raise the hearts of missionary priests to a full sense
of their high vocation it was this visit. My own acquaintance
with Paris is too limited to locate this seminary properly, so
as to benefit any one as little acquainted with Paris as myself.
Galignani's Paris Guide for 1884 gives its situation at 128 Rue
du Bac. This I understand to be not far from the tomb of
Napoleon and some fine residences of the old noblesse ; near
also to many notable institutions of Paris, which may con-
veniently be visited in one and the same walk.

The students of this Seminary of Missions are instructed in
the Asiatic languages and in whatever may best fit them for
the dangerous missions in the East. Their special vocation is
to labor for the conversion of the heathen, and in those
countries especially where such conversion can be achieved
only by a danger which generally ends in martyrdom. My
memory brings back little of what we saw at the " Missions
Etrangeres." The reason is that my attention was so com-
pletely absorbed by our visit to an apartment which is well
named " La Chambre des Martyres." To this we were con-
ducted by a young student who was near the point of gradua-
tion. Bodies of murdered missionaries, or some remnants of
their bones, or some of their blood-stained garments, lay
covered in glass cases and cherished as the richest treasures
which this institute had to show. The young student who
acted as our guide gave the history of these treasures. His
eyes glittered as he recounted their success in the work of
conversion, with its dangers and glorious fruits. But his mouth
was wreathed with smiles of joy when he told the glory of
their martyrdom, and of his own hopes to follow in their foot-
steps and, like them, to shed his blood for Christ. One of
these had been a companion of his in the seminary, who had
stood with him in that same room a year or two earlier. The
seminary had succeeded in securing nothing of his remains save
the head. The young man took this in his hands and fondled
it and kissed it with the greatest affection. We were all
moved at the sight of this. Father Hafkenscheid knew human
nature too well to make many words of comment. He gazed
at us all most earnestly, but all he said was :

" My Fathers and my Brothers, this is a good lesson for
us. I think we have not got so far as this yet."

CRAWFORD'S latest work* is a romance of the
second Crusade, and we can recommend it upon the
whole, though there are defects of a very grave
character both in the local and historical coloring,
and in the conception of individual character and in
the understanding of moral movements.

The book opens with a scene of early May in the year
1145; time, sunset. The lady of the Manor of Stoke Regis, in
Hertfordshire, is walking in the little garden of the castle. As
a preliminary we may say Mr. Crawford is hardly correct in
speaking of a manor as if it were a building ; accordingly we
have changed his text so as to make the " garden " appurte-
nant to the castle and not to the manor, as lawyers would say.
In fact, though there might be, by straining, etymological author-
ity for his use of the word manor,f it really means the lands
and jurisdiction of a lord, and we the more decidedly criticise
our author because we have remarked that Scott alone is free
from mistakes of this kind.

The hero, Gilbert Warde, is moulded by great trials to the
fashion of a Christian hero. Suffering and temptation are the
forces which strengthen and determine his character. In him
the success of the author is signal ; and he owes this success
to the unfailing application of intelligible motives to the pro-
duction of the acts which form character. Simplicity and purity
are the strength of the conception, and from them the noble
wisdom proceeds which governs the hero's conduct in diffi-
culties where craft and mere worldly experience would afford
no safe guidance. To do the right regardless of consequences
is the principle which leads out from every perplexity ; and so
natural is the relation between the principle and its result that
not for a single moment is there a strain, or a wrench, or a
disproportion.

Queen Eleanor's love for Gilbert affords the means for
offering a new and a somewhat elaborate study of the charac-

* Via Crucis. By Francis Marion Crawford. New York and London : The Macmillan
Company. t Manoir mansion.

I8Q9-1 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 421

ter of the woman who had been the wife of Louis VII. and
became the wife of Henry II., bringing to the latter the vast
possessions which made him lord of a third of France when
he was King of England. In the book we have this Planta-
genet, a boy from twelve to fourteen years of age, manifesting
towards this beautiful woman all the passion of manhood.

The disposition and the moods, the accomplishments and
the strength of will, the inexorable cruelty and the strange
generosity of Eleanor form a conception difficult to be worked
into harmony with her relations towards those around her.
The strain of blood is a factor in the author's psychology;
and the inferences go forward and backward with an impar-
tiality which may be inferentially probable, though never used
by historians in forming estimates of character. Retroactive
heredity, if not a paradox or a bull, is complicated by the
consideration of foreign elements. At the same time she is
made very interesting. The ferocious contempt for her hus-
band or, as she calls him, the monk ; the alternations of defi-
ance and admiration with which she regards St. Bernard; the
enthusiasm and cynicism, moods of ice and moods of fire, with
which she joins in the Crusade ; the cruel and unholy love for
Gilbert, gradually purifying and elevating itself into a passion
of the intellect, lofty and intense, are traced for us with the
power of a master. ,

There are certain tricks of what we may call psycho-physi-
cal determinism which we regret Mr. Crawford has not left to
Balzac and Miss Braddon. The unutterable cruelty which is
presented in persons of delicate organization, or in persons
whose forms and complexions are usually associated with all
that is softest and gentlest, is too evident a bidding for sur-
prise to be legitimate art. Certain fanciful students of Shak-
spere Hazlitt, even Goethe, among others draw in words
some of his gallery from the minutiae of self-revelation instead
of from the differentiating qualities, and these together with
all else that constitutes the embodiment of imagination ; but
this, at least, has the merit of comment, even though unsatisfy-
ing comment. The other course has no justification in nature,
for it simply resolves itself into the position that a Raphael
face is not the outside of an angel of light but of darkness.

For a conversation between the spirit of this world and of
the world to come we have in the scene in which St. Bernard
and Queen Eleanor are the speakers the display of powers we
had already noticed in Mr. Crawford. The monk, conscious
that his responsibilities in connection with the Crusade and his

422 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

powers were limited, refused to lead it like Peter the Hermit.
That he should do so was the request, if not the command, of
Eleanor. " No, madam, I will not go with you. ... I am
unfit to be a leader of armies." She, however, insisted, and as
they proceeded he said : <4 When an army has lost faith it is
already beaten." To which she retorted: "As when love dies,
contempt and hatred take its place."

Then the scene of Christmas Eve in the camp near Nicaea,
as Gilbert and his attendant walked from tent to tent in the
late hour, is a miniature of the world-wide rule of the church
and the union of the races and languages of the earth under
her sway; a reflection, too, of the influence of the world upon
the church's influence in affecting life. Revelry in one place
or another, devotion in one place or another, vice almost
brazen in the wanderer's sight, and in a moment later a tent
is passed where knight and squire and groom wait in prayer or
welcome with the chanting of hymns the birth of the Lord as
the stars climb the purple night.

The composition is Mr. Crawford's best. There are long pas-
sages equal to the finest in Ave Roma Immortalis ! his dialogue
is always clear, natural, witty, vivacious everything that the
person speaking, and the subject, the place and time demand.
We are by no means satisfied with his historical impressions ;
they are too often without perspective ; but we are ready to
give him credit for a desire to make himself acquainted with
facts and their relation to the character of men and the knowl-
edge of the time. We do not think he has been assisted by
the authors he consulted ; the sciolism of the nineteenth cen-
tury appears to be the whole field of thought. Why, even the
stupendous mendacity that the Greeks were justified in betray-
ing the Crusaders seems adopted by him, and the exploded
injustice that the Crusades were a blank, aimless waste of blood
and treasure appears to be cherished by him. Even with these
drawbacks we pronounce this novel one of the best produced
since Scott.

The Ralstons* \ a novel in which Mr. Marion Crawford en-
deavors to put before us the moral and religious aspects of this
age, as in Via Cruets he tried to reproduce those of the twelfth
century. It is plain enough that he is at home with a certain
class with those who are called cultured people ; we do not
mean cultivated people, but those persons who are in easy
circumstances, and to whom the pulpit is Mecca and the

* The Ralstons. By Francis Marion Crawford. New York and London : The Macmillan
Company.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 423

fashionable or scientific magazine the leaves of Gabriel edited
by the prophet.

A novel of a very different kind is /anice Meredith, by Paul
Leicester Ford.* It is a tale of the Revolutionary War, and
a very good one too. Mr. Ford has made himself well ac-
quainted with the " costume " of his time, which is not merely
the clothes and the wigs of macaronis, but the whole setting
of the colonial life on the eve of the revolt, and the prejudices
inseparable from social distinctions. Charles Fownes, a " re-
demptioner," becomes the bond servant of a New Jersey gen-
tleman, Squire Meredith, and we immediately see there is a
mystery about him. Squire Meredith is an uncompromising old
Tory ; even the kindness and courtesy of Washington cannot
shake his loyalty. He is very impulsive and given to swearing.
The latter habit is a great offence to his wife, who belongs to
a severe school of Predestinarianism, and is accordingly most
anxious that no one shall deserve hell, though he may not
escape it.

The minor characters are very well conceived, and entertain-
ing in their own way. Squire Hennion, who is beyond belief
hypocritical, finally meets his deserts while communicating
information to the British leaders. We meet the British offi-
cers, for whom the author seems to have a liking ; while the
character of that man whom Byron called the Cincinnatus of
the West stands out amid the varying fortunes of the war, the
manifold treacheries, the desertions, the calumnies of all who
should have sustained him, stands forth fixed like the north
star, strong and luminous; and so saying we recommend Mr.
Ford's very admirable novel to our readers.

The Blue Lady of Miss Nixon's story f is the Virgin
Mother, and her knight is a little school-boy who is converted
to the church. The story of how the conversion came about
is well told, and so presented as to win the interest and sym-
pathy of child-readers. There is not a little good taste as well
as that refined feeling that can come only from a writer of
high culture.

Dr. Roark's former book on Psychology in Education was in-
tended as a foundation for pedagogy. In the present volume \
he attempts to develop in detail the applications of ps> chol-
ogy to the work of teaching. He admits that courses of study

* Janice Meredith. By Paul Leicester Ford. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.
t The Blue Lady's Knight. By Mary F. Nixon. St. Louis : B. Herder.
% Met hod in Education: A text-book for Teachers. By R uric N. Roark, Ph.D. New
York : The American Book Company.

424 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

should rest, to some extent, upon a sociological basis, taking
into account, also, the mind and body and the laws of physical
and mental growth.

Religion as a factor in character-building is not mentioned.
Dr. Roark could get some valuable information on this point
from the Catholic parish schools to complete his system of
pedagogy. In other respects his book contains a large fund
of expert knowledge on many questions that have been under
discussion in the educational journals.

Words below the Third Reader are omitted in The Stu-
dent's Standard Speller.* Much attention is given to the plan
of associating the spelling of words with their common roots,
especially those derived from Latin, Greek, and Anglo-Saxon
sources. The omission of diacritical marks is a noticeable fea-
ture. For dictionary use a knowledge of such marks is needed
by advanced pupils. Among small children pronunciation is
learned chiefly by imitation. The average man rarely consults
any dictionary. This spelling-book contains ten thousand
words, and would be of great assistance in aiding the parents
at home to revive their own knowledge and give an excellent

drill to the children.

I. "WHAT IS LIBERALISM ? "f

In the flowing style of a practised American journalist Mr.
Fallen has here given us the fierce attack of a Spanish writer
on European ecclesiastical Liberalism, interspersing many re-
marks of his own, applicable, he trusts, to home conditions.
We are sorry that he has not availed himself of the candid,
though confessedly awkward, expedient of quotation marks, to
distinguish the double authorship of the little volume, every
part of which, as it stands, may be attributed to both or either
of the names on the title-page.

Mr. Fallen utters some fierce warnings against the minimiz-
ing of doctrine and the mitigating of discipline, and what warn-
ings can be too emphatic against such bad tendencies? But we
venture to administer to him a fraternal admonition for totally
ignoring the Holy Father's Letter to Cardinal Gibbons, whose
opening paragraphs so severely condemn all minimizing and
mitigating in religious matters. Why omit even to name the
Testem benevolentice in a book which treats of the very matter
covered so recently by the Pope's supreme authority?

* The Student's Standard Speller : A drill book in orthography and dictation. By
E. P. Maxwell. New York : Potter & Putnam Co.

f What is Liberalism ? Englished and adapted from the Spanish of Dr. Don Felix Sarda
y Salvany. By Conde B. Pallen, Ph.D., LL.D. St. Louis : B. Herder.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 425

Religious Liberalism is mainly an error, or set of errors, of
continental Europe, whose Catholicity is badly in need of Ro-
manizing, using the word in the Roman-American sense that
is to say, it needs implicit and unreserved acceptance of all
Roman teaching. That some trace of this evil may be found
in the English-speaking nations is doubtless true, though it is
too slight to be classified among our main difficulties. That
there is real danger of its increase is, however, obvious from
the character of our environment, so full of error and scepti-
cism, a danger which is fortunately amply guarded against by
the vigilance of our bishops and clergy, so lately reinforced by
the Letter of Leo XIII. We thank God that Liberalism, as
the word is used by Mr. Fallen, has little prevalence here.
Take a test. The average American Catholic, sojourning or
travelling in Catholic Europe, is notoriously surer to practise
his faith courageously, from the Friday abstinence to the first
Friday Communion, than the average Catholic from Italy,
France, or Spain is likely to do while tarrying in English-
speaking countries. A similar statement may be made as to re-
spect for and obedience to the pope, bishops, and clergy of the
church.

Mr. Fallen (or his Spanish original) has some excellent re-
marks about the impinging of naturalism (akin to Liberalism)
upon true Catholic devotion, as not seldom noticed among de-
vout people : " Piety itself does not escape the action of this
pernicious naturalistic principle ; it converts it into pietism
that is to say, into a parody of true piety, as is painfully seen
in the pious practices of so many people who seek in their de-
votions only the sentimental emotions of which they themselves
are able to be the source. They are devout over themselves,
worshipping their own little sentiments and offering incense to
idols graven after their own image. This is simply spiritual
sensualism, and nothing else. Thus we see in our day in so
many souls the degeneration of Christian asceticism which is
the purification of the heart by the repression of the appetites,
and the falsification of Christian mysticism, which is neither
emotion, nor interior consolation, nor any other epicurean foible
of human sentiment, but union with God through a supernatural
love for him and through absolute submission to his holy will"
(p. 45-6). Our author is quite safe in writing such true and hard
words, but there are others who would write them only at
their peril. Words like these have before now been condemned
by Catholic journals as smacking of Liberalism, and even of
pietism nay, of Americanism.

426 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec.,

We must also praise some very well expressed views in
this book on the different forms of government as related to
the church and faith of Christ, given on pages 65 and 66,
which seem to us to voice the Catholic mind very adequately,
and are a plain echo of one of the present Pontiff's great
encyclicals, "The Christian State."

We reluctantly pen our protest against Mr. Fallen's violent
language in condemning his erring Catholic brethren, or even
our deluded but well-meaning non-Catholics. If the Roman
Index warned the Spanish writer, mentioned by our author,
against personal abuse and extravagantly violent language,
what would the same tribunal say of such terms as " Liberal
reptiles," " perverse Catholics [who] serve the devil," " tainted
Catholics," etc. ? The author alleges in excuse the custom
of the saints, those in Scripture and others out of it. But,
says St. Francis de Sales, " these were great souls, who
could well handle their passions and regulate their anger, but
we, who are, all of us, but common little people, have no such
power over our movements." St. Francis then quotes an ad-
monition from St. Denis to one of his followers: "'We in no
sort approve your impetuosities (to which an indiscreet zeal
urged you) though you should a thousand times recall Phenees
and Elias ; for similar words did not please Jesus Christ, when
said to him by his disciples, who were not yet made partakers
of that sweet and benign Spirit/ ' (Love of God, Bk. x. ch.
xvi.)

We also venture to suspect that Mr. Pallen, in putting his
lips to the Spanish trumpet to swell its blast of woe, has
imagined our conditions to be what the poor Spaniard's are.
He is like the Englishman in New York, who reading in the
paper that it was raining in London, went out into the sun-
shiny American streets with his mackintosh and rubbers and
his umbrella, and with his trousers turned up.

2. THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE IN THE UNITED STATES.*

Six years of popularity, the best approval of any book, has
made Dr. S. B. Smith's volume a standard work on the all-
important theme of the Marriage Process in the United States.
It is due to acknowledge the indebtedness under which the
church in America has been laid. Year by year the need for
the work is enhanced by the rapid modification of Catholic
social life, incident to the increasing prosperity of our people.

* The Marriage Process in the United States. By Rev. S. B. Smith, D.D. New York :
Benziger Brothers.

1899-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 427

The day is already dawning when the Catholic element shall
preponderate in American society, when the extant uncertainty
of that society concerning the marriage bond shall be momen-
tarily and intimately confronted by the stern inflexibility of
the Catholic standard. This shall be only at the price of un-
tiring ecclesiastical vigilance, for the new complexion of the
times means new restiveness of the socially progressive laity.
For how can they bear with equanimity a yoke which their
partners in social prominence have long ignored ? Yet the
yoke must be borne with more than equanimity with enthu-
siasm ; for, as ever, the true Catholic is a witness to higher
things. The problem is unhappily not confined to the beau
monde. Marital difficulties are as ubiquitous as marital con-
tentment is rare. And the constant stream of immigration by
no means clarifies the problem. The priest must have the in-
tricacies of marriage legislation at ready command if he is to
perform the simplest routine of parish or mission duty. Un-
versed in marriage laws, he cannot hope to effect even the
beginning of an influence upon the social tendencies which
mark the century's close. In this instance Dryasdust is your
only reliable pioneer.

Dr. Smith's work is at once thoroughly comprehensive and
readily accessible. Marriage, its nature and essential elements,
the nature and various kinds of diriment impediments, the
personnel and organization of the court, the contending parties
and their assistants, proofs and processes for annulment, the
consecutive steps of the trial, execution of sentence, settlement
of costs, remedies against unjust sentences under these and
similar headings he places the whole of the vexed question
before the reader, who will be no less entertained if curious
than edified if hard pressed for instruction. That the book is
in English is as desirable for the spiritual director as that sig-
nal-lamps should be undimmed on the railway at night. Pre-
cise information, instruction at first hand, is too indispensable
for the busy man to be for ever paying toll at the Milvian
Bridge. At first inspection, the English of the book has even
a greater merit it secures to the layman an understanding of
his position which must at times prove an invaluable safeguard
to his fortunes even after he has confided himself to the eccle-
siastical court. It were better still that he familiarize himself
with the book before embarking upon wedlock's troubled sea.
How many hearts to-day lie broken and bleeding for lack of
Dr. Smith's timely instructions !

THE Anno Sancto, the Holy Year of 1900, will
be inaugurated on Christmas Eve by the opening
of the Holy Door of St. Peter's. The great year
of Jubilee will have for its purpose the glorification of the
triumphs of the Cross during the past century. It is good to
stand on the mountain top to which we have laboriously
climbed and look back over the road we have come, and then
turn about and look into the future.

Mallock, in one of those luminous articles'* in which he
seems to have searched into the inner relations of the deepest
movements of the age, discusses the intellectual future of
Catholicism. He maintains that the Catholic Church holds the
key to the present religious problem. Protestantism, which
looked to the Bible as a chart to guide its course, through the
destructive work of Higher Criticism is left floating helplessly
on the high seas without any means of taking its bearings.
Catholicism, inasmuch as it alone claims infallible authority, can
safely guide the souls of men to a safe haven. The article is
well worthy of careful perusal.

The most important national event of the month is the
partition of Samoa. The present arrangement gives to the
United States three islands and the magnificent deep, land-
locked harbor of Pago-Pago. The utility of this half-way
haven on the route to Australia and the Far East as a coaling
station, as well as a naval depot, is immeasurable. The fact
that the Far East is going to be the arena of the World's
strivings during the next quarter of a century makes the pres-
ent settlement an item of national importance. In the natives
of the islands we shall find a docile and submissive people,
educated far above the state of savagery and especially pro-
gressive on the question of religion. Mataafa is a good Catho-
lic, and there are sisterhoods, with nuns of the native tribes,
teaching schools.

^Nineteenth Century, November.

1899-] EDITORIAL NOTES. 429

Attention is called to a letter printed on the Publisher's
Page pleading for the people of the rural districts. The more
thoughtful men in the church are thoroughly aroused to the
fact that not enough is done for the people who live at a dis-
tance from church and priest. It is among this class that the
Catholic Church is not gaining, because the instrumentalities of
our religion are not able to reach them. If the priest does not
go among them, there seems to be no other means of getting at
them in order to keep alive the light of faith. If the " cate-
chist " movement were introduced in these distant places, it
would, to some extent, supply the deficiencies of the priest.
The " catechist " is one selected by the priest within whose
jurisdiction the place is, to represent him to the people when
he cannot be there, to gather them for some prayers, to teach
the children the catechism, to read a duly authorized sermon,
and in many other ways to supply such spiritual nutriment as
may be necessary to keep faith and devotion alive. Such a
one can be to a small congregation all that any Protestant
minister is to his people and more, for he will have the great
organization of the church behind him.

430 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Dec.,

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

A COMMITTEE of the board of trustees of the New York Public Library,
combining the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden foundations, was appointed
November 10, 1897,10 consider the expediency of bringing all the libraries of the
city under one administration. The leading member of this committee, Andrew
H. Green, has been an earnest advocate of the proposed consolidation. A recent
statement of his far-reaching plans is here given for the consideration of the
managers of parish libraries.

In 1892 Governor Tilden left about $6,000,000 for a public library, compre-
hending in his intention scientific institutions. Certain persons instituted pro-
ceedings to destroy his will, and finally the court, by a decision of four to three,
declared the trust void. There were two judges of the Supreme Court and three
of the Court of Appeals who considered the will valid. When the will by which
Governor Tilden gave $6,000,000 to a library was declared invalid, the Tilden
Trust saved about $2,000,000 by an arrangement which was inadequate for the
establishment of such a library as New York should have, and I addressed to
my co-trustees a paper in 1892, in which I said :

" Nothing short of the most capacious scheme that can be devised for sup-
plying the needs of a large city both with a library furnished with the most effi-
cient means of interchange and distribution and of enlistment of the popular
interest will at all answer the requirements of this day and age. And to these
may be added the propriety and the necessity of the most ample consideration
and accommodation of those who are pursuing the interests of science."

It seemed to me that instead of establishing a library with a comparatively
small amount of money, it would be best to consolidate the libraries of the city,
and that was the basis of the consolidation of the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden
libraries. Appended to my communication was a list of all the libraries in the
city, to facilitate the question of bringing them together not only for reference
but for distribution.

I would have one central depository and establish branches all over the city.
At the central depository should be kept the costly works of reference, accessible
only to scholars or the comparatively few who would wish to consult them.
Radiating from there would be branch libraries all over the city.

What should the Tilden Trust do if it had at its disposal the sum that
Governor Tilden intended it should have, and of which it had, in his view, been
unjustly deprived ? Manifestly so to cast its programme as not to interfere with
but rather increase the efficiency of library plants already in operation. First,
a chief seat of administration and depository of collections located with reference
to the public convenience and to a continuous requirement of increased space
for storage ; second, a system of district auxiliaries or branch libraries established
at points readily accessible to the people of the respective districts; and third,
the means of prompt circulation and delivery of books, and of quick communica-
tion between the chief administrative offices and the branches. These libraries
throughout the city, each with a general assortment of books such as are ordin-
arily in request, could provide reading rooms supplied with newspapers and popu-

1 899.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 431

lar magazines, and it might come about that in certain school-houses, stores, or
other convenient places lesser delivery and exchange depositories might be
established with advantage. A thoroughly well devised system of circulation
and transmission of books by vehicles or by electrical process would be essential
to the effective working of the proposed system, and it should be practicable
that one calling for a volume at any branch library if it should happen not to be
there could have it put there by a telephone call in a few minutes. Volumes
from the reference library, which were not permitted to be taken home for read-
ing, might be transmitted from the main library to be consulted at any branch.

Before the meeting of the Board of Estimate, Controller Coler lately urged
the consideration of this plan. The subject was discussed and the evident will-
ingness of the several libraries to amalgamate so encouraged the controller
that after the meeting he said that he believed the work of union would be well
under way before the end of the present administration.

At present there are some twenty-five libraries receiving aid from the city.
Under a State law these institutions may apply to the Board of Estimate for
appropriations amounting to ten cents a year for each volume circulated. Mr.
Coler's plan is for the amalgamation with the New York Public Library of all
the libraries on Manhattan Island which receive support from the city, with a
similar centralizing movement in each of the boroughs. Already this plan is in
operation in Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Public Library is absorbing the
smaller libraries. It is not expected that the carrying out of this plan will con-
duce to a great saving of money, at least immediately ; but it will increase the
efficiency of the service by tending to place libraries in neighborhoods where
they are needed, and by lessening competition. In many localities there are
libraries which compete with each other, virtually covering the same ground
twice, while, on the other hand, there are neighborhoods which are entirely
without libraries.

The majority of our citizens are not aware that the free circulating libraries
are supported mainly by the city. As a matter of fact, it is the city's money
which keeps most of them going. The libraries maintained for philanthropic
purposes would be willing in most cases to co-operate with the New York
Public Library. These libraries would naturally be continued as distributing
agencies, except in cases where there were more libraries in a territory than the
population warranted. In such cases the plant could be moved to other locali-
ties. It is to systematize this good work, rather than to reduce expenses, that
this plan has been proposed, though ultimately a saving of money can be
effected.

During the hearing, at which the representatives of at least twenty libraries
were present, the latter were asked as to their sentiments in regard to the possi-
ble union of all publicly supported libraries. Ex-Judge William M. K. Olcott,
who appeared for St. Agnes's Free Library, replied that he thought the ab-
sorption would serve a good purpose, and ex-Judge Henry E. Rowland, who re-
presented the New York Free Circulating Library, said that it would be most
advisable. This system prevails in Boston, and has made the Boston Public
Library the greatest in this country.

Samuel Greenbaum, in asking for an appropriation of $5 1,000 for the Aguilar
Library an increase of $i 1,000 informed the mayor that the society had just
spent $25,000 in erecting a new building, the cost of which had been defrayed
by the society.

432 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Dec., 1899.

" Why, the city pays you five per cent, on $800,000 now," said Mayor Van
Wyck.

" I know," Mr. Greenbaum replied, " but we need the money to carry on the
work. I am heartily in favor of the controller's plan for city control."

This control to be exercised by the city should not be a dictatorship. It
should be a copartnership of public and private agencies working together for
the general good. Many advantages will result from a broad plan of utilizing
the books now gathered in the various collections of the city, so as to incorporate
them into a system that will render them more easily accessible and therefore
more widely useful. The union of these existing collections under one adminis-
tration can, to a greater or less extent, as may be agreed on by their respective
managers in many cases, be brought about, and where such union is not practi-
cable some relations can be established certain to be advantageous, preventing
the duplication of rare and expensive volumes and of special collections not gen-
erally consulted. One who desires to obtain some exceptionally peculiar volume
or collection can as well seek it in one library as another. The chief problem is
to provide material for the great number of readers. The variety of forms of
ownership of existing libraries and the terms upon which some of them are
founded may preclude the transfer of ownership of their plant unless the act
passed at the last session of the Legislature is availed of, which renders it prac-
ticable to do this where the parties can agree upon the conditions ; they can
under their existing names, if desirable, and under present conditions of owner-
ship, become branches of the main establishment and incorporated into its gen-
eral system of circulation.

* * *

We are pleased to learn that the historical romance Paul Beaumont, by Dr.
E. W. Gilliam, has been favorably received. The author has had much encour-
agement from many personal letters in praise of his book. Price one dollar ; a
liberal discount allowed for five copies. Orders may be sent direct to Dr. E. W.

Gilliam, 1538 John Street, Baltimore, Md.

* * * .

For many years the Paulist Fathers have assisted the cause of good litera-
ture in the United States, especially by the great Convention of the Apostolate
of the Press which they organized in memory of the late Father Hecker and his
work for the mission of the printed word. Likewise in THE CATHOLIC WORLD
MAGAZINE the department entitled THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION pro-
vided a convenient medium for discussing current topics concerning books and
authors. In this department the claims of Catholic authors to recognition by
the reading public have been stated in various ways since the year 1889. The
members of Catholic Reading Circles became active in disseminating the
opinions put forth in these pageSj so that now it is gratifying to observe a
general tendency to encourage the circulation of books representing the culture
and learning of Catholic writers. Every Reading Circle formed among Catholics
should endeavor to assist in this good work of cultivating a feeling of loyalty to
their own representatives in the world of letters.

The latest effort in this direction is the list of Catholic Authors published
by Houghton, Miffiin & Co., containing over thirty choice books suitable for
Christmas presents. A large discount is guaranteed to any one using the order
blank appended to the list. Copies of this list may be obtained by remitting ten
cents in postage to The Columbian Reading Union, 415 West Fifty-ninth Street,
New York City. M. C. M.

THEY FOUND THE CHII,D WITH MARY His MOTHER."

Matthew ii. n.

THE

cOutarlo

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LXX.

JANUARY, 1900.

No. 418.

ON THE TURN OF THE CENTURY.

HERE is to be celebrated throughout the Chris-
tian world during the year 1900 a Solemn Act
of Homage to our Divine Lord as King and
Saviour, and the attention of Catholics the
world over is to be drawn in a special way to
the wonderful progress that the Church has
made during -the last one hundred years. The
particular purpose that the Central Roman Com-
mittee, under the chairmanship of Cardinal Jacobini, has in
this celebration is to gather in one range of view the many
triumphs for God and humanity which the Church stands for,
in order that by a solemn act of religion there may be made
a profession of our belief in and adherence to Christ the Son
of the living God, in whose name alone we hope for salvation.
There have been many wonderful things which have pro-
foundly influenced the destinies of men, both for weal and for
woe, that date their birth during some of the eventful years of
this century; but great as they are, we cannot but consider
the welfare of the Church of God as the greatest of all. In
all ages, through her divine organization as well as through
the gifts she bears, unto men, she can easily lay claim to being
the most potent factor in the social and intellectual evolution
of man. She lifted man up from the condition of serfdom and
endowed him with both civil and religious freedom; she ele-
vated woman ; she inspired the arts ; she trained the barbarian
and taught him the highest civic virtues ; she created the
modern civilization which we enjoy. In estimating the factors

STATE OF,?/EW YORK. 1899.
VOL. LXX. 28

434 ON THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. [Jan.,

that have influenced the lives of men she must be given a
place far ahead of all the others. As there is no passion
so strong in the human heart as that of religion, she who is
the external embodiment of it has moulded and modified the
ways of men as no other power has done. In making a hasty
survey of the last one hundred years it is from her point of
view we must look, and through her eyes we must estimate
the progress of the world.

She began the century with little hope of securing many
triumphs during its course. She was down in the valley of the
shadow of death. The wise men of the world seemed to see
in her a hoary old institution, bearing with some dignity the
laurels of the past, though feebly tottering to her ruin. Judged
from worldly standards, there did not appear to be any
elements of recuperation within her bosom ; her strength was
sapped in the wrinkles and emaciation of old age. The signs
of the times were portentous. The spirit of religion had been
drowned in the streams of blood of the Revolution in France.
England and Germany, who had been nourished at the breasts
of the Church, had gone out from under her roof-tree and had
disowned her for the poisonous pastures of heresy. Russia
and the East were in decadent schism. Austria, like a spoiled
child, attempted to rule the household. Italy and Spain de-
fended their old home, but it was with many insults to their
feeble mother. Humanly speaking, there was but little hope
that the Church would ever rise from her bed of prostration
and defeat. But the ways of God are not the ways of men.
" Why have the Gentiles raged and the people devised vain
things ? " " The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes
met together against the Lord and against his Christ." " Let
us break their bonds asunder, and let us cast away their yoke
from us. He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them ; and
the Lord shall deride them. Then shall he speak to them in
his anger and trouble them in his rage. But I am appointed
king by him over Sion, his holy mountain, preaching his com-
mandments. The Lord hath said to me : Thou art my son,
this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give
thee the Gentiles for thy inheritance, and the uttermost parts
of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt rule them with a
rod of iron, and shall break them in pieces like a potter's
vessel."

The princes of the earth had raged against the Church
and the people had devised vain things, and now, after every

IQOO.] ON THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. 435

antagonist has exhausted the resources of his energies, she
has the Gentiles for her inheritance and the uttermost bounds
of the earth for her possession.

It is interesting to note, in but a cursory way, the wonder-
ful increases that have come to the Church within the last
century. The Reformation, which had drawn away the north-
ern races from the centre of unity, is now discredited in the
homes of its own followers. Probably the most pronounced
movement in the Protestant churches has for its purpose to
undo the baneful work of the sixteenth century. Ninety years
ago there were in North Germany but 6,000,000 Catholics, and
they were steeped in apathy; but the flail of persecution came
to them and awakened them from their torpor, with the result
that now they number 13,000,000. In Switzerland, the home
of Calvin, as late as 1880 the Catholic population numbered
only one-third ; to-day they are over two-fifths. In Denmark
and on the Scandinavian peninsula the revival of pre-reforma-
tion Catholicism is most remarkable. As late as 1847 ft was
comparatively unknown ; to-day it has its completed organiza-
tion, and it numbers its adherents by the thousands. In Hol-
land, where the Reformation had a profound influence, the
growth of Catholics has been from 350,000 to 1,488,352. But
the English-speaking peoples, who lead the world in commercial
enterprise and all that is known as the spirit of the age it is
among these particularly that the undoing of the Reformation
has been the more thorough. In 1800 England and Scotland
had 120,000 Catholics and only 65 priests, and were absolutely
destitute of churches, schools, ard institutions, while to-day a
cardinal-archbishop, 2 archbishops, 18 bishops, and 3, coo priests
care for the spiritual interests of more than 2,000,000 Catho-
lics. Great as these increases are, yet they are not a moiety
of the phenomenal growth of the Church within the United
States. In 1800 the combined missions of Canada and the
United States hardly numbered 400,000, while to-day there are
thirty times that number, or 12,000,000. This growth is largely
due to emigration, but there have gone with it a consolidation
of forces and an organization of energies that perfectly equip
the Church for a still more marvellous progress during the
years to come.

This growth which we have already indicated has been
largely the expansion of internal forces, but there is another
which has come through the peaceful conquest by the missionary
from the temples of the pagan gods, from the jungles of

436 ON THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. [Jan.,

fetichism, from the darkness of barbarism. These are the
noblest successes, and more than any other they manifest that
all-conquering spirit of Christ which permeates the Church. In
India the growth has been from about 475,000 souls in 1830 to
1,700,000 souls in 1900 ; while in China, in spite of the enroll-
ment of thousands of martyrs in the lists of the Church trium-
phant, there has been a growth of 400,000 native Christians.

In Africa at the beginning of the century it seemed as
though the millions of natives were perpetually to be given
over to the lowest forms of savagery, but now from the Cape
to Cairo missionaries are preaching the Gospel, and willing
hearts by thousands are accepting the sweet yoke of Christ.

Nor is the progress of the century to be measured by mere
numerical successes. There has been a wonderful deepening
and strengthening of the Faith among her own children ; and
this in spite of the atmosphere of intellectual antagonism dur-
ing the early half, and of infidelity and agnosticism during the
latter half of this period. The open-handed generosity with which
the Catholic people have cast their wealth into her lap has been
outstripped only by the largesses of the ages of faith, and
rarely if ever has any age seen such devotion to the higher
life so many of the choicest souls leaving the busy mart and
the dusty lane, and scaling the heights of the religious life
and placing on the altar of sacrifice the choicest treasures of
earth. Moreover, along with this perfect flowering of her
devotional spirit there has gone a complete co-ordination of
her intellectual forces, so that she stands in the intellectual
world as the great beacon, casting her steady light out over
the shifty waters of scepticism and rationalism, and drawing
unto her the best minds of the age and compelling from even
her enemies the acknowledgment of her intellectual strength,
vigor, and consistency.

To celebrate these triumphs in no boastful spirit, but as a
solemn profession of fealty and homage to the great Giver of
all graces, this year that we are just entering has been set
apart as The Holy Year. The Vicar of Christ has sent out an
invitation to all who may, to come to the trysting place of
Christendom, the Eternal City of Rome, and with one acclaim
send up their shouts of joy to the listening heavens.

1900.] THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 437
THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

BY REV. H. G. GANSS.

'ROBABLY not since the beginning of the Tracta-
rian Movement has the Church of England ex-
perienced a ruder shock, a more general up-
heaval, a more aggressive and determined reac-
tion, than that which is now running its course
in Great Britain, and, as a correlative force, affecting the Prot-
estant Episcopal Church in America. It is not a revolution,
though fundamental doctrines are seriously affected, and heated
words, mutual crimination, and fanatic violence have not been
wanting. It is hardly a reformation, in the accepted meaning
of the word, for England had one distressing, calamitous ex-
perience in that direction, the results of which it is now trying
to neutralize and efface. It might more appropriately be called
a religious Renaissance a supreme effort of reversion to the
discarded old Faith. The mere attempt has wrung from the
hearts of spiritual leaders the truth that, weighed in the bal-
ance of historic evidence, the English Reformation as a spir-
itual agency has proved barren ; measured by its so-called spiritual
emancipation, its boasted liberty has sunk into anarchic license ;
testing it by the heart-invigorating and soul-uplifting influence
it was expected to exercise, it has left apathy, coldness, and
unbelief in its train. This Renaissance, under the scrutiny of
closer investigation and this is a most auspicious portent
shows to the eye of faith the undying vitality of the Church
of God, and more yet, how even the apparently inappreciable
Catholic leaven, in spite of three hundred years of proscrip-
tion and persecution, could not be sterilized, and promises
again, like the leaven "hid in three measures of wheat," to fer-
ment under God's guiding providence "until the whole is
leavened."

A DAWN FULL OF HOPE AND PROMISE.

The return to Catholic doctrine, once proscribed under
penal legislation, the introduction of Catholic practices once
denounced as idolatrous, the energetic efforts made to trans-
fuse some vitalizing dogmatic consistency into its anaemic
organism, the struggle to reinstate our Lord in his dese-

438 THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. [Jan.,

crated sanctuary, and reanimate those matchless architectural
monuments of Catholic zeal and piety, the great cathedrals,
with the Divine Life all these endeavors bear the stamp of a
higher influence than mere human effort, and all show the
glinting rays of a dawn full of hope and promise. The reac-
tion in our own country a mere oscillation of that of the
old is of more recent date. Its incipient and progressive
stages can be distinctly traced in the memory of living man.
It is not as wide in extent, nor as pronounced in vigor, as
that in the mother country. This is readily accounted for.
First, on the ground that we are too much engrossed in the
hurry and push of daily life to give such matters more than
a passing attention. Principally, however, because we do not
live in environments whose very atmosphere is surcharged
with the hauntingly sacred memories of a Catholic ancestry,
where every ivy-clad ruin and sunlit cathedral spire stands
in mute eloquence, like the Pompeian sentinel, a pathetic re-
minder not only of the days of knighthood and minstrelsy,
but of the abandoned faith and vanished piety. The introduc-
tion of the surplice, the cross-crowned church, the passing of
the communion table, the substitution of the altar, the tenta-
tive employment of candles, the bolder innovation of sacer-
dotal vestments, the furtive prayers for the dead, the surrep-
titious use of holy water, the mass, the clandestine confession,
the veering from the name minister to that of priest, the
tabooing of its corporate name Protestant Episcopal, the
temerarious appropriation of the name Catholic with but a
triflingly slight accentual variation on the first syllable who
does not recount the evolution in all its timorous and covert
stages ?

A HARBOR FILLED WITH DERELICTS.

However, this movement forms but one of a number of
branches of the church, and at first sight would appear to the
uninitiated rather as a speculative study on the " philosophy
of clothes" belonging to the province of Herr Teufelsdrockh,
than of interest to the ordinary reader. The clearly defined
battle-lines of this one branch brings into bold and hostile
relief its ecclesiastical adversaries in the same church. Above
all it emphasizes and accentuates, with an overpowering sense
of conviction, the absence of unity, even uniformity, which the
logical mind must expect, and which always typifies the handi-
work of God in animate or inanimate creation, and all the

1900.] THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 439

more in his kingdom on earth the Church. The Anglican
Church and its own children shall stand up to give testimony,
the accredited servants of her sanctuary shall bear witness
that it not only lacks all homogeneity, but is a seething
cauldron of heterogeneous, irreconcilable, unassimilative ele-
ments. It is the refuge of every color and shade of religious
thought the harbor that loosely anchors every ecclesiastical
derelict that cannot find a mooring elsewhere, the inviting
beach where all the flotsam and jetsam tossed on the sea of
doubt, dissent, and negation is washed ashore. " It has re-
mained open," says Professor Allen, its leading American his-
torian, " to all tides of religious thought which have swept over
the nation ; it has been able to retain in its fold those whom
no other form of organized Christianity could tolerate."*
More trenchant and specific is the indictment of Professor
Momerie, of England. " There is not one single doctrine or
ceremony," writes this author to an American public, "in re-
gard to which the clergy are agreed. The views which they
hold are divergent oftentimes to the point of contradiction.
Some of the clergy, for instance, adopt the expiatory view of
the atonement, and believe that Christ's vicarious suffering
'satisfied the justice of God' and saved us from hell. Others
look upon this theory as no better than 'a doctrine of devils.' '
He allows the plummet of his remorseless examination to
sound the full depth of the decline of faith when he continues,
in the same article, that there "is not complete agreement
among the clergy even in regard to the value and importance
of the Christian religion ; for one well-known divine Canon
Taylor emphatically asserts the superior efficacy under certain
circumstances of the religion of Mohammed. "f Its own
thoughtful members find but scant comfort in Dr. Schaff's
delicate flattery, that the Anglican Church " has more outward
uniformity than inward unity." But in this he is flatly contra-
dicted by the official utterances of the church. " After two
hundred and eighty years," says Dr. McConnell, an authori-
tative voice in the history of the church, " the assembled
bishops of the whole Pan-Anglican Communion have recorded
their judgment that uniformity in discipline and worship is not
only not to be compelled, but not to be expected.";}: How
could this uniformity be maintained? By the Prayer Book?
But Dean Stanley said and proved " that if a literal accepta-

* The Continuity of Christian Thought, fourth edition, p. 324.

f T/ie Forum, vol. xi. pp. 302-304. \ History of the American Episcopal Church, p. 12 .

44Q THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. fJ an ->

tion of the Prayer Book were required of the priests of the
Church of England, all must come out, from the Archbishop
at Lambeth and Bishopsthorpe down to the humblest curate
in Wales and Westmoreland?"* Perhaps by falling back on
primatial decisions? The Primate of England made a deci-
sion, fresh in the memory of every reader, before promulgating
which he prudently disavowed imparting to it a legislative
character and with what result ? Canon Knox-Little, as
spokesman for a party, tells us emphatically that the . " Lam-
beth opinion cannot stand. Its inaccuracies and mistakes are
being every day more and more exposed. "f

How can we picture a unity, even uniformity, where, in the
language of one of the conspicuous figures of American Epis-
copalianism, we confronted " in one parish a celibate priest of-
ficiating in cope and chasuble, while in the next a married
priest held forth in his coat, while his wife wore the embroidered
vestment for a petticoat " ? \ How can an inquiring soul arrive
at even the dimmest perception of certitude when such a
battle-scarred and doughty champion as Dr. Littledale, with
evident irritation, informs us that the very charter of the
church's existence is " A piece of deliberately ambiguous com-
promise"? And the man threading his way through the innu-
merable sects in search of a religion, what hope is held out to
him when one of England's most illustrious sons, Lord
Chatham, recommends the Established Church because it has
a " Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian
clergy " ? How can the starved soul, tottering under the ac-
cumulating weight of doubt, find solace and repose in such
confessions of impotence as that of Principal Tulloch "that
the spirit of the church is not and never has been definite and
consistent" . . . that it is "undogmatic and adaptive "?
And when a disillusion awaits the truth-seeker who sees in
his church the One, Holy, Catholic Apostolic Church, "the
Faith handed down by the Saints," to be awakened by another
Anglican, and with a prodigious display of evidence told " that
nothing . . . can be doctrinally or historically plainer than
that the theology of the Thirty-nine Articles is the theology
of the Confession of Augsburg " ? || Even the sceptic, the
embers of whose declining faith still show fitful glimmerings,
must they not be totally extinguished when he hears one of

* Contemporary Review, vol. lix. p. 570.

t Ibid^ November, 1899, p. 656. \ McConnell, ut sup., p. n.

Luther and other Reformers, p. 340, third edition.

H Beard, The Reformation; Hibbert Lectures, 1883, pp. 315-327.

i QOO.] THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 441

the ordained ministers of the church shout from the house-
tops that " the appointed Lessons and Psalms, portions of the
Bible," listened to Sunday after Sunday, are " inhuman, inde-
cent, and false," and, playing into the hands of baldest infidelity,
deplore the fact that "the rigmarole goes on with hardly a
lifted voice to protest or demand that the Prayer Book be re-
vised " ? * And when a chivalrous attempt is made by the brave
and sincere fewf to protect and vindicate the sacred heritage of
a common Christianity, a popular preacher with churlish flip-
pancy finds the effort screamingly amusing, and with a scowl-
ing cynicism that would not have discredited Voltaire drawls,
"It interests and amuses me greatly "!:f

"AMBIGUOUS COMPROMISE" THE ONLY REFUGE.
After such public and official pronouncements, coming from
the very seats of the prophets, from the very bosom of the
church, who with any pretence to seriousness can entertain the
thought that unity or uniformity could be found in a church
which Carlyle in his unique vocabulary would describe as
"monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of chaos."
It must be borne in mind that this "voice of chaos" is not
the product of modern development, but is found and heard
in all periods of its history. What does Latimer mean when,
three centuries ago at the cradle of the Reformation, the
infant still in swaddling clothes, instead of crooning sweet
lullabies, is reproached as " a mingle-mangle, a hotch-potch
. . . partly popery and partly true religion mingled to-
gether." The language is ungracious because he himself was
one of its wet-nurses, knew its paternity, knew that the halt-
ing, indistinct, stammering speech was a congenital impedi-
ment, which even now has not yielded to centuries of treatment.
When furthermore he completes the above sentence, chiding
the royal offspring of Henry VIII. in language so coarse that
modern type would not dare reproduce it, his conduct becomes,
to use an Anglo-Saxon colloquialism, simply horrid. What
language would he employ now, seeing the theological tug-of-
war between Ritualism and Broad-Churchism, with all the other
isms as interested, amused, hilarious spectators?

A year or two ago Harold Frederic caused considerable
merriment, and some unfavorable comment, by an epigram, in
which he defines the main characteristics of the Anglican

* M. K. Schermerhorn, New York Sun, October 27, 1899. f In Church Defence.

\ New York Sun, November 24, 1899.

% Latimer' s III. Sermons preached before King Edward VI, , p. 447, Parker Soc. Publ.

442 THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. [Jan.,

Church to consist in an " irreducible minimum of dogmatic
theology and an artistic elaboration of ritual." Though verg-
ing on truth, the association of ideas certainly has not the
authority of a truism. The Ritualists disclaim such an alliance
even more vehemently than the Broad-Churchmen resent the
implied insult. The attitude of the Anglican Church here is most
perplexing. It seems singularly inconsequent, not to say inex-
plicable, that the fullest scope of thought and action should
be allowed to Broad-Churchmen, and the Ritualist be corralled
in a circumscribed limit ; that the one should enjoy the amplest
privileges of ecclesiastical citizenship, and the other be kept in
a nursing state of pupilage. It may be variously explained :
by the frictions and collisions of the latter with their bishops,
whom they are oath-bound to obey, who usually are of a
different school than themselves, and who as loyal Britons and
Conscript Fathers must look to it that the prerogatives of the
Establishment remain intact, that refractory spirits be summar-
ily dealt with, and the Protestantism of the Realm triumphantly
upheld. The Ritualists, as Bishop Wilberforce said many years
ago, were men who "with great outward asceticism were ruled
by an unmortified will." It makes the lot of a bishop most
embarrassing, vexatious, if not whimsical, to an outsider. For a
Broad-Church bishop to be told by Dr. Littledale "that every
bishop who acts as a Protestant " that is, obeys the formu-
laries " is a traitor to his order, either from ignorance or
wilful disloyalty, and is thoroughly despised by those who are
happy to use him as a tool against the church he has sworn to
obey,"* does not tend to even a bishop's peace of mind; and
we can conjecture the horror, consternation, and baffled rage
that banished the suave benignity of the Ritualistic bishop
when Dr. Arnold in contentious tone claimed that "to insist
on the necessity of episcopacy is exactly like insisting on the
necessity of circumcision. . . ."f Dean Alford celebrated
his escape from the Bishop's Bench by gleefully laying his
Greek Testament aside, preening his wings for a poetical flight,
with the result that this charming and instructive ditty re-
warded his toil :

"I'm glad I'm not a Bishop,

To have to walk in gaiters
And get my conduct pull'd about
By democratic dictators.

* Dr. Eittledale, Essays on Questions of the Djy, p. 25, 1869.
Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, by Rev. A. P. Stanley, vol. ii. p. 384.

i goo.] THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 443

From Langley down to Sodor,

From Exeter to Lincoln,
They've knots to cut, or to unite,

Would make me mad to think on."

RITUALISM IS THE CINDERELLA.

The lot of the Ritualist is even more elegiac and plaintive.
It is a continuous vacillation between conscientious scruples
and sworn duties, between shuffling evasion and reluctant obe-
dience, between stubborn contumacy and ecclesiastical censure.
Compromise is the only avenue of escape.

In the second place, though the Anglican Church " nursed
at her breasts Calvinistic Puritans, Arminian Methodists, liberal
Latitudinarians, and Romanizing Tractarians "* so, at least,
says Dr. Schaff her maternal solicitude for the latter, "like
one born out of due time," was never cordially affectionate in
fact, it savored strongly of the step-mother's love. In the mot-
ley elements constituting the Anglican household Ritualism was
and is the Cinderella. Has not the church with instinctive
horror shrunk from Popery ? Has not even the vaguely
reminiscent and dimly obscure, if they bore but the faint echo or
outline of Roma Immortalis, fallen under her maternal frown,
and the most harmless coquetry with her been rewarded by
the peremptory infliction of the "forty stripes save one"?
The divinity of our Lord may be assailed, but woe to the
malefactor who bears the odor of incense ; Holy Scripture may
be discarded as a legendary myth-book, but drastic measures
threaten the use of confession ; eternal punishment may be
remanded to the credulous, but it would, presuming its availa-
bility, be meted out to the miscreant who would suggest the
invocation of saints ; the Blessed Trinity may be rejected as a
relic of mediaeval scholasticism, but the episcopal fulmination
smites the man who will offer public prayers for the dead ; the
miraculous birth, the resurrection, the ascension of our Lord
may be explained away as the phantasmal delusions of uncul-
tivated fishermen, but censure, dire and instant, falls upon the
culprit who dips his sacrilegious finger in holy water. It would
seem what Lord Clarendon designates as the fundamental doc-
trine of the Scotch "their whole religion consists in hatred
of Popsry"f can hardly be misapplied to English Protest-
antism.

* Creeds of Christendom, vol. i. p. 593.
t Edinburgh Review, vol. xliv. p. 38.

444 THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. [Jan.,

INCONSISTENCIES OF THE RITUALISTS.

It may be remonstrated that the Ritualists battle fearlessly
and courageously, in the face of a formidable breastwork of
opposition, under continual and raking fire, at great sacrifice of
personal comfort and popularity, to counteract these crying
evils. Few Catholics, no matter what hesitancy they have in
crediting the sincerity of their convictions, impugn the purity
of their motives or underrate their spiritualizing influence.
They are usually men of piety, zeal, energy, and ability. The
results of their self-denying labors among the poor and wretched
stand in marked contrast to the obsequious truckling of their
clashing brethren to the rich and influential. All the same, in
the estimation of reflective minds in their own church, and
certainly in the estimation of all reflective minds outside of it,
their position, to put it in all charity, seems anomalous, un-
real, illogical. To imitate the Catholic Church in every rubric,
contrary to episcopal command ; to inculcate nearly all her
doctrines, thinly veneered, in direct violation of their church's
official decisions ; to copy most of her private devotions, in op-
position to the emphatic teachings of the Prayer Book ; to
masquerade in her vestments, satirized by their spiritual fathers
in the faith as " ridiculous trifles and relics of the Amorites,
. . . comical stage dresses " ; to parody (the word is u'sed
in no offensive sense) Holy Mass, the mere hearing of which,
not to mention the saying, was punished by the severest penal
inflictions*; to speak in patronizing unctuousness about the
" Roman Obedience," " Sister Church," all would be deliciously
humorous if the object involved were not ineffably sacred ; all
would be prayerfully welcomed by the devout Catholic were
the whole evolved claim not impalpable, imponderable, impossi-
ble ; all would promise the widest extension of God's Kingdom
on earth were it not that they sold their birthright, forfeited
their inheritance by disowning their Mother. The Scotsman's
prayer, " O Lord, gie us a gude conceit o' oursels," applies as
an answered prayer to those who appropriated all the above,
and then claimed it by the rights of imprescriptible inheritance.

The attitude is strange and incongruous; it baffles all charita-
ble, even serious solution. It almost unconsciously reminds

*23 Eliz. C. " What availeth it," says Cranmer, " to take away beads, pardons, pilgrim-
ages, and such other like Popery, so long as the two chief roots remain unpulled up ? ...
but the very body of the tree ... is the Popish doctrine of Transubstantiation and the
Real Presence of Christ's Flesh and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar (as they call it) and
of the Sacrifice and Oblation of the quick and the dead." (Quoted Contemp. Rev., Dec.,
1898, p. 786.)

1900.] THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 445

one of a very clever illustration made by Zangwill, in one of
his lectures on dramatic art, in which, if memory plays no
freak, he draws a distinction between art and realism. " When
I want to amuse my servant," he remarks with droll gravity,
" I send her to a play that contains a steam-engine and a
snow-storm. She can see both by looking out of the window,
but it delights her to see them in the wrong place." With no
attempt at facetiousness, is not the analogy between the ser-
vant and the Ritualist startlingly real ? He would only have to
go into the Catholic Church to see the full and sacred reality,
which he can now only grasp as a figment of the imagination ;
he could as a free agent and consistent worshipper kneel before
God's altar and participate in the holy functions there enacted,
whereas now he cannot do so unless he makes mental com-
promise, disobeys his ordinary, and performs a purely mimetic
role. " It was scarcely possible," are the indignant words of
Thomas Arnold, " that they could subscribe honestly to the
opinion of men whom they hate,"* referring to those who are
in hostile opposition to their spiritual forefathers and repudiate
and revile what they esteemed holy and sacred, and hold up
to reverence what they denounced as superstition and cursed
as idolatry.

The healthy consensus of mankind, irrespective of denomi-
national lines, has long since questioned the propriety, the
consistency we will not push the question closer of preferring
the wrong place with its factitious accessories and accompani-
ments to the Living Reality with its Divine Immanence.

Spinoza somewhere says that there are two kinds of laws :
those that appeal to reason, which are strong ; those that ap-
peal to reason and the common affections, which are invinci-
ble. Neither of these two criterions strengthen the Ritualists'
title to Catholicity. The mere arbitrary usurpation and flam-
boyant parade of a name gives as little pre-emptive right to
it as the sans-culotte's affectionate invitation to the first passer-
by, " Be my brother, or I'll cut thy throat," made him a philan-
thropist. History has rendered its verdict a verdict that still
remains irreversible after three centuries of uncontested validity
that the English Reformation, in all its intents and purposes,
was distinctly, typically, absolutely Protestant ; that in its blind,
iconoclastic fury it tried to stamp out every trace and vestige
of what it now claims as its rightful, indisputable inheritance.
Or, to borrow the language of a leading English periodical re-

* Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, by A. P. Stanley, vol. ii. p. 289.

446 THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. [Jan.,

fleeting the ripest national thought, " there was a time when
she was universally regarded as the natural leader of the
churches of the Reformation ; when the Archbishop of Canter-
bury enjoyed a kind of informal patriarchate of Protestantism ;
when ministers of foreign Protestant churches found a ready
welcome within her pale, and when no difficulty would have
been raised against their ministering in her churches."* The
verdict of history is ratified by Macaulay, Green, Hallam,
Child, Brewer, Blunt, Short every historian of weight and
trustworthiness in England. The appeal to reason vanishes
into empty pretence. The common affections of the people are
not with their church ; from the archbishop at Lambeth down to
the rustic in the most isolated shire her members are not in
sympathy with her, and would oppose the fiction of her
Catholicity by every legitimate obstacle or revolutionary force.

GULF BETWEEN PARTIES WIDENING.

The gulf between the contending and hostile branches is
daily widening and deepening, and to such a tension has it
come that many anticipate a crisis, and a crisis that will shake
the church from centre to circumference, perhaps even be fol-
lowed by disintegration. And yet, unless the unprecedented
happens, the latter contingency seems remote. An organization
which has always permitted a boundless elasticity of dogmatic
belief and a riotous liberty of ecclesiastical discipline unparal-
leled in the annals of any sect or denomination, even paraded
this comprehensive and adaptive pliancy as a birthmark, will
continue to yield. It will hardly go into ecclesiastical liquida-
tion, or dissolve the ill-assorted partnership, as long as the
principal member of the firm the English Government de-
clares regular and remunerative dividends. Dogmatic bank-
ruptcy, like moral bankruptcy, hardly entails a consequent loss
of life. u The Church of England," in the language of Profes-
sor Momerie, already quoted, " is within measurable distance
of dissolution. In fifty or a hundred years' time, unless it un-
dergoes a radical change, it will practically have ceased to
exist. There may still be an institution comprising bishops,
priests, and deacons, but it will appeal exclusively to the in-
tellectual dregs of the community, and could only, therefore,
in the bitterest irony be called a National Church." f

We hardly think this a Cassandra vaticination when the
interval during which this dissolution should occur covers the

* Contemporary Review, vol. xlvii. p. 74. t Ibid., vol. lix. p. 570.

1900.] THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 447

space of a century. Havveis, another Anglican luminary of no
small magnitude, claims " that nothing short of a frank and
radical reformation of doctrine, at least as radical as the
English Reformation, is required" in the present crisis; "all,"
he further alleges, " hear the shouting of the foe, and they bury
their heads deeper in the sand." We are unkind enough to
think that this most effective ostrich method, found so advan.
tageous during the past, will be adopted in the future. How-
ever, the smell of Transvaal smokeless powder deadens the
smell of Lambeth frankincense momentarily, and further de-
velopments may be expected after the present armistice.

One of the cleverest and most readable of English essayists,
Augustin Birrel, has his own peculiar way of looking at the
Anglican Church. " If the Ark of Peter won't hoist the Union
Jack " is his witty manner of putting it " John Bull must have
an Ark of his own, with patriotic clergy of his own manufac-
ture tugging at the oar, and with nothing foreign in the hold
save some old porter." * Abstracting from the cargo, we think
that this Ark, with its captains manacled and gagged, the crew
in a state of mutiny, the chart and compass thrown over-
board, with the tug of State towing it whither it lists, would
be a most unsafe vessel to cross the ocean of life with. Should
it ever be separated from the tug, the storm-riven, rudderless
boat would come to an early shipwreck.

It is related of the late Dr. Nevin, the leader of the Mer-
cersburg movement, whose leanings to the church were most
pronounced, and who, according to Dollinger, then in his
palmiest day, was " the only (Protestant) theologian of any
importance living in America," f that having evidently lost his
theological bearings, drifting about aimlessly, if not hopelessly,
was waited upon by some kind, well-meaning friends of the
Protestant Episcopal Church. They threw out gentle intima-
tions that a warm and hospitable welcome would await him
there. "No, gentlemen," said the stern old logician, who never
knew what a compromise with conscience was, " no, gentle-
men, if I see shipwreck is inevitable, I prefer hailing that
staunch, full-rigged, majestic vessel with the cross, keys, and
tiara on its prow, before jumping overboard and trusting my-
self to the mercy of a plank." The story may be apocryphal,
though it comes from a well-authenticated source and is char-
acteristic of the man. But it points a moral.

Carlisle, Pa.

* Res Indicates passim. f Kirche u. Kirchen, p. 327, 1861.

448 FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. [Jan.,

1900.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 449

FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON
HORSEBACK.

BY ETHEL NAST.

*UR final preparations were completed. We took
a last fond look from our balcony, hung high
over the white-domed houses of the Holy City ;
then, hurrying along the echoing corridors of
the monastery, joined the cavalcade, which was
awaiting us in the narrow street that threads its zigzag course
by the entrance of Casa Nova.

It was a motley conglomeration of horses, baggage, and
turbaned figures that choked the narrow passage and seemed
entangled in inextricable confusion, but at last the bulky
figure of Totoree, the guide, on a pack-horse, emerged from
the chaos ; after him his son and the muleteer ; then our party,
and finally the Franciscan Brother who was to accompany us
as body-guard. The listless crowd that had collected to see
us off parted to let us pass, and waving a final good-by to
our friends at the monastery, we wended our way along the
silent streets, out the Damascus gate, along the road that
leads to Nazareth.

From the brow of the hill of Scopus we turned to take a
last view of Jerusalem, crowning in embattled strength the
sacred hills. All the undying interest of that picture, with its
shimmering aureole of gilded dome and gleaming spire,
stamped itself in a life-long memory in our hearts. The day
seemed darker as its light set behind the ridge, and the dusty
road and barren hills stretched in a sombre vista of desolation
before us.

The land of Judea is indeed cursed ; the fields are sown
with stones, and the grain forced its sickly growth among them
wherever the flowers had not usurped the soil.

It was a slow, tedious march picking a footing over the
gullies and rocks that made the common highway, but the
horses, choosing their ground with instinctive accuracy, never
slipped nor stumbled.

Our first halt was at El Bireh, where tradition records that
the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, when en route for Naza-
VOL. LXX. 29

450 FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. [Jan.,

reth, first remarked the absence of Jesus, who had remained
in the Temple disputing with the Doctors.

We strolled about the wretched hovels of the village with
a retinue of half the population at our heels. They were a
friendly, picturesque lot, and by the aid of signs and excla-
mations, we managed to maintain an animated conversation.
The female members of the community wear their inheritance,
in coin, in a circle about the head, making a peculiarly effec-
tive head-dress.

We were soon in the saddle again riding along the crest of
the hill, in sight of the ancient Bethel perched on an eleva-
tion to the east. As we descended into the valley the route
was very trying, leading for a long distance through the bed
of a stream, and then a miry bottom, where we floundered
about in imminent danger of a mud bath.

Gifna was finally discerned nestling smilingly on a wooded
slope, and as the sun set sombred into a purple glow, we drew
up at the cure's house and asked for a night's lodging. It
was a rambling stone structure of two stories, built around a
court, and adjoined by the church. We were given comforta-
ble quarters, and after partaking of a hearty meal from our
stock of provisions, turned in for the night.

At five o'clock in the morning came a rousing rap, that
startled us out of the sweetest of slumbers ; but as we had a
nine hours' march before us, there was no time for delays.

An hour later we were riding over the mountains in the
brisk, cool mountain air, with the sleeping valleys far beneath
us Judea mantled in mist that lay a cold, gray shroud over
her desolation, and the verdant plains of Samaria smiling in
the flush of early spring. From time to time our way led by
a deserted khan, with a bubbling spring, whose usefulness was
mostly restricted to feeding the thirsty flowers and grasses
about its brink. Upon emerging into the valley we passed a
band of Russian pilgrims, toiling along on foot, with an occa-
sional donkey to carry the aged and infirm.

Shiloh lies off the main road in the midst of well cultivated
fields. Flowers and tendrils of every hue and variety conse-
crate the site as a shrine of loveliness ; but the ruins rise
gaunt and naked from the earth, devoid of beauty, bereft of
grandeur, affording no key-note into the past memories of the
famous place.

Noon found us amid the olive groves of Sewiha, so we ate
our luncheon under the trees, and spread our rugs in the cool

i goo.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 451

;
f

452 FROM JER USA LEM TO NA ZA RE TH ON HOR SEE A CK. [Jan.,

shade to enjoy a quiet siesta. The balmy breezes came to us
freighted with perfume from the countless wild flowers nodding
from every hillock and hollow. Our dreamy vision wandered
from their prismatic hues to the azure of the sky and the pur-
pie mountains lighting up the horizon, to the silvery gray of
the hoary branches above our heads, and the symphony of
color lulled us into dreamland.

The Great Hermon's snowy crest came in view in the
course of the afternoon, then Mount Gerizim, and after a toil-
some climb over a mountain range we rode down into the
broad plain of Mackhua, where Abraham erected an altar to
the Lord, where Jacob pitched his tents, and where Joseph
sought his brethren. The fields were covered with waving
grain, and here and there were scattered groups of merry
children and dark-eyed women clearing out the weeds. At the
extremity of the plain, where the valley of Nablous curves
around Mount Gerizim, we rode across the inheritance of
Joseph and rested at Jacob's Well. Pilgrims were coming and
going ; phantoms of past ages, back to the twilight of time,
mingled in the throng; but the mind and heart were centred
on one vision Christ seated on the brink, saying to the
woman of Samaria, " Give me to drink."

Further up the valley the tomb of Joseph lay amid the
fields, but it was growing late, so we rode direct to Nablous.
The clatter of our horses' hoofs through the streets was a sig-
nal for the attention and interest of every one within hearing
distance. Some watched us sullenly, others scowled, and an
occasional urchin threw stones in contempt, cursing, with volu-
ble eloquence, ourselves, our fathers, and forefathers back to
Adam.

We had no more than entered the monastery court when a
brace of police came and demanded our passports. We thought
they looked disappointed when they found everything in order
and had no excuse for making a disturbance. After a short
rest we joined a party of "White Fathers" from Central
Africa in a stroll through the town. Many of the streets are
dark, vaulted passages running beneath the projecting houses.
On emerging from one of them we found ourselves in a dirty,
ill-smelling court, at one end of which was a vestibule giving
ingress into the Samaritan synagogue. We were fortunate in
arriving in time to witness their peculiar rite.

The room was small and whitewashed, and the walls lined
with a'shouting, howling congregation of men and boys, robed

1900.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 453

454 FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. [Jan.,

in white, swaying their bodies back and forth, and wildly
gesticulating with head and arms. The Patriarch stood in the
centre chanting before the ancient Pentateuch, and offered the
book from time to time to be kissed. They took no heed of
our inquisitive faces peering in at the doorway, and, in fact,
seemed solely absorbed in rivalling one another in discordant
sounds and energetic movements.

The inhabitants of Nablous are noted for their fanaticism,
which finds vent in frequent outbursts against the Christians,
In a recent disturbance they mobbed the monastery, breaking
the windows and battering down the doors, and were only pre-
vented from wreaking their fury on the inmates by the timely
arrival of the soldiers.

We passed a restless night, haunted by discordant cries and
phantoms of murderous Turks, and it was with a feeling of
relief that we rode out of the sleeping town the next morning,
up the valley and across the mountains to Sebastiyeh. A
populous town crowned this site in the days of Herod the
Great, and the ruins scattered about the fields and amid the
hovels testify to its former importance. Tradition records that
St. John the Baptist was beheaded and buried where the Cru-
saders erected the present basilica on the foundations of a still
earlier one. Its dimensions and ruined magnificence contrast
strangely with the mean and sordid surroundings, and the em-
blazoned crosses on the walls are a startling background to
the turbaned Mussulmans worshipping in the shrines.

After lunching at Jeba we rode to Bethulia, the home of
Judith, rising on a fortified eminence in the plain of Sanur,
then over the difficult mountain pass, where we were obliged
to lead our horses owing to the slippery slabs of stone that
paved the route. As evening closed in around us we came to
a deep and narrow valley, intersected by a brawling stream,
and the splash of the water and the cooling shades were de-
lightfully refreshing after the unusual heat of the day.

Jenin lay at the end of the pass, and we halted for the
night at the only quarters that the place afforded a small
whitewashed building, consisting of four rooms and placarded
with five big black letters that spelled Hotel.

The beds were made as attractive as possible with white
sheets and chintz coverlets ; but experience had sapped our
faith in fair appearances, so we improvised a couch with chairs
and satchels, and rolling ourselves in the rugs, lay our weary
limbs upon them and slept the sleep of the wicked.

1900.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 455

456 FROM JER USA L EM TO NA ZA RE TH ON HORSEBA CK. [Jan.,

It was no hardship to respond to the early summons the
next morning, and by five o'clock we were cantering across the
plain of Esdrelon in the direction of Mount Hermon. We
passed through Jezrahel and saw the traditional sight of Na-
both's vineyard, that Jezabel so fatally coveted. A party of
women from the village met us on the hill-side on their way
from the spring. We were treading upon soil bearing the im-
print of a thousand stirring memories ; we were gazing on
scenes hallowed by countless associations of the bygone times;
and these women with their water-jugs filled the rdle that had
been enacted by the women of these hills from immemorial
time, revivified all that was dead and toneless in the past, and
made it a living, tangible thing that breathed with ourselves
in the sunlit present.

Rounding a spur of Mount Hermon we came to the dilapi-
dated village of Nain, and, as the heat was excessive, we rested
for an hour or two in the shade of the church commemorating
the raising to life of the widow's son. But the beautiful knoll
of Mount Thabor, gleaming in ethereal radiance in the blue
atmosphere, lured us onward across the plain, and we were
soon toiling up the steep ascent, holding on to ouf horses'
manes to avoid falling off backwards. The trail to the summit
mounted up the rocky heights in a succession of steps, worn
smooth by time and affording a precarious foot-hold. The only
habitations on the mountain are the Franciscan and Greek
monasteries, and on reaching the summit we rode to the former
through a grove of ancient oak-trees. The spacious court-yard
was enclosed by a wall, and the buildings rose on the edge of
a precipice descending in terraces to the plains.

We were hot and tired after the climb, but soon regained
our forces in the invigorating air and started for a ramble
among the ruins of the ancient churches, built by St. Helena
on the site of the Transfiguration. They cover a large area
back of the monastery. Here and there only the ground-plan
is traceable, but in some instances the walls rise to a height of
several feet. Climbing upon an elevation, we commanded a
magnificent survey of the surrounding country.

The plain of Esdrelon lay at our feet carpeted in variegated
tones of green that outlined the pastures and the fields of
grain stretching in luxuriant verdure over its vast expanse.
All about circled majestic mountains : Hermon's snowy crest,
the blue chain of Hauran from beyond the Jordan, the lofty
heights of Carmel rising from the sea. Off on the horizon,

1900.] FROM JER u SALEM TO NAZARE TH ON HORSEBA CK. 457

458 Fit OM JER u SALEM TO NA ZA RE TH ON HOR SEBA CK. [Jan.,

where land and sky meet, stretched a ribbon of light, the
blue Mediterranean, and nestling in the cup of the hills
slept the lake of Genesareth, mirroring the sky in its placid
depths. The Mount of Beatitudes raised its knoll above the
intervening heights. The Precipice of Nazareth fell sheer to
the plain, and here and there gleamed villages in the valleys and
on the mountain tops Nain and Endor and many a historic
name that bore some record of the ancient times. It was a
panorama of surpassing beauty and untold interest, that chroni-
cled some of the saddest and some of the fairest pages in the
history of mankind.

The descent of Mount Thabor on horseback was too haz-
ardous, so we were up betimes the next morning to make the
descent on foot, and reached Tiberias before the heat of the
day had set in. The ride across the rugged foot-hills was
monotonous, but at Kahr Sabt a rich and fertile valley stretched
in a charming vista before us. The ragged women and
children of the village collected about us as we wended our
way through the labyrinth of wretched hovels, and we had not
proceeded far down the hill when we were followed by a party
of eight Arabs, superbly mounted and looking more like per-
sonages from some Eastern court than inhabitants from the
village we had left. They were armed to the teeth with
knives and pistols, and rode their thoroughbreds with a match-
less grace that was enhanced by their picturesque robes and
turbans. The spokesman of the party, who knew a little
French and said he had been a Chasseur d'Afrique in the French
army, commented on the pleasure he and his companions felt
in meeting us, and hoped we would not object to their riding
in our company. We knew the repute of these people for
brigandage, and that only the preceding week a merchant
had been despoiled here of all his possessions, even to the
clothes on his back, so we gave an unwilling assent. Totore
finally adopted the ruse of resting the horses to get rid of
them, so we dismounted and they continued into the valley.
They had not proceeded far when they also dismounted. The
Franciscan, who had been a soldier and who was the only
martial figure in our party, loaded the sole pistol in our pos-
session and placed it in a conspicuous place in his belt. We
then mounted again and, to our dismay, the Arabs mounted
also as soon as they saw us, and loitered on the road until we
came up to them. They kept with us some distance up the
valley, and then, for some reason or other, either fearing we

i goo.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 459

460 FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. [Jan.,

were too well armed or had nothing worth the risk of robbing,
they finally turned back and left us to pursue our way in
peace.

At noon we found ourselves on the summit of a high ridge,
and came to a sudden halt at the first glimpse of the outlook
disclosed to view. We were high above the sea of Galilee.
How that name soothes the ear, and lingers on the lips, and
vibrates through the heart ! We repeated it over and over
again as we looked far below over the blue expanse of water, with
the encircling hills and the gleaming villages along the shores.

After an hour's steep descent we reached Tiberias and rode
at once to the monastery, situated on the water's edge, where
we ate a hurried luncheon and then prepared for the sail to
Capharnaum. The bark was roughly built, with oars for six
rowers and a curiously fashioned sail. As there was no wind
the men took to the oars, and we were soon speeding along
within a few yards of the barren shores. At Magdala a stiff
breeze blew up, created by a gap in the hills, and under full
sail we headed across the sea to Capharnaum. Owing to the
rocky beach in this vicinity we landed with difficulty and be-
gan to look around for some evidence of the former town.
Some low buildings of the Franciscan fathers cover the site,
but all ruins are buried again as soon as discovered, owing to
the difficulty with the Turkish government in regard to ex-
cavations. A record is made of each new discovery, and then
all traces are removed until the enactment of more favorable
laws.

There are some broken capitals and columns peeping out
here and there from the soil, but naught else to aid the im-
agination in picturing what Capharnaum was in the days when
Christ walked in its midst.

On our return we landed at Bethesda. It is a deserted
place, and in the evening glow seems strangely pathetic in its
loneliness. We sat on the beach gathering shells, and dreaming
all the while of the eyes that had looked upon these shores and
the foot-prints that had consecrated them.

As we drifted home in the twilight trie breezes whispered
echoes of the Voice that had sounded here, and, in the sunset
hues lighting the gloaming with a wondrous radiance, we
dreamed we saw visions of the One who had so often sailed
upon the sea, who had stilled the waves and walked upon the
waters. Then the night closed in around us and the moonlight
enshrouded all in a silvery veil. We heard again the swish of

1900.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 461

462 FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. [Jan.,

the water against the bark, the thud of the oars in the locks,
and the grating of the keel on the beach. We were back at
Tiberias. We enjoyed a magnificent prospect the next morn-
ing, mounting the hills on the way to Nazareth. After a rough
climb a high plateau was reached where the site of the Multi-
plication of the Loaves and Fishes is located, and shortly after
the road circled around the base of the Mount of Beatitudes.
Early in the forenoon Cana came in view, picturesquely situated
on the hill-slope. We drew up at the little church built in
commemoration of the Marriage Feast, and had refreshments
in the adjoining monastery. The goal of our pilgrimage was
only two hours' ride distant and we were eager to press for-
ward, so, after a short rest, we resumed the march over a
rough and difficult road, keeping expectant eyes on the ever-
widening vista for the first glimpse of Nazareth. The road
finally made a broad sweep around the ridge, and there, in an
amphitheatre of mountains, lay the little town, with its white
houses clinging to the slopes, and its narrow streets radiating
over the plateau. We descended in a zigzag course and en-
tered the village by the Fountain of the Blessed Virgin. Num-
bers of women were congregated there gossiping with one an-
other as they filled their water-jugs. This is the only spring
in Nazareth, and the scene we looked upon has been daily re-
hearsed during the hundreds of years that the village has been
clustered about its life-giving source. But for ourselves, to
mar the reality, it might just as well have been in the days of
the Holy Family, and the Blessed Virgin herself among the
throng filling her water-jug to quench the thirst of Jesus and
Joseph at work in the carpenter shop a short distance up the
road.

A large new building for the pilgrims is being built, but
we were lodged in the old house, a picturesque stone structure
with rooms opening on a veranda that looked down upon a
bright stone-paved court where plants were grouped around a
splashing fountain.

That afternoon we ransacked every nook and corner of the
little town, knowing we were treading in the foot-prints of
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph ; for how often must not the avoca-
tions of their daily lives have blessed the ways and by-ways
with their presence! A beautiful church rises on the site of
the Annunciation and another over the workshop of St. Joseph.
Not far off, in a crooked little street, is the synagogue where
our Lord taught the Jews, and from whence they dragged

1900.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 463

464 FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. [Jan.,

him forth to cast him over the precipice to the north of the
town.

We could have whiled away many a happy day in Nazareth
but the boat that was to take us to Syria was almost due, so
we left for Haifa the next morning. It took hours to reach the
plain from our lofty situation in the mountains. By noon we
were among the foot-hills and ate our last luncheon amid the
olive groves, then rode along the verdant plain, through marshy
bottoms and richly cultivated lands, to the sea.

We did not delay in Haifa, but rode at once up the heights
of Carmel to the monastery crowning the summit. The moun-
tain juts far into the sea and commands a wide survey of the
surrounding country and historic coasts. We spent a delight-
ful hour or so roaming along the ridge gathering the wild
flowers for which Carmel is famed, then repaired to the little
chapel in the grotto of the prophet Elias and recited the " Te
Deum " in thanksgiving for our successful pilgrimage.

That night, at 9 o'clock, our ship weighed anchor and steered
for the open sea. We sat out on deck in the starlight, watch-
ing the shores round into bold promontory and curving bay,
till the outlines grew dimmer and the shadows deepened, and
all semblance of form dissolved in the mist ; then the sea and
sky met and the Holy Land lay beyond our horizon. But its
spirit abided with us and enriched our lives with a legacy of
precious memories that treasured a harvest of blessings for the
coming years.

1900.] FROM JERUSALEM TO NAZARETH ON HORSEBACK. 465

VOL. LXX. 30

466 A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan.,

A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY.

BY JAMES J. WALSH, PH.D., M.D.

HEN, some time towards the close of the next
century perhaps, the accounts of the Nineteenth
Century with the race shall be definitely made
up, it will be found that the intellectual activity
devoted to biological science represents the
largest item of the century's credit with mankind for this im-
portant period. Especially will this be true of the last fifty
years. In general this is beginning to be realized already.
Much of the thought of the time is cast in a biological mould.
Words and phrases from biology are finding their way not
only into distantly kindred scientific subjects, but into general
literature. Not only are illustrations borrowed, but allusions
are made which assume that, practically, every reader is familiar
with the elements of biology, and that the terms, at least, of the
great problems of biological science no one with pretences to
culture can afford to be entirely ignorant of.

BIOLOGICAL TERMS IN COMMON LIFE.

Of course this view of the all-pervading influence of biology
is apt to be set down as the dream, and perhaps the desire,
of the enthusiast, rather than as the calm opinion of the im-
partial observer. Even a passing glance, however, at some of
the biological elements that have found their way into every-
day speech will serve to show, I think, what good grounds
there are for the claim. Such phrases as " the struggle for
life," " the survival of the fittest," " natural and sexual selec-
tion," " atavism," "crossed and direct heredity," "hereditary
transmission," " environment," "parallelism," "altruism," " adap-
tation," and the like, though technical terms of very special
significance, have become current coin of the realm wherever
our English tongue is spoken. Even such words as ontogeny
and phylogeny, abiogenesis, physiogenesis, kinetogenesis, and
the like, have a definite meaning for many who have no pre-
tence to any special biological knowledge. The names of Dar-
win, Wallace, Huxley, and Haeckel, to say nothing of lesser
lights, have become universally familiar, because of the wide-
spread interest in biological problems.

i goo.] A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. 467

There is besides this a wealth of allusion to biological prin-
ciples and theories in the current thought and poetry of our
time, that shows how the spirit of the day is influenced, though
often it maybe unconsciously, by the biology in the air. This
influence is patent not only in the works of what, for want of
a better term, we may call the scientific litterateurs, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Grant Allen, and the like, but in essentially
literary men.

"A sacred kinship I would not forego
Binds me to all that breathes,"

is Boyesen's expression of the new-found consciousness that
has come to the race in our day of a relationship in creatures
almost undreamt of before. Sometimes the biological allusion
is missed, perhaps, by the generality of readers. Surely John
Boyle O'Reilly's

" The world was made when a man was born "

was penned with the thought in mind of the biological princi-
ple that the individual, in his development, recapitulates the
history of the race in the physical as well as the moral order.
Much more of the current thought of our time is tinged in
similar fashion than those who have not seriously considered
the matter could very well imagine. Browning, always respon-
sive to the human interest of the moment, is full of oft-quoted
references to biology. Tennyson, as his admirers well know,
though in a much less degree, has been notably influenced by
the biology in the air. Lesser writers in their measure pay
their tribute to the Time-spirit, whose most characteristic ma-
terial expression would be a treatise dealing with biological
problems.

THE REALM OF BIOLOGY INVADED HER TITLE USURPED.

Biology came into her birthright among the sciences very
late. So late, in fact, that one of the daughter sciences had
usurped the name she was entitled to if, following the routine
of nomenclature, she was to be named from the Greek. For the
word biology, as has often been pointed out, fails entirely to
express etymologically the proper subject-matter of the science
it is used to designate. Aristotle used the word Bios life to
signify the social or ethical life, not life as an expression of
simple organic activity, as it is treated of in biology. He
divided Bios into the species, a life of pleasure, a life of ambi-

468 A HALF. CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan.,

tion, a life of thought. He divided Zoe, life, into the three spe-
cies, vegetable, animal, and human. This is evidently the word
that should have been selected as the root from which to
derive the term for the science of life as we have it at present,
but the word so derived, zoology, was already pre-empted when
biology came on the scene by a science that treats of only one
form of living things the animals.

When the new science of life began its real development,
just before the middle of the century, it found not only its
name pre-empted, but its proper subject-matter practically taken
from it by an invasion of physics and chemistry. The wonder-
ful development of these sciences in the early part of the
century, and the explanations their principles afforded of many
phenomena utterly incomprehensible, or at most very imper-
fectly understood before, gave birth to the thought that they
would serve to explain many of the phenomena of living things
too.

The desire to find an explanation of physiological processes
in chemical and physical laws was really father to the thought
that such principles actually did afford the explanation
wished for. On the one hand, the masters in the physical
sciences were only too willing to extend the domain of their
sciences so as to include living things. On the other hand,
very welcome support would be afforded to materialistic views
if the phenomena that occurred in living things could be re-
duced to the working of the same laws that ruled non-living
matter. The scientists of the time were infected by outspoken
tendencies to positivism and materialism, and were not back-
ward to accept theories that promised to substantiate such
views.

If life were no more than a co-ordination of chemical and
physical activities, as seemed to be demonstrated ; if even its
origin, under certain circumstances at least, were no more than
the fortuitous concourse of certain favorable physical and
chemical conditions, then biology the science of life would
occupy a very second-rate place in the scheme of the sciences.
It could scarcely be said to have an independent existence at
all. Yet between 1840 and 1860 this was just the position
that biology occupied. For, while Theodor Schwann by his
discovery, at the Catholic University of Louvain, of the essen-
tial similarity between plants and animals, inasmuch as both
were composed of ultimate elements called cells, had laid the
ground-work of modern biology as it was destined to develop,

1900.] A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. 469

he had announced at the same time his conviction that cells
might originate in certain liquids within the body, to all appear-
ance, just as crystals do in a supersaturated chemical solution.
This was, of course, to lower still further the dignity of biology,
since it was to reduce the most intimate and important vital
processes, in the ultimate elements of the physical basis of life,
to the level of the most frankly material of inorganic physical
laws.

The end was not yet in the matter of degradation for the
great science of life. At the beginning of the fifties the spon-
taneous generation controversy was opened up once more, and
for awhile raged with great bitterness. At first the upholders
of spontaneous generation had things practically all their own
way. They seemed to be able to demonstrate that no matter
what precautions were taken to destroy all life in organic in-
fusions, if these were afterwards exposed to the presence of
oxygen minute living things developed in them. Grapes were
crushed in a Torricelli vacuum, and remained sterile as long as
the vacuum remained perfect, while immediately after the ad-
mission of the smallest bubble of oxygen they begin to fer-
ment. Hay infusions after prolonged boiling seemed to de-
velop microscopic life, notwithstanding that the most careful
precautions seemed to be taken to prevent the entrance of all
germs from without. Even the origin of life then seemed to
be merely a question of the meeting of organic material and
oxygen under certain definite and not very mysterious conditions.

BIOLOGY REGAINS HER BIRTHRIGHT.

These darkest hours for biology were indeed just before a
glorious dawn. A revolution in accepted ways of thinking had
been preparing for some time from two very different sources,
neither of them directly connected with biology. Virchow, work-
ing in pathology, laid the first great foundation stone of the
importance of the science of life as such, by showing that not
even the minutest portions of living substance ever came from
anything but material already alive. Cells were not formed in
the body-juices as crystals in a solution, but were always budded
off from other cells. Omnis cellula e cellula every cell from a
preceding cell became the great axiom that revolutionized
pathology, and with it biology.

Very shortly afterwards Pasteur, a chemist whose interest
in chemistry had led him to the investigation of fermentation,
and consequently had interested him in microscopic life,

470 A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan.,

showed that spontaneous generation was an utter illusion. If
the living germs were completely destroyed in even the most
unstable organic solutions, no living thing would appear in
them afterwards, unless germs were allowed entrance from
without. The air might be admitted to such solutions with
.the greatest freedom, provided it were first filtered clear of
all living germs. It was shown by Pasteur that no very elabor-
ate apparatus was required to keep the air from sowing the
seeds of life in the organic material. The passage of the air,
admitted through a layer of cotton, was sufficient to filter it
completely of all germs of life. Even if the opening into the
vessel containing the organic solution under observation were
only fitted with a tube bent several times in reasonably large
arcs of circles, the open end of the tube being made to point
downward instead of upward, no germs reached the liquid and
no life developed, though absolutely free and direct access of
air was allowed.

These two important concessions to biology, the non-occur-
rence of spontaneous generation and the origin of cells only
from preceding cells, were but the beginning of the better
things in store for the science of life, but gave scarcely more
than an inkling of the honors that were to come in rapid suc-
cession. Pasteur had shown that fermentation was always a
biological process i. e., always due to the presence of minute
plants called ferments. For years this process had been held
up as the bright particular exemplar of the power of even the
comparatively inert oxygen of the air to work wondrous
chemical changes when the circumstances were at all favorable.
But the spell of chemical ideas, so long dominant, was at
length broken. Biology had come to claim her own. Besides
making good the claim to the explanation of vital processes
which were peculiarly hers, she was about to lay claim suc-
cessfully to a series of most important phenomena in science
that had long been conceded to be chemical or physical in
origin. In return for the invasion of her territory the newly
aroused science of life was about to make a most successful
incursion into the territory of her rivals, who had succeeded
in carrying off and retaining while she was in helpless infancy
some of the precious spoils of her family heritage.

BIOLOGICAL INVASIONS.

Biology's revenge on her step-sister sciences is the main
portion of the great advances in the science of life during the

1 900.] A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. 471

half-century that is just closing. Over three centuries ago Sir
Robert Boyle, the great chemist, of whom his notorious kins-
man, Sir Boyle Roche, the great "bullster," said very truth-
fully, if a little inconsequentially, that he was the " father
of chemistry and the brother of the Earl of Cork," made a
wonderfully prophetic remark. Like Pasteur, though a chem-
ist, Sir Robert Boyle had been very much interested in the
phenomena of fermentation, and had spent considerable time
in the investigation of the process and the search for its cause.
Needless to say, with the ill-developed scientific methods of
his day, he was not able to accomplish much in the matter.
He penetrated far enough, however, into the mystery that the
great chemist-biologist of our day was to solve, to realize that
its solution would be pregnant with suggestive helpfulness for
other equally mysterious natural processes that were baffling
science. " He who succeeds in explaining fermentation," Boyle
said, "will be in a position to throw great light on the causes
of the contagious diseases." His prophecy was absolutely ful-
filled ad literajfi. Pasteur discovered the mycoderms that set
up fermentation, and thus was drawn into the work that led
to the discovery of the germs of various diseases. Disease
had been considered for centuries, ever since Hippocrates'
time and before it, as due to an alteration in the body
humors, as they were called i. e., to a chemical change in
some of the fluids of the body. How thoroughly ingrained
this idea is, by millennial traditions, into the human mind,
may be judged from the fact that the popular judgment has
not even yet, after half a century, accepted the scientific aeti-
ology of disease, but attributes practically all disease to that
convenient scapegoat, "impure blood." This humoral patholo-
gy, finding in a dyscrasia of the systemic fluids an all-suffi-
cient reason for disease, was even accepted by such distin-
guished pathologists as Rokitansky, whose great pathologico-
anatomical work at Vienna just before the middle of the
century ushered in the new medicine. With Virchow's ground-
breaking work in cellular pathology at Berlin, and later at the
Catholic University of Wiirzburg, in Bavaria, when his politi-
cal sentiments* made it advisable for him to retire from Ber-

* He became a Social Democrat, as the Radicals are called in Germany, as the result of
medical investigations in Silesia during the famine and bread riot years, and has remained
consistently and steadfastly as a leader of that party, though it has often been hinted to him,
it is said, that a change of political sentiment would make him a persona grata at the royal,
and later at the imperial court, and probably secure him the title of Excellenz the equiva-
lent, and perhaps something more in German eyes, of the honor of knighthood in England.

472 A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan.,

lin for awhile, all the old humoral theories of disease were
superseded, chemistry lost her domination in the aetiology of
disease, and biology succeeded to her kingdom.

PHYSIOLOGY AND THERAPEUTICS TRANSFORMED.

Practically the same thing happened though it took longer
for biology to regain her own in physiology. Digestive pro-
cesses were supposed to be mainly chemical. Respiration and
absorption were considered to be the results of physical laws.
The internal vital activities by which inorganic material was
changed into the living substance that forms the physical basis
of life, was thought to be a combination of physical and
chemical processes. Now it is known that all of these im-
portant phenomena are the result of vital activity. Vitalism,
as it is called, the doctrine that behind the blind forces of
matter in the animal or vegetable system there is a great
force, the principle of life, from which all the important activi-
ties of living things flow, and without which no combination
of chemical and physical forces, however fortuitously happy,
can liberate energy in the tissues of the living body, has be-
come the most prominent feature of modern up-to-date
physiology.

Pasteur did not halt at the investigation of the cause of
disease, but went on to the study of the best methods for
its cure. It is in therapeutics above all that biology has
invaded a realm that seemed entirely given over to chemis-
try. From time immemorial it had been the custom to
believe that there existed in nature some remedy that would
cure every disease, if it were but known. The vis medicatrix
natures" nature's power to heal " so lauded by Hippocrates,
the great Father of Medicine, had come at one time to be al-
most entirely ignored. The greatest American physician of his
time, Dr. Rush, a really great clinical observer, said, just a
century ago, that "to trust to nature for help in the cure of
disease was to foster an illusion ; nature always did harm,
never good in disease." Drugs were the great auxiliaries, and
the developing science of chemistry, it was hoped, would soon
lead to the discovery of remedies for every ill.

A reaction set in after this era of pessimism with regard
to nature's curative powers and of too optimistic faith in the
all-saving virtue of drugs. This reaction degenerated into al-
most therapeutic nihilism on the part of scientific medical men
by the middle of the present century. Pasteur's discoveries

1900.] A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. 473

with regard to nature's methods in the cure of disease not only
reawakened interest in therapeutics but led to further study of
the factors that nature makes use of for the conservation of
the organism. Here a whole new world was opened up to inves-
tigation. It was soon found that in many cases what were
taken as symptoms of disease, and therefore were presumably
to be combated by every means at command, were often
really manifestations of nature's resistive reaction for the pro-
tection of the organism. Eruptions, for instance, constitute
her method of eliminating by the skin the virus of contagions.
Fever is a protective mechanism, pain a highly conservative
agent. The fact that after a contagious disease had once been
recovered from it would not, as a rule, be acquired again
showed the perfection of nature's curative methods. Biological
factors were very different to drugs in the persistence of their
influence against disease. A new era in the study of disease
and its treatment was opened up. It resulted in the splendid
discoveries of Lister, that have revolutionized surgery ; in
Pasteur's method of treatment for rabies, which is gradually
changing a great scourge of the race into a comparatively
harmless and temporary inconvenience ; in Behring and Roux's
discovery of diphtheria serum, the greatest blessing ever con-
ferred upon the race, scarcely even excepting vaccination ; all this
has aroused the highest hopes for a really scientific therapeutics.

BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION.

While these great practical advances in biology were making
there was infused into the rising science a current of thought
that was to prove of most absorbing interest, and that was to
attract the attention of all thinkers to it. Darwin and Wallace
took up a theory that had been often broached before, and
had been very ably presented by Lamarck at the beginning of
the present century the theory that all living things are de-
rived from some simple form by a process of evolution.
Darwin's and Wallace's work attracted immediate and wide-
spread attention, because their theory of evolution was sup-
ported by a series of most acute observations on the influence
of natural and sexual selection in modifying species of plants
and animals. Evolution in all its phases has since that time
come to be one of the most widely discussed of questions.
There is scarcely any thinker of our day who has not con
sidered it necessary to form or adopt some opinion on the
subject.

474 A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan.,

The first edition of Darwin's book, the Origin of Species,
was published October i, 1859, almost exactly forty years ago.
It would seem as though in that length of time some definite
conclusion must have been reached in a subject discussed as
much as evolution has been. Yet a definite position in science
can scarcely be given to the Darwinian theory even at the
present time. In view of the changes of opinion with regard
to the theory in the last twenty years one is forcibly reminded
of Huxley's almost prophetic words on the subject in 18/0.
Referring, in his address " On the coming of age of the
Origin of Species," to the storm of protest that greeted the
book on its first publication and on the reaction in its favor
that had set in afterwards, he said : " History warns us that it
is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and
to end as superstitions. As matters now stand, it is hardly
rash to anticipate that in another twenty years the new gen-
eration, educated under the influence of the present day, will
be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the Origin
of Species with as little reflection, and it may be with as little
justification, as so many of our contemporaries years ago re-
jected them."

What Huxley foresaw so clearly came to pass, but sooner
than he had anticipated. In 1890 there was in many quarters
an almost unreasoning acceptance of many parts of the Dar-
winian hypothesis that further consideration and later investi-
gation have shown to be untenable. With that pendulum-like
swing of opinion that characterizes the theoretic parts of the
physical sciences, though it is so often and so volubly insisted
that they have to do only with exact knowledge, there are
now very few that accept the Darwinian doctrines in their
entirety. The theory of sexual selection, which is the typically
Darwinian addition to the question of evolution, and which
Darwin's wonderful power of observation, amounting almost to
intuition in matters that concerned the habits of animals and
plants, did so much to make popular, is no longer considered
to have anything like the influence in causing variation that
was at one time conceded to it. Natural selection i. e., the
influence of the environment in bringing about changes in the
organism has practically eclipsed sexual selection.

In general a theory of evolution is accepted in biological
circles, but by no means the simple succession of beings that
it was at one time thought would constitute the history of the
development of life from the lowest to the highest forms.

1900.] A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. 475

Whether one species may ever be transmuted into another is
more generally doubted now than it was ten years ago. There
is a general concession that organized beings contain in them-
selves certain organs and tissues, and rudiments of organs, and
certain arrangements of these organs and tissues, that show
that they have some marvellous relationships with other organic
beings seemingly very distant from them in the scale of crea-
'tion. Embryology, the science of the growth of the organism
in its development from the single cell from which every
organism comes, until it reaches the stage in which it may
carry on an independent existence, shows that organisms in
their origins demonstrate, still more than in their perfect form,
the relationship that binds the whole 'organic creation together.
But the process of whatever evolution there may have been
remains almost as mysterious as ever. It is impossible to
trace a satisfactory genealogy for any of the lowest animals,
much less for those higher in the scale of creation. Certain
species of animals, as the horse, have their history written
large in the geological record, and some very striking facts
have been brought to light, especially here in America, by the
much-to-be-lamented Cope, which speak stronger for evolution
than any other set of facts that have been discovered. The
unearthing in our West of the many-toed, small-sized ancestor
of our present horse, and the elucidation of the factors of
natural development by which the equine race as we know it
has been evolved, is a bright particular star in the firmament
of evolutionary science.

Theory has, however, been allowed to rule scientific discus-
sions too much in the subject of evolution. As a matter of
fact, far from being able to show how species have been con-
verted into one another, we are not even able to point out a
single case of the undoubted transmission of even one acquired
character. A good many cases presumed by various observers
to be examples of such a transmission have been reported, but
all of them so far have proved to be illusions when submitted
to the judicious criticism of serious biological criteria. Medical
men still cling to the idea that acquired characters are trans-
mitted, and that, too, very commonly. A great many of the
claims now so frequent as to the heredity of predisposition to
disease, and even of disease itself, assumes that the transmission
of acquired characters is an accepted principle. As time goes
on, however, medical men have learned that at least it is not
Disease itself that is transmitted. Tuberculosis and leprosy, and

476 A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan.,

like diseases, have been removed from the category of directly-
hereditary diseases within the last few years, and the predis-
position to disease is now recognized to be rather a general
lowering of resistive vitality than a specific tendency to the
acquirement of any particular disease, or even a lack of organic
resistance to one rather than to any other disease.

Occasionally in the medical journals we meet with reports
of cases where mutilations are said to have been transmitted.
A parent who has an injured eye or finger or toe is reported
as having for offspring a child with a congenital malformation
of a corresponding part. Sometimes, as the reader of a paper
at the last meeting of the British Medical Association notes,
such a communication is followed by another from a sceptical
biologist, who in derision reports an almost similar case, in
which, however, the parent sustained the injury after, not be-
fore, the birth of the child. This brings the whole matter
very properly back to the realm of coincidences, where it
belongs. In general it may be said that this is the great crux
of the theory of evolution, the corner-stone which must be
secured before a permanent scientific edifice can be built. We
are no nearer a demonstration of the actual transmutation of
species now than we were forty years ago, when Darwin's
theory first disturbed the scientific world. On the other hand,
it must not be forgotten that forty years are not much in the
history of human knowledge and that the theory of evolution,
far from being definitely settled, is, in the opinion of present-
day biologists, only just beginning its development. Professor
Henry Osborn, of Columbia University, said not long ago :
" My last word is that we are entering the threshold of the
evolution problem, instead of standing within the portals. The
harder tasks lie before us, not behind us, and their solution
will carry us well into the twentieth century."

PRACTICAL BIOLOGY.

While the discussion of evolution has brought us very little
nearer to a definite acceptance or rejection of the theory it-
self, it has brought us important benefits in other ways. It
has brought with it a larger view in things biologic, it has
hastened the demonstration of the marvellously close relation-
ships that unite all living things, and has given us a better
realization of the laws that bind them all into a universal
whole. While biologists no longer think the beautifully reverent
thought of Agassiz, that species are the special earthly reflec-

1900.] A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. 477

tions of the divine ideas, and therefore immutable, a great spirit
of reverence has come over biological thought with the normal
advance of the science. The contemplation of the mystery of
life and of vital activities which every year becomes deeper,
and of the wonderful co-ordination and correlation that exist
among living things even when most widely separate in the
biological scale, has made the necessity for Creation clearer
and the reflection of the Creator in His works less obscure.

Beyond these advances in great fields of thought, however,
there have come from the interest aroused in biological ques-
tions by the discussion of the theory of evolution great prac-
tical benefits. Under the new dispensation of life as a mani-
festation of activity not essentially different for each form of
living being, but as a possible member of a great series of or-
ganisms closely connected and related, even the study of the
most unimportant forms of life took on a serious significance.
Pliny said long ago, without realizing all the meaning of the
phrase, " Natura nusquam magis tota quam in minimis" The
study of the smaller forms of life became one of the great oc-
cupations of the biologist, because in them the problems of the
erganic being exist in their simplest expression.

Out of this study of the smaller forms of life has come the
solution of many of the practical problems of every-day life.
The role of the insect in fertilizing plants has been of use in
agriculture. The study of the warfare between different forms
of minute life has enabled the biologist to use biological agents
to fight various pests. In California the orange scale, that
threatened to ruin a great industry, has been gotten under con-
trol by the introduction of a destroying organism. In India an
analogous triumph has been recently recorded, and the locusts
that almost annually ravage that country are being destroyed
by the distribution among the farmers of a fungus that kills
them. The methods by which Pasteur was enabled to save the
grape and wine industry and the silk industry for France were
biological, and they are being imitated in many an improve-
ment that is in course of introduction.

In medicine the study of the minuter forms of life has been
especially of service. It has not only laid bare the aetiology
of disease and opened a promising future for therapeutics, but
it has especially created the science of preventive medicine.
It is practically always biological factors that are concerned
with the spread of disease. The study of the conditions and
relations of life has led to the discovery of the microscopic

478 A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY. [Jan..

and other parasites, and made it possible to guard against
them to a certain extent at least. Biology has lifted the filtra-
tion of water out of empiricism to a level of scientific pre-
cision. Finally, the study of the various insect carriers of dis-
ease, a chapter that is only just opening up in epidemiology,
has already conferred great benefits on the race, and promises
to be of the greatest possible service, especially in tropical
medicine.

THE FUTURE OF BIOLOGY.

The outlook in biology is most promising. Already one is
apt to be startled by the business card, " Expert in Biology,"
and is tempted to wonder just what may be the subject-mat-
ter of the expertness that he hopes will be lucrative in the
commercial world. In the canning industry, however, in cheese
and butter making, in wine and beer and vinegar making, there
are lucrative opportunities for the practical biologist, and
capital is glad to avail itself of his services, nor haggle about
his compensation.

New lines of applied biology are constantly opening up,
and it promises to surpass even the industrial successes of
applied chemistry. Already patents have been issued in Ger-
many for methods of growing microbes which when planted in
the soil will store up for the use of larger plants the nitrogen
of the air in an available form. This will do away with the
necessity for expensive fertilizers, for guano and the products
of the nitrate beds of South America, which threaten exhaus-
tion. Another form of microbe has also been isolated and
patented that will convert certain forms of phosphorus salts at
present existent in the soil, but unavailable to growing plants,
into more soluble compounds that can be of agricultural value.
This will do away with the necessity for rifling battle-fields for
bones to supply phosphorus, a practice which has of late
years become very common. It is claimed that a four to five
ounce vial of microbes will suffice for an acre field, and so
replace hundreds of pounds of fertilizing material. This is not
the idle dream that it may seem, for it is well known now
that practically all the growth of larger plants is due to the
conversion of the inorganic material of the soil into certain
unstable organic compounds by the action of microscopic
organisms.

In color-making the products of microbic activity will some
day, and before very long, replace the coal-tar colors that in-

1900.]

A HALF-CENTURY IN BIOLOGY.

479

dustrial chemistry has supplied. Other microbic products there
are, such as wax, that suggest practical possibilities. In the
ripening of tobacco after it has been cut micro-organisms are
said to play a very important rtile, and the better or more
highly prized varieties of tobacco are claimed to be due rather
to the products that result from microbic activity than from
peculiarities in the plant itself, the soil, or the climate in which
it has been grown. This matter, too, is the subject of a
German patent. Spontaneous combustion is now known to be
due to microbes, and not to any exquisitely heightened pro-
cess of oxidation under special conditions. It seems far fetched
to suggest such a phenomenon as indicating a possible source
of energy, but the suggestion has been made, and stranger
things have proved true even in less progressive times than
ours.

The science of biology, though it had its origin in the
midst of theories and problems that it might seem could never
have a practical bearing, has developed into the most practical
of sciences, helpful, suggestive, even commercial, and with a
most promising outlook. The future of biology is roseate, for
as yet it is but the dawn of the science, and somewhere there
is behind the glorious day, that will prove at least as bewilder-
ingly surprising to a not distant generation as have so many of
the other sciences to ours and preceding generations. It is
not too much to say that the next great industrial revolution,
such a one as came with the introduction of steam or electric-
ity, will come in the realm of applied biology.

CfilDRn 07 CflRfl,

CDep Dace no wine/* sweet marp said,

Co CDrist of Galilee:
(CDe fairest mam tDe fairest maid,

CDe world sDall ever see !)

CDep Dave no wine/' tDe motDcr said-

4 'no wine for marriage=guest !
Son, to bride and bridegroom's aid

Paste CDou at mp bcbest ! "

mp Dour is not pet come," spake Be,

CDe Son of moiDcr maid !
WDateoer Be sDall sap, do pe!"

Co waiters marp said*

Did sDe not Deed Bis word divine,

CDat not pet eame Bis Dour?
Rap ! Bride and bridegroom laeked for wine,

find marp knew Der pow'r.

CDep Dace no wine!" SDe said no more;

Awaiting now Bis part
SDe knew tDat CDrist would not ignore

CDe praper of marp's Deart.

CDe pitcDers fill witD water!" So

Said CDrist, witD gracious sign :
'flnd carrp to tDe master!" o,

CDe water turned to w|ne !

marp, pitiful of bride

Jlnd bridegroom in tbeir deartD ;
CDrist WDO Heed, CDrist wDo died

In love for us of eartD,

?rom Dearts tDat parcD in Duman tDirst,

OasD cDalice of despair !
ove'$ wine at last, if not at first,

Concede to Cana's praper!

MINNIE GILMORE.

1900.] A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. 481

A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH.

BY KATHERINE HUGHES.

O one is eligible for membership in the Wanderers'
Club at the Canadian capital unless he has seen
a certain amount of the globe, and has grown
mentally with 'his travellings.

They say Hawkins can tell you all about
Western Africa ; Sadler knows as much about India as Kipling
does, but he rarely talks of it outside the club ; Ives-Halkett,
with whom the idea of the club originated, has been in almost
every corner of the globe in a dozen different capacities. There
are ten others on the membership roll mostly engineers, min-
ing and civil, or surveyors attached to the Geological Survey.

The club is not very well known at home ; it is by no
means a show-place for visitors. The building itself is an old-
fashioned stone one, looked down upon by all its newly-
glorious neighbors, and the principal room of the club is a
long, low, shadowy one. Seen at night through wreaths of
nebulous smoke, it leaves an indistinct picture of dusky arm-
chairs and reclining forms, with one spot of vivid color in the
glowing fire-place.

There are good stories told at the club very thin yarns
spun.

When a few evenings after Stanley Scott had come home
from an Alaskan survey, he and Tom Richardson, the political
correspondent, found themselves alone at their club, Richardson
asked the surveyor for a yarn. He was in an unusually re-
ceptive mood that night, and willing to give credence to any-
thing, he said. But Scott was in a serious mood, as he is
habitually " ponderous Scott " they call him at the club.
When he finally told his story he thought it necessary to pre-
face it with an apology to the brilliant journalist :

" It 's so far removed from a yarn, Richardson, that you
will find it awfully slow, I daresay. But my camp-fires have
always been more lonely than gay and I don't know anything
thrilling."

Richardson assured him that it was part of his profession
to listen to all sorts of stories, and that he had an infinite

VOL. LXX. 31

482

A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH.

[Jan.,

capacity for enjoying
them. Scott told the
story. Richardson
made it his own, but
he says things of that
sort aren't in his line.
That is why Scott's
story has come to be
set down by me in this
inadequate fashion.

" I 've never seen a
fire-place to compare
with this for comfort
but the one at Barclay's
trading-post at St. Ig-
nace, up North," Scott
began.

" I 've never seen
its equal; it is a genu-
ine old one.
You can seat a
...;>} neat little hunt-
..._ ing party of
four between
the jamb-stones.
We 've done it,
too, on occa-
sions Barclay
and his man and myself and my Indian.

"That's a room for a man to be happy in Barclay's den.
All rifles and pipes and skins and books what is n't j" fire-
place ! But the poor beggar says he is sick enough of it at
times."

" I daresay," Richardson said when Scott paused. " It is
one thing to visit there, and quite another to set up one's
Penates^ even such good things as pipes and rifles."

" That 's very true. Yet somehow it is always the best sort
one finds stranded there, on the hill-tops. Cultured, hospitable,
real sportsmen when they 're after game fine fellows ! "

Scott's mind did not seem to be concentrated in proper
story-telling fashion, so Richardson jogged his memory.

" Is it about Barclay you are going to tell the story ? " he
asked. '

HE WAS IN AN UNUSUALLY RECEPTIVE MOOD THAT NIGHT.

1900.]

A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH.

483

" No, it is not. It is about another man, and I don't feel
equal to the thing now that I have begun it. But here goes !
Let it come out anyway.

11 I used to feel it a red-letter day when my work brought
me to St. Ignace. Barclay always had a seat for me by the
fire-place, and I particularly enjoyed a talk with Pere Lesaint,
the Jesuit missionary there. He is the man I want to tell you
about.

"He was a man of about forty-five, with a face like like
the statues of your St. Joseph "

" * My St. Joseph'! I am afraid I haven't any more claim
on him than yourself now."

" Never mind ; you ought to have Pere Lesaint's face had
the look that must have been on the Apostles' after Pentecost.

" I really cannot tell you how that man impressed me.
The Chelsea hills can give you no idea of the Rockies' height,
nor I of him. You will understand.

" Barclay told me he was a Parisian of good family who had
left home for the missionary field. When I ran over there
with Marshall, during the Behring Sea Commission, I learned
a great deal more of him and his family. They were of the

"YOU CAN SEAT A NEAT LITTLE HUNTING PARTY OF FOUR BETWEEN THE JAMB-STONES.'

484 A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. [Jan.,

first people there, and this priest, when a young man, had
given up a career in military circles that would dazzle plain
Canadians like you and me, Tom.

" His relatives were active, influential men, and willing to
do a great deal for him.

" It was after that I picked up at the mission a piece of
a large obituary card, with an Indian hymn written in a hurried
way on the back for some one in the little choir, I suppose.

" I remembered then an impressive black-edged envelope
that had come to him with the last mail you know the mail
only goes in and out there twice a year. The array of titles
on the back of that slip of paper would have insured it safe-
keeping in the most democratic home in America in a place,
too, where a stranger would be likely to catch sight of it. It
was asking his prayers for relatives who had died in that
Parisian holocaust, the Charity Bazaar. You may remember it.

"The day he got that card I was with him, and I got a
glimpse of what he still felt for the people at home. But he
never said a word to me about it, and the next day there was
no trace of grief on his face.

" I was at St. Ignace a year ago last October. Pere Lesaint
came over to Barclay's den for a couple of hours one Sunday
evening, and we sat around the fireplace and smoked. In
seven years Barclay told me he had never spent so much time
there before. I think he felt particularly satisfied with his
Indians that day. They were putting on Christian clothes and
manners in an encouraging way. But they would have been
less than human if they hadn't, with that man devoting seven-
teen hours a day to them. If two men quarrelled, their fami-
lies asked the Praying-man to settle it ; if Taku Red Blanket
borrowed some wood from Spotted Tail's wood-pile, the mat-
ter was brought to the same tribunal ; and if Budding Leaves
called White Fawn a she-dog with eyes of fire and a heart of
serpents, the poor man had to settle that too. On week-days
he even used to go to the little school awhile each day and
teach the children morals and manners. In fact, when the
teacher left he was a roving sort of a fellow Pere Lesaint
took the whole thing on himself for some months.

" His Sundays belonged to the grown-up children. The
day I speak of Barclay and I had watched them going in and
out continually before and after the Mass and afternoon ser-
vice. I pitied him that day; a little of their company must
go a long way with a man. I know it does with me.

1 900.] A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. 485

" In front of the good logs at Barclay's that night he was
another man than I had imagined he could be. He felt our
sympathy, I am sure, and he appeared to grow younger and
stronger which he could very well afford to do. I got an
idea then of what he might have been as a man of the world,
instead of a Jesuit absorbed in saving souls. He was brilliant.
His Gallic wit was perfect, tempered with the gentle humor
you might expect in a priest. We talked mostly of his people,
for they were his world, and a score of droll things came back
to him then when he had some one to laugh with.

" A young fellow had come into the mission two months
before. He was the son of a noted medicine-man from Old
Fort Hope, an abandoned post, two hundred miles away. He
was a clever young fellow, as Indians go, and Pere Lesaint had
been very much afraid of his influence, but that day the mission-
ary's cup was filled when the young pagan came and asked to
be taken into his flock. Pere Lesaint laughed at first fears then.

*' We went over to the priest's gate with him, and it was
when we were coming back that Barclay told me he thought
Pere Lesaint would find Takwaipa as bright as quicksilver and
about as solid. He was notably 'crooked' in business matters,
Barclay said, and a man of his stamp was likely to accommo-
date his religion to his needs.

"That was the first winter I stayed North, and I turned
up at St. Ignace again at Christmas. Sak, my man, wanted
to go because his cousin was going to be married, and I easily
fell in with the idea.

" We had to cross a wide plain the last day, and we tramped
along on snow-shoes while the dogs hauled our tent and be-
longings. The winter daylight is a poor affair up there, set-
tling into darkness very quickly. The lights of the decent
little village looked like home-comfort that dingy afternoon.
My Mecca was in a grove of stunted firs standing over from
the village where Barclay's post and the log Mission-house
and the ungainly bit of a church were.

" I tramped into the place with some anticipation. After
the bare white plain there was even a touch of Christmas
cheer in the village tucked under the shoulder of a hill. I felt
comfortable ; particularly so when I met Barclay. He beamed
on me.

" I enjoyed that week like a stray moose might that had
come up to a herd and was given the freedom of their yard.
Barclay and the priest were equally kind.

A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH.

[Jan.,

" The Midnight Mass was the
grand ceremony of the week.
" Do you know what a frosty,
windless night in the North-west
is like ?

"The white plains
are the world's swad-
dling-clothes or
shroud, according
to your mood ;
the hills are ebony
shapes that have clasped
the ages: they come into a
man's tent at night and dis-
close the mysteries they have
known.

"That Christmas night was
one of these. The stars weren't like jewels,
but rather the points of flaming swords a
long way off. Under them were the plains
and the hills, and village and church of logs
beaded with light. I cannot imagine a more
perfect setting for that service of your church.
Barclay wasn't a professed Catholic then, but he was one in
heart, and I went with him to church that night. I daresay
you would have been amused to see us looking for a Christ-
mas star and finding one too, shining directly over the
church.

" There was a crib in there, and the most apparently de-
vout worshippers I 've ever looked on. They were singing
Christmas hymns to old French airs. Of course, you haven't
heard those people sing, Richardson, and I cannot describe it.
It is usually sweet and plaintive, like the music of trees ; very
high, and wayward as to time and tune, like the Northern
winds. Barclay and I had followed the star until we entered
the church, but our star was in the extreme west, and in other
ways, I am afraid, we were not very much like the Kings
with gifts prepared, for instance. But at least before I left I
felt something of the shepherds' awe. I felt some moments
of real worship of the Divinity that was all. Fellows like
us, Richardson pardon me! have not blameless lives or even
ones of. honest spiritual endeavor to offer the Child.

" Barclay said Pere Lesaint's sermon was a wonderful invi-

i QOO.] A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. 487

tation to us to give our hearts to God, but I didn't dare to
venture such a worthless thing.

"There, I know what you 're going to say 'That it was the
best I had.' Yes ; but I know it 's my own fault that it is not
better.

"We had dinner with Pere Lesaint Christmas day. He
said in such times he would make no apology for the rather
plain menu ; it was the best he could offer us, and many of his
people would not have as good. You see, the fall hunt and
fishing had been somewhat of a failure, and Barclay said that
while he did what he could without depriving himself of too
much, Pere Lesaint had been literally going half-fed. He cer-
tainly looked it. We almost carried him over to supper at the
fort carried him with mental persuasion, I mean though he
hadn't a ghost of an excuse, for all his people were having a
good time down in the village.

" New Year's night, when we went out with Sak to feed
the dogs and put things ready for an early start next morn-
ing, we saw the lights in the mission-house windows and we
remembered that he had spoken of giving me letters to take
down to civilization to post.

" We went over and found Pere Lesaint coming through
one of those quarts d'heure that it takes fifteen years of a
man's life to strengthen him to meet.

" A young girl in the village was dying. She had been very
sick for a couple of weeks, and that night her lover, the Chris-
tian of a month's standing, had thrown religion, prudence,
everything to the wind, and gone back to paganism to practise
magic and effect a cure. What was killing Pere Lesaint was
that almost the whole village had been lured on the quiet into
the affair with him. Some of them had almost forgotten the
performance, and they wanted only to see it at first ; but when
the clever young stranger had roused their race's blood in them,
they grew anxious to take part in it.

" Pere Lesaint had gone down to the
village that evening to pray with the girl's
friends and give them what comfort he
could. Down there he found the very
old and the very young, and a
few of his ' standard-bearers '
who had frowned on the thing
at first and were afterwards kept
in the dark about the plans.

483 A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. [Jan.,

All the others had gone off in little parties after dusk, with
the sick girl wrapped in skins and carried on a litter. They
were somewhere in the forest back of the plain, and he knew
batter than we could guess what hellish dances and ceremonies
they would go through.

" If he had known where they were, I am sure he would
have set out after them I know I would have been glad to
go with him. But he told us there would be half-a-dozen trails
to follow, for they had started out in different ways and then
made a tangle of trails, criss-cross, that would take us hours to
unravel in the darkness. He had been looking, you see.

" It 's doubtful what we could have done if we had gone.
Still, the tangled trails seemed to show their fear of the priest
following them and compelling their return.

" We forgot all about the mail that night. We went back to
the fort utterly miserable. We felt as helpless as the young lay
brother appeared to be before the anguish of that priest. Not
that he said anything of it, but his face man! it was sublime.
A holy woman, whose family had thrown her off, and God as
well, to join a band of some Rosicrucians or other, might have
looked like that. Those missionaries have the tenderness of a
woman's soul with all the strength of a man's. They have
pre-eminently ' the maternal heart/ I should say. He was
making excuses over and over for his 'poor forest children*
and their defection. He put it down to their half-starved
state, I remember.

"His hand was on the house-chapel door when he said
good-night, and we knew he would spend the greater part of
the night in there.

"The next morning Barclay's old, half-breed housekeeper
gave us an early breakfast in Barclay's den. It was awfully
cold outside, and the darkness before dawn was oppressive.
The den was so cozy and bright that I was weak enough to
listen to Barclay coaxing me to stay a few days more.

" I was trying to resist him and my weaker self when we
heard some one running over the hard snow outside and thump
on the heavy side-door. Barclay is a cool fellow, but he looked
thoroughly frightened then. He told me later that he had an
instant premonition of what had happened.

" Brother Jean was standing shaking in the big door-way.
He was in trouble and had run to us as the only white men
near.

" Pere Lesaint was dead !

IQOO.J A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. 489

" I would not believe him and I told him so, but he only
shook his head like a protesting child and ran to the church.
We heard a queer, agitated Angelus ringing as we went over
the road. And then when we were in the yard the bell began
to toll.

" I tell you, Richardson, we did not want to go on toward
the mission-house lights. It seemed a hard thing to step out
of that darkness into a bright room and meet Death there in
the awfully calm way we knew we would.

"The door of his room was open. We tiptoed in. There
was a candle burning low in there, a large crucifix, and a thin
black figure bent on the praying-desk before it. We put him
on the hard couch that had been his bed. There was a small
crucifix above the rosary at his sash. Barclay put that be-
tween his hands.

" ' I think he 'd like to have it there/ he said.

" Then we stood back and looked at him. His handsome
head and silver-brown curls reminded me more than ever of
the St. Joseph statues. He looked what he had been a very
just man. Even the shell was venerable. I tried to imagine
what light those eyes had opened on when they closed to the
candle-light.

" It was a poor death chamber for the man who came of
the noblest of French noblesse, wasn't it, Richardson ? But it
was a poorer room for him to have lived in seven years.

" Our feelings were choking us. Men cannot cry and we
could only stand there and look, while the distress was rolling
up in us like we rolled big snow-balls at school. Brother Jean
came in and fell on his knees. That was his relief.

" After awhile we heard a noise outside. Day was just
breaking and we could see the yard and road dotted with
people running. The Indians had heard of it. The old house-
keeper had roused the village.

" When I saw them I remembered his anguish the night
before. I had no doubt that it had killed him, for Barclay
said he had some heart trouble for years. I wanted to take
the whole pack of them in my two hands and knock their col-
lective heads together, as you would do with very bad young-
sters who had heads like rocks. They had been so utterly
graceless and ungrateful.

<f I locked the door on the pack, at any rate ; but the little
Brother unlocked it. He was wiser, I guess. They wouldn't
have stayed out. Their nerves were n't over the strain of the

A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH.

[Jan.,

magic-dance and this sudden turn in affairs had made them
lose control of themselves. They thought their hearts were
broken ; I believe they were temporarily. They loved him in
their own fashion miserable children ! He was a living type
of his Master to them all gifts, all care.

"The men were moaning like frightened animals; the wo-
men were sobbing ; the young medicine-man, with face livid
behind its paint, was kneeling alone in an outer part of the
house, half dead with fear. Man ! it was a harrowing sight.

" They looked on him in groups ; then went out and sat or
stood or crouched about the big square
hall. It 's usual, I think, for you
Catholics to pray for the dead. But
these people could n't do it that morn,
ing. The Brother proposed that they
should pray
and return
home after-
ward.

" Then came
the agony.
They all
broke down.

" THE YOUNG MEDICINE-MAN . . . WAS

KNEELING ALONE, . . . HALF DEAD
WITH FEAR."

Heart and soul seemed crushed in them. Even the men sob"
bed; the women cried aloud.

"One old man said, as nearly as I could understand: 'It
must not be, Brother. Devils cannot pray for saints. . . .
Brother, we killed our father me and my people/

"He turned to them and said: 'It is true, my brothers.
We have sent away the Light from Heaven ' his Indian name
' his . spirit passed us and put out our fire while AVC
danced.'

1900.] A NEW YEAR'S TALE OF THE NORTH. 491

"That reminded me of Barclay's stories about the trembling
lodge and the smoke and flames about the medicine-man, but
when they all broke down again, like frightened children, I
could honestly pity them. They were so much in earnest.

" The little Brother did not try to stop . his tears or keep
them out of his voice. He said to the Indians then: 'We are
all sinners, my brothers. But Jesus died for love of sinners.
Kneel with me.'

" They all knelt. Barclay and I did too. It would have
been boorish to stand there pharisaical to separate ourselves
from them in the face of what the Brother had said.

"First the Brother made some sort of acknowledgment of
sin and repentance a. "

"An act of contrition."

" Yes, I suppose that 's it ; then some more. After the
prayers they were calmer, but they seemed unable to leave
the place and the body.

" A wild-looking girl came in and whispered something to
a man at the door. The girl was not more wild than they
were when the message spread. The girl in the village was
dead.

" Their punishment was up to the measure. They felt it.
Such a cry, Richardson not loud, but from souls in despair!
Then they were stunned to perfect silence. The women hid
their faces in their blankets. And before we quite realized
the movement, they had slipped away and left the hall empty.
I believe they felt themselves on holy ground and unworthy
of it.

" I did n't leave St. Ignace that day. I waited until we had
paid what honor we could to the dead priest ; the Indian girl
was buried the same day. I took all the letters he had ready
for me and sent a note of my own with each.

" Necessity made a sort of spiritual hero out of the little
Brother in those days. The Indians were like broken reeds frozen
in a marsh. They were in perfect despair. But some of Pere
Lesaint's spirit seemed to animate Brother Jean, and he raised
them up again. He said the priest was praying in heaven for
him and the Indians. I could honestly believe it.

"Barclay declares that the priest's death has done more
than even he could do living to drive all hankerings for pagan-
ism out of the Indians. There is likely truth in that, but it
strikes me again how hard it is to bow to the old truth that
God's ways are not our ways, and his wisdom not the world's

49 2 HOME. [Jan.,

wisdom. It is wonderfully hard. But a fellow thinks of these
things in his tent at night."

When Richardson told me this story he ended it with this :
" There are many good sermons written and some delivered,
but if there were more living sermons out in the world, where
we need them most, Tom Richardson and the likes of him
would be better men. Don't you think so ? "

I assented. I added that there must be somewhat of a
sermon in his own life, since Tom Richardson was pointed out
to " me and the likes of me " as a model of success achieved
in a certain line.

He grew serious at that, and his eyes saw much beyond
the paper-knife in his hand, that was left to find its way to the
Review's pages.

"Success? That is in the world's tribunal," he said.
"Don't follow the model too closely, little woman, and touch
in your work with lights caught from Stanley Scott's Northern
picture."

That was a remarkable saying for the brilliant journalist.

HOME.

BY CLARA CONWAY.

O many long and lonely exile years

I walked the tropic wastes of scorching sand,
Away from Thee and from the dear home land
My childhood knew, my strength oft spent in fears,
For naught, in vain ; so long, with blinding tears
Thy rod and staff were veiled, though near at hand,
So long, dear Lord, I do not understand
Why now, at eventide, the home land light appears.

Because I spent the gifts, that came from Thee
In reckless service to my own wild will,
Imperious seeking o'er the desert sea
A Voice to bid my restless heart be still ;
Because waste dregs alone are left to fill
Thy chalice, Lord, I pray Thee, pardon me !

1900.] MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. 493

MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE.

BY REV. GEORGE M. SEARLE, C.S.P.

UMAN VIVISECTION " is the title of a pam-
phlet we have received from the American Hu-
mane Association. At first sight this title is
perhaps somewhat misleading, for we are gener-
ally accustomed to associate the word " vivisec-
tion " with surgical operations ; and of course the etymology
of the word justifies us in so doing. But it is evident that a
medical practice, as well as a surgical one, can be instituted
for the purpose for which vivisection, as it is usually under-
stood, is performed ; that is, for the better understanding of
the workings of an animal organism. This better understand-
ing may be either that of the scientific world in general, in
which case the aim or object of the vivisection is an absolute
contribution to science ; or it may be merely that of a class
of students, who are supposed to learn their profession more
thoroughly in this way than in any other. This last case we
need not discuss, as it is not concerned in the matter now
before us. The question proposed to us by the pamphlet is
whether vivisection, either surgical or medical, of the human
subject, simply for the advancement of science, can be allowed
by the laws of morality ; that is, whether it is allowable to
perform dangerous operations, or administer powerful drugs to
a human being, with no intention of curing or alleviating a
disease from which he is suffering, but simply to learn some-
thing about the way in which such operations or drugs will
affect the human subject generally. It is obvious, also, that
practically such a course would be taken without obtaining
the consent of the patient, or victim, as he may more properly
be called. The victim, in practice for unfortunately this is
not a mere theoretical question is either an infant or young
child, or insane, or in some way unable to protest ; or if he
be able to protest, the real intention is concealed from him,
and the impression is given to him that the medicine or opera-
tion is employed in order to remedy the disease or lesion from
which he is suffering, or at any rate in some way to do him
good. He is either deceived, or taken at a disadvantage.

49 j- MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. [Jan.,

Evidently there are questions concerning this matter, beside
the definite one which we have proposed ; other cases might
arise beside the one which we have stated. It may well be
doubted when one can lawfully subject even himself to such a
treatment ; and if in any case he can, what that case must be.
Conditions for its lawfulness may be supposed, etc. But with
all this we are not now concerned. The actual practical case,
which stands before us, is the one defined above.

Before passing the judgment upon it which the common
sense of mankind, as well as Catholic theology, immediately
and unhesitatingly must pass, let us realize the gravity of the
matter by looking into the actual facts ; let us see what is
this monstrous thing which is being done, and the doing which
is defended in the name of science by not a few medical men.
The full impression of it, unfortunately, cannot be given by
merely a few instances; but we must not be too prolix, and
moreover due regard for propriety in a magazine for general
reading must shut out some of the strongest ones. But what
we can give ought to be quite sufficient.

Here, to begin with, is the direct statement of an English
physician; for charity's sake, in this, as in the other cases, we
will suppress the name. It is taken from a published work
of his.

"In connection," he says, "with Mr. , I have made

some investigations concerning the action of salicine on the
human body, using healthy children for our experiments (of
course, here and elsewhere, the italics are our own), to whom
we gave doses sufficient to produce toxic (i. e. t poisonous)
symptoms.

"Our first set of experiments were made on a lad of ten.
. . . He was admitted with belladonna poisoning, but our
observations were not commenced until some days after his com-
plete recovery."

Of course, the boy should have been discharged then, as
cured ; but this doctor (may God save us from such !) takes ad-
vantage of his past illness to make a pretext for these dia-
bolical experiments, pretending, it may be well supposed, to
his parents that their child needed further treatment.

In another case he makes his experiments on a boy who
had recovered from pneumonia, " his temperature having become
normal ten days previously'' In this case the symptoms became
somewhat alarming, and frightened his kind physician ; he be-
came, perhaps, afraid that some persons interested might get

1900.] MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. 495

on his tracks, though he seems to have felt that his medical
brethren would consider his proceedings very commendable.
But it may be, also, that when death seemed likely to be the
result of these proceedings, his conscience may have also
begun to make him uncomfortable.

But this gentleman was really quite kind and considerate ;
compared, that is, with many of his fellow-practitioners. He
seems to have thought, indeed, that it was rather a weakness
to have a scruple about killing a human being committed to
his medical care ; " we must confess" he says, " we felt a little
relief when the toxic symptoms abated." Still he did feel that
relief, and it is to be hoped that it was not merely the fear of
being caught which had caused his alarm. But others evi-
dently regard it as quite a matter of indifference whether their
victims live or die, as long as new ones can be procured. In-
deed, if they die, so much more cogent becomes the proof of
the efficacy of the treatment ; for the treatment is not to cure
disease, but to produce it.

Here, for instance, is a very outrageous case, but by no
means an extraordinary one except for the deliberate decep-
tion practised on the parents of the child on whom the ex-
periment was made. This is calmly reported by the German
doctor who made the experiment, as follows; the idea being
to inoculate a boy with the seeds of consumption !

" I am sorry," he tells us, " to say that it is very difficult
to obtain subjects for such experiments. There are, of course,
plenty of healthy children in consumptive families, but the
parents are not always willing to give them up. Finally, I got
a little boy for the purpose. The treatment to which I sub-
jected him was to be a sort of punishment for some slight bit
of naughtiness of which he had been guilty at home. I had
been entreating the parents to let me have the boy for some
time, but the father relented only when the child deserved
punishment. He said to him : * Now you shall be inoculated.'
My patient was very susceptible to the poison. After I had
given him an injection of one milligramme, the most intense
fever seized him. It lasted three or four days ; one of the
glands of the jaw swelled up enormously. / cannot yet say
whether the boy will be consumptive in consequence of my
treatment"

Of course he hopes he will, that the theory may be veri-
fied ; though he does not say so.

Now, in fact, there is no difference in principle between

496 MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. [Jan.,

poisoning a boy to obtain a scientific result, and poisoning an
old man to obtain a pecuniary result. Both are equally de-
serving of capital punishment.

Let it not be imagined for a moment that these atrocities
have only occurred here and there, or at long intervals. On
the Continent of Europe, we are justified in saying that this
horrible business is carried on wholesale. We quote again
from the pamphlet before us an article from the Medical Brief
of June, 1899 :

" More shocking revelations of the atrocities perpetrated by
Continental physicians on helpless women and children are
coming to light.

"At the Konigsberg Hospital of Midwifery, Professor ,

experimenting with Koch's new tuberculin} made injections of
fifty times the maximum dose prescribed by Koch, in forty
new-born children ! Inoculations of various virulent bacterial
cultures were also made on a large number of women at the
same institution.

" A German physician named tells, without any apparent

understanding of the heinousness of the offence, how he inocu-
lated a young woman with a poisonous virus.

" Dr. -, assistant physician in the University Hospital for

Women at Leipsic, made similar inoculations on a helpless
woman. The same man inoculated a new-born infant with a
culture of staphylococci, in the Royal University Ear Hospital.

" A Dr. inoculated two boys with the virus from a

boil, and both died from a piistular disease.

" Dr. , Professor of Children's Diseases at Prague, in-
fected five children with round worms just for the sake of
experiment.

" These are a few instances of every- day practices in the
hospitals and clinics on the Continent."

Let it be understood that the names of the criminals are
given in the original publications. These things are not vague
rumors ; quite the contrary ; for these men, butchers rather
than physicians, do not hesitate to publish their shame to their
professional brethren, who, they seem to think, will approve of
everything done in the name of science ; though they might
think several times before letting the public in general know
of their iniquity ; particularly that portion of it which is likely
to come under their hands.

But perhaps these crimes are only committed abroad

1900.] MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. 497

surely, we may say, no American physicians would be guilty
of the like. We wish, for the honor "of our country, that such
a hope could be indulged. But, incredible as it may seem, we
have before us extracts from the reports of two hospitals of
large American cities, in which these abominable practices are
openly recorded. Of course it would be perfectly right to give
the names of the hospitals and the physicians ; but we refrain
from doing so, in order not to put a special brand of infamy
on any particular institution or man. Moreover, it is to be
feared that the ones for which we have the documents are not
the only ones implicated, as might seem to be the case if we
said just what or who they were. One evil of these practices
is that they necessarily cast some suspicion on all physicians
and hospitals, until they explicitly disavow them.

Let us then give the instances right here among us, with-
out distinctly pointing out just where they occurred.

First, then, we have poisoning with the extract of the thy-
roid gland, which as the doctor, with surprising ingenuousness,
remarks, when administered even to a moderate degree almost
invariably produces death. With a most astounding perversion,
then, of the ordinary conscience possessed by the most callous
or uninstructed, he proceeds to try this deadly substance on
eight persons ; insane, it is true, and probably incurable ; but
what of that? We are all incurable; we cannot be cured per-
manently, but have got to die some time. Yes, it may be said,
but meanwhile we are useful members of society. But did any
one, except in pagan countries, ever hold that the insane or
hopelessly diseased could be put to death, even by the public
authority ?

Of course you would expect that at any rate these experi-
ments would be made very cautiously, and that if there was
the least sign of a fatal result, they would be promptly stopped,
and antidotes instantly applied. By no means. That would
ruin the whole object, which is to find out just how much is
needed to really kill a person in this way, or to find out just
how much one can stand, which of course involves serious dan-
ger of death. In the second case recorded, the patient, though
" deeply demented, was quiet for several months before the thy-
roid treatment began. She lost flesh very rapidly, and on the
eleventh day of the treatment showed pronounced mental and
motor excitement. On the twelfth day she passed into a state
of frenzy. The thyroid extract was now discontinued " (not
apparently to save life, but not to give more than was needed
VOL. LXX. 32

498 MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. [Jan.,

to produce the desired effect), "but the excitement kept up
. . . for seven weeks, at the end of which time she died."

But now we have something still worse, called " some ex-
perimental work " on children by way of tapping the spinal
canal. To show its atrocity in the strongest light, we will
simply give, without note or comment, extracts from the cold-
blooded journal of this "work," merely asking the reader to
notice the dates :

"Case II. Female, aged 20 months. Punctured, January
16, 1896, January 22, February 16, on day of patient's death.

Case III. Female, aged 4 months. Puncture, January 17,
1896. Patient died. January 22.

Case V. Male, aged 3^ years. Puncture, February 3, 1896.
Patient died February 4.

Case VI. Male, aged 6 months. Puncture, February i. Pa-
tient died in convulsions three weeks later.

Case VII. Male, aged 7 months. Patient entered hospital
February 5, 1896. Punctured, February 5, February 21, Febru-
ary 27. Died February 28."

Besides these, we may mention the detestable experiment
of an American physician to inoculate, in no less than twenty
cases, persons already suffering from leprosy with the virus of
another, and we may even say still more loathsome and hor-
rible disease. This experiment was suggested to him by a
medical friend in Europe. Fortunately it was not successful ;
but he was not satisfied, and thought it should be tried
again. He says: "It is to be hoped that this experiment
should (sic) be tried by competent observers under more favora-
ble circumstances." He seems to need a little instruction in
grammar as well as in humanity.

Even worse than this has been done in Europe. We quote,
with reluctance, but moved by the desire to excite as far as
possible a righteous indignation against these horrible practices,
the attempt of a doctor in Vienna to do what would seem to
many even more criminal than murder. This professor inocu-
lated three women, recently confined, with an infectious disease
of a loathsome and shameful character. . . . "We can im-
agine," says the right-minded physician who reports this, "the
feelings of these poor and probably respectable women, com-
pelled,, for no fault of their own, to herd with diseased women
of infamous life."

Would this Vienna man have tried this " experiment " on
his own "wife or sister ? And if not, why not ?

MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. 499

And would any of these doctors have tried any of their ex-
periments on themselves, getting other doctors to watch the re-
sults ? That shows how genuine their enthusiasm for science
is. It is not enthusiasm ; it is simply curiosity or vanity,
coupled with utter disregard for ordinary charity or justice.
We remember hearing of one such case of self-sacrifice, a good
while ago, when a French physician swallowed some of the
vomit of a cholera patient, to see if it would affect a healthy
organism. Whether justifiable or not, that was certainly real
desire for knowledge. Probably there may have been, here or
there, some such instances; but we imagine they are very
rare.

The pretence may be made that experiments on human
beings are absolutely necessary for the full acquisition of
science. Even if so, as we intend shortly to show, that would
not justify such as have been described ; but that this is not
always, to say the least, the real motive, is evident from the
following infamous statement by a Swedish doctor.

" When I began," he says, " my experiments with small-pox
pus, I should, perhaps, have chosen animals for the purpose.
But the most fit subjects, calves, were obtainable only at con-
siderable cost. There was, besides, the cost of their keep, so I
concluded to make my experiments upon the children of the
Foundlings' Home, and obtained kind permission to do so from
the head physician, Professor .

" I selected fourteen children, who were inoculated day
after day. Afterward " (moved apparently by conscience) " I
discontinued them, and used calves. I did not continue my
experiments on calves long, once because I despaired of gain-
ing my ends within a limited period, and again because the
calves were so expensive. I intend, however, to go back to my
experiments in the Foundling Asylum at some future time."

You see his valuable time and money were more important
by far than the health and life of his fellow-beings. What
else is the motive of the ordinary murderer or thief ? There
is not a word to imply that calves would not have done as
well as children ; only his limited income could not supply
them rapidly enough.

It is indeed disgraceful, though natural enough, to have the
poor and the children of the poor selected for these atrocious
experiments on account of their cheapness, ease of supply, or
safety to the operator. But let not the well-to-do imagine that
they are secure, if circumstances are such that the butcher can

5oo MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. [Jan..

safely go to work on them. The very fact that operations on
the rich are more lucrative by far, is in itself an inducement
to try them unnecessarily. A leading physician of London dis-
tinctly says that it is charged that " surgical operations are
now constantly performed, not for the advantage of the patients,
but for the pecuniary benefit of the operators. This is really a very
serious charge, and, I deeply grieve to think, one not altogether
unfounded." This, perhaps, is something you have not thought
of before.

One root of the whole trouble, we are inclined to think, is
the prevailing opinion that there is no essential difference be-
tween man and the lower animals. If this is admitted, no solid
reason can be given why a monkey in the woods can be killed
for food, or even for the excitement of the chase, but that a
man cannot. Admit evolution to this extent and in this sense,
and we must hold either that it is wrong to tread deliberately
on a worm, or that we have a right to shoot any man on
sight, as far as any solid obligation of conscience is concerned.
Fear of retribution by his friends or by the state, or the open-
ing of the door to indiscriminate slaughter, and the total de-
struction of society and civilization, are dangers to be feared of
course ; but these do not exist, if the crime can be kept secret.
Secret murder of any kind becomes as lawful, if practised on a
man, as on a brute ; and this really breaks down all possibility
of the order and security which civilization requires. The
ultra doctrine of evolution is then, not merely to be regarded
as destructive to religion, but of all our temporal peace and
welfare. Evolution means murder, in the sense in which the doc-
trine is taught by many, and carelessly accepted by many more.
. That these logical consequences have actually been deduced
from it, is evident enough from the express statements of
some votaries of modern science. A writer in the Independent,
December 12, 1895, as quoted in our pamphlet, distinctly says:

"A human life is nothing compared with a new fact in
science. ... The aim of science is the advancement of
human knowledge at any sacrifice of human life. ... If
cats and guinea pigs can be put to any higher use than to
advance science, we do not know what it is. We do not know
of any higher use we can put a man to."

There is the doctrine, you see, openly and unblushingly
stated ; that, at any rate, compared with the Moloch of science,
and as offerings to it, human and brute life are practically on
a par.

1900.] MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. 501

Of course, as Catholics, we know the true doctrine on this
matter ; namely, that human life is sacred ; that we have no
right to take it as a means to an end ; that it can only be
taken in legitimate defence, or by the vindictive authority ex-
ercised by the state in the name of God, who has the supreme
right over it, and imparts it to the state so far as the stability
of the state requires. We need hardly say to Catholics, that
even our own lives are not our absolute possession, to do with
them as we please; that we have no right to take them by
suicide, or even to risk them wantonly. But we have a right
over the lives of brutes ; as we read in Genesis : " Every thing
that moveth and liveth shall be meat for you ; even as the
green herbs have I delivered them all to you." But it is
added : " Whosoever shall shed man's blood, his blood shall
be shed ; for man was made to the image of God " (Gen.
ix. 3-6).

But it will naturally be asked : " Do we not continually
take chances, so to speak, on life ? To come right down to
the subject in hand, is it not legitimate practice to perform an
operation which may, and even probably will, result fatally?"

It certainly is; but in such legitimate cases the real inten-
tion is not to destroy or endanger life but to save it ; to cure
in the patient some grievous malady or lesion ; if this, the in-
tention, is not accomplished, fatal consequences, which we are
far from wishing, may result. And in some cases in the medi-
cal line desperate remedies may be used, which may save life,
but, on the other hand, may be injurious to it, or even result
fatally ; of course these are used in a desperate disease, which
will terminate fatally if no remedy is employed, and in the
absence of any knowledge of an equally efficacious, but safer,
one. And even in these cases, generally the consent of the
patient should be obtained. But to perform an operation, or
use a drug, even in desperate cases, which is simply injurious
to life, as a means to an end, in order, for instance, that the
sufferer may sooner be relieved of his misery, is not allowable.

We need hardly say to Catholics, but we have great need
to say, and cannot repeat too frequently, to those not in the
church, that it is never lawful to use bad means to a good end ;
in other words, that we cannot do evil that good may come ; or
to put it still more tersely, that the doctrine that " the end
sanctifies the means " is unknown to Catholic theology. It is
strange that even in the earliest days this calumny against us
was in circulation. " As we are slandered," says St. Paul,

5Q2 MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIEACE. [Jan..

" and as some affirm that we say, let us do evil that there may
come good " (Rom. iii. 8). The teaching of the church is clear
on this point, as given by Catholic theologians, and especially
by the Jesuits, to whom the contrary doctrine is so persis-
tently ascribed. But outside the church, the most hopeless
confusion seems to prevail. In our very pamphlet in review
we find an instance of this. The VossiscJie Zeitung of Berlin
is quoted as affirming that sometimes in war " a general sends
a regiment to certain death to gain the victory for the rest of
the army." Does he send them, we would like to know, sim-
ply to be shot down ; are they not expected to do some shoot-
ing on their own account? The whole theory of war is that
it is lawful, if the rules of civilized warfare are observed, to
shoot your enemy, still more to embarrass him, or impede his
movements in any way ; and if a regiment is sent to " certain
death," to use the somewhat exaggerated language of our
German friend, it is not in order that they may be shot down,
but that they may do some good work before they are.

Then he says, " Should not a doctor be allowed to act in
a similar way ? " Certainly he should, in what really is a
similar way that is the way that has just been described ; i. e.,
of using a remedy which it is hoped will do good, though with
a possibility, even a probability, of disastrous results, and with
a certainty of a good deal of pain and inconvenience. The
remedial effect is expected to proceed directly from the opera-
tion or drug ; the medicine or the amputation is expected to
do good in itself, though there is danger of its also doing
harm, if the patient's system is not strong enough to bear it,
or is not suited to it, or of harm coming afterward from it.
Such proceedings are legitimate ; but to do the harm first, in
order that good may result from it, is to invert the order, to
put the cart before the horse. It would not be lawful even
for a martyr to offer himself for death, thus directly inviting
and causing the sin of the persecutor, and disposing of his
life as if it belonged absolutely to himself, even if he kne\v
that afterward thousands would be converted and saved by re-
flecting on his faith and fortitude. No, he confesses the faith,,
which is a virtuous act ; the sin of the persecutor follows from
it, against the will of the martyr. It is commonplace Catholic
theology, taught indeed in our Sunday-schools, that one cannot
even tell a harmless lie, if it were to save the whole world
from ruin. There is nothing more plain and consistent than
the Catholic teaching on this subject; all theologians teach

1900.] MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. 503

that we must not do evil that good may come ; that the end
does not sanctify the means. But the confusion of ideas out-
side the church as evidenced by the Vossische Zeitimg, and in
hundreds of books, periodicals, and newspapers besides, is
really phenomenal. The real truth is that Protestantism, which
started in unreasonableness and self-contradiction, has by the
mental chaos necessarily following from it, made clear thought
about moral questions very difficult among those affected by
it. They have no fixed principles to start from, and naturally
never arrive at any fixed conclusions.

Now, finally, that we may understand just how the special
matter in hand is determined by the clear and precise moral
theology of the church, the teachings of which, by the way,
rest on the labors of great thinkers enlightened by Christian
principles, rather than on actual definitions or condemnations
proceeding from the Holy See, though some such have been
given, we will put the matter in a few words, which, though
not alluding to enormities such as we have mentioned, cover
them fully, and much more.

All Catholic works on morals intended to be thorough, and
to serve as guides for the clergy, contain a treatise on the
duties of physicians ; and this treatise contains as a certain
teaching, not open to doubt, that a physician sins grievously,
or mortally as we say, if he uses unknown drugs with the
intention of finding out their effects, unless indeed he uses
quantities so small as to preclude the possibility of serious
harm. The same doctrine, mutatis mutandis, of course applies
to operations.

"But how," our scientific gentlemen will say, " are we going
to find out the effects of an unknown drug or a new opera-
tion ? Is not this like requiring us not to go into the water
till we know how to swim ? "

This is an idle question, for they know the answer to it
themselves. The brute creation is ours for legitimate use of
this kind, though suffering should not be inflicted on it except
for reasonable cause. And it is also idle to say that we can-
not learn sufficiently well from the higher animals what the
effect of medicine or surgery will be on man. As we have
just seen, the Swedish doctor does not claim that it was
necessary to take children for his experiments, but that they were
cheaper than calves. But even supposing that complete cer-
tainty cannot be attained by experiments on brutes as to the
beneficial effect of any treatment proposed for human beings,

504 MURDER IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE. [Jan.

still enough knowledge can be acquired in this way to give a
probability quite sufficient for our purpose ; for that matter,
absolute certainty cannot be obtained from experiments on one
man or woman as to the effect of the same experiments on
another. If we have a strong probability of a favorable result,
the course is clear ; we are not now simply working in the
dark, but with a good light ahead. We can direct our inten-
tion now to the securing of the good which we have good
ground to hope for ; and unless there is something better or
more certain to do the good which we -wish to effect, we are
at perfect liberty to follow what seems likely to accomplish
it. We may fail of course, and even do harm instead of good ;
but, as has just been stated, we know of nothing better to do
than what we did. The physician who acts in this way is
doing the best he can for his patient ; and it is to his patient,
not to science in general, that he is bound by his profession.
If people do not trust in doctors to do this, they will soon
lose all confidence, in them; no person of ordinary common
sense would employ .a doctor who was even suspected of
making experiments even remotely resembling those which
have been related.

But the real gist of the matter is that, whether people trust
him or not, a doctor cannot lawfully injure or even endanger
the well-being of his patient, simply to advance the general
cause of science ; for this is doing evil that good may come.

If there is, as seems likely, serious danger that physicians
may ignore this rule of morals, it is certainly high time that
the common sense of the community should force them to do
so, by penal legislation. Many of the proceedings described
above are simply murder in the name of science ; and the usual
penalties of murder should be visited upon them. The scaffold,
or the electric chair, is the proper remedy and preventive for
these utterly abominable and disgraceful crimes.

IMCO

flncient Priorp of Saint Petre ana Saint Paul at Bath
A Dona Tor prayer perpctuatea,

Ro other Oraer bath

fls tl)i$ for centuries, both bp aap ana night,
Kept up continuouslp the noble Christian rite
Of "Watching unto 6oa" for other,
Kins or queen, erring sister, brother :
nor interceded so, with heart ana soul,
jls Durham monk o'er mortuarp roll
Announcing death of mortal, great or small
ou)lp priest, or potentate, aailp praper for all -
Perpetual praper for others, spiritual fellowship*

nor eloquence of language spoke, nor fervent aip

of facile pen in fount of inspiration

'er heralded a fairer cause for pious meditation,

Co comfort Hiring souls, ana rest the spirit flea,

Of children of the earth plane ; to ease the mortal dread

Of the coming of the flngel, harbinger of Death,

Who gentlp laps her touch upon the mobile lips ana saitb,

44 Come with me, child, to oisit other scenes,

ChP soul to brighter, better woria nou> leans-

ChP infant hanas hath onip graspea

Jit the latch kep to the portal, raspea

flgainst the thorns along the u>ap

Chat leaas to ife eternal, a fairer, longer aap/'

KATE HUNT CRADDOCK

506 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Jan.,

REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS IN
ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO.

BY REV. C. L. WALWORTH.

XIV.
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC IN FIFTY-TWO DAYS.

AT HAVRE. ESCAPE FROM BEACHY HEAD. STORMY CROSSING
TO NEW YORK. ST. JOSEPH A GREAT SAINT BUT QUESTION-
ABLE NAVIGATOR. FATHER BERNARD'S NOVENA. HEARTY
WELCOME HOME FROM MCMASTER AND OTHERS. FIRST
ENGLISH MISSION AT ST. JOSEPH'S CHURCH,
i

N the 2/th day of January, 1851, we embarked at
Havre on the Helvetia, a sailing vessel bound
for New York ; and with every promise of a
fair voyage. In this we were doomed to disap-
pointment. Before we could reach the open sea
we were met by stormy weather which drove us back upon
our course, and so far into the English Channel that Havre lay
once more abreast of us to the south, and the coast of Sussex
on the north. Here the head winds which had blocked up
our way to the ocean grew into a perfect hurricane, so that
in the evening of the thirtieth of January we found ourselves
quite near to England. We were so land-locked in the re-
cesses of its coast and so confronted by a promontory called
Beachy Head that it was difficult even to beat our way out
into such small safety as the British Channel afforded. Our
adventures here were so memorable and brought out so strong-
ly the characteristics of our provincial that my reader must
perforce wait patiently at this point until I get ready to let
him off. In the evening of the thirtieth of January aforesaid
we were seated at supper and holding carefully on to our
plates and cups, which were behaving in a very frantic manner.
This caused more merriment than alarm to our party, for we
were getting accustomed to stormy weather. The captain had
not come to the table as yet, which was something quite unusual.
When at last he came aft through the cabin he showed no dis-
position to take his seat amongst us. He paused, however, for a
moment" to take a look at us, and seeing our merriment, he said :

1 9oo.] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 507

" Eat hearty, gentlemen ; eat hearty ! " And then passed
rapidly up the companion way to the deck.

I noticed something strange both in his words and in his
manner. After supper Father Hafkenscheid advised us all to
retire early to our births, and so sleep away a night which was
not likely to prove favorable to anything more busy than sleep.

I took the earliest opportunity to go up on deck, for I
knew that we were in danger and I was anxious to learn pre-
cisely in what the danger consisted. I found the captain and
crew all still and silent as death. There was an energy in this
silence. The ship was pushing her way forward to some crisis,
and all hands were braced up to meet the emergency. I felt
familiar with the captain, and walking up to his side, I asked
him to let me know frankly what the danger was and where
the chances of safety lay. He replied without hesitation :

" Look there ! You see that land off to the leeward. Well !
that is Beachy Head, and we are bound to pass it. On this
course, which is the only course we have, we could pass all
there is to be seen of it ; but lying still farther out into the
Channel there is a reef under the water, which no eye can see.
Whether we shall be able to pass that reef no one can tell in
weather like this. Chances ! There is only one chance that I
can think of. That one is to pass Beachy Head without touching
the reef. If we don't, any one is welcome to my chance after that."

I then went down into the cabin again and explained the
situation to Father Bernard.

"The first question," he said, "to be settled is, shall we
wake up our companions?"

I thought not. They could do nothing to save the ship and
it would be a needless alarm to themselves. To this he assented.

"They are good young men," he said, "and, I believe, well
prepared to die. You and I will go on deck and watch. But
come with me a moment. I have a little business with you."

He then led me into his room and made a brief confession.
This being done, I knelt to him in my turn, after which we
both mounted to the deck. Here we remained, attentive ob-
servers of all that took place, but keeping out of the way of
the mariners on duty. I do not now remember how long this
watch of ours lasted. The night was not very far advanced
when the captain brought our anxiety to a joyful termination.

"Get to your berths, gentlemen," he said. "All danger is
over now. Give thanks to God and sleep soundly till morning."

To get past Beachy Head, however, was not to get nearer

508 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [J an '

to our destination. Our backs were still turned upon home,
and the wind chased us further up into the Channel until we
were driven past Dover and into the Downs, or what is called
the Port of London, dropping anchor in Hampton Roads. The
captain and Father Bernard made arrangements to go by rail
to London, and return together in case of a lull in the storm.
This gave our provincial an opportunity to visit Clapham and
confer with Father De Held. This state of things continued
for nearly four days, when a favorable change in the weather
brought both back to the ship and in a hurry. On February
3, early in the morning, we left the Downs, retracing our
course to the Atlantic. The Atlantic received us this time with
a better show of kindness, but she did not let us go far before
she got her back up again and disputed with us every inch of
progress. The captain had serious thoughts of running down
the European coast to Africa. Sailing vessels often do this,
hoping that, by taking advantage of winds and currents that
prevail at this lower latitude, they can cross the ocean to the
mouth of the Mexican Gulf, and there striking the northern
currents which bear toward New York, gain more by rapid
progress than they lose by the greater distance traversed.
Such a plan, however, was too bold a one for a man of his
cautious temperament, and he concluded to work his way west-
ward by the usual route. Many days followed of stormy
weather and slow progress, with the usual experience of sea
sickness and personal casualties incident to life at sea. We
have no desire to go into details of this kind. Enough to say
that the French steward and waiter was constantly tumbling
down with the tray in his hand and breaking the dishes, for
which the captain as often broke one of the commandments
over his head. I only mention this to show what mishaps might
have happened to any of us. I remember no damage very
serious except that one of our party was thrown very violently
against the partition of his cabin, making a crack in the panel
with his head. It was a good head and has done much service
for the church since.

In spite of wind and weather, Father Hafkenscheid found
opportunities to take the measure of his companions and to
leave on our minds an impress of his own great soul. Of any
plans which he may have had to work for the conversion of
souls to the faith in America I cannot speak. I cannot say
that he had any at that time. When St. Alphonsus said to his
missionary companions that when the order should be ex-

1900.] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 509

tended beyond the bounds of Italy it would have to " preach
the Faith," he could have had no special plan to modify the
work of giving missions. He was only conscious, as all apos-
tolic souls must be, of the charge of Christ given to his
Church to " go teach all nations." The same must be said of
St. Paul of the Cross, founder of another missionary band, whose
heart was fired with the thought of devoting himself to the con-
version of England. The chief means of converting a nation of
unbelievers to the Faith cannot consist in giving missions such
as are grounded on the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.
There is always a development in these matters. Great apos-
tles and holy saints are developed by circumstances.

" There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune."

In matters of grace the church presides and souls take
shape under her guidance, albeit sometimes very slowly.

In Elliott's Life oj Father Hecker, page 239, we find very
direct testimony on this point :

" The missions could not be made the ordinary channel of
direct influences for turning sceptics and Protestants to the
true religion. The attempt to make them so, involving as it
does a notable interspersion of controversial sermons, has never
been tried by the Redemptorist or Paulist Fathers to our
knowledge, and when done by others has resulted in not
enough of controversy for making solid converts, and too little
penitential preaching for the proper reformation of hard sin-
ners among Catholics."

Elliott then adds the testimony of Hecker to show that no
such thought existed in the mind of Father Bernard. It was
our venerable provincial himself who aided Hecker in prepar-
ing his morning and evening instructions for the American
missions. These began almost immediately after the arrival of
the Helvetia at New York. They had as little of controversy in
them as those given in Italy under the direction of St. Liguori,
or under that of Father Bernard in Holland and Belgium.

St. Liguori is sometimes cited as an instance of a wise and
holy man, a doctor of the church, an old and experienced mis-
sionary and confessor, who never sent away a sinner from his
confessional unabsolved. I look upon this statement as some-
thing utterly incredible. It is something worse than incredi-
ble. It is a dangerous thing to believe or to repeat. Father
Bernard brought up this question one evening during this

510 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Jan.,

voyage. He was evidently anxious to sound our minds in re-
gard to this matter and to give us a clear insight into his own.
If preaching must be earnest and instruction must be sound and
practical, it is the confessor who has the last word in the mission ;
and he must be no " gobe-mouche" himself, but stand by those
doctrines of approved theology which the church has taught him.

" For my part," said Father Hafkenscheid, " I must confess
that I have sent away many sinners without absolution, and
this I have learned from St. Liguori."

Father Hafkenscheid's Christian name was Bernard-Joseph.
For St. Joseph he had a very special devotion. To St. Joseph
he appealed in order to bring our long-protracted voyage to a
speedy and happy termination. We were in the month of
March, and consequently approaching the annual festival of the
great foster-father of our Saviour, which occurs on the nine-
teenth of that month. He determined on a novena. He not
only engaged his Catholic companions in making it but talked
freely of it to the captain.

"You shall see," he said, "what St. Joseph will do for us.
He will bring us into New York in time to take part in cele-
brating his festival."

" He can't do it," replied the captain. " I wish to speak of
him respectfully, but he can't do that."

He then gave us several funny stones to show the confi-
dence of Italian sailors in the patronage of St. Anthony. The
novena began and went on, but the Atlantic held on also to
the same weather and the same winds.

" What is St. Joseph about now ? " the captain would say
jocosely, from time to time. " Can't you wake him up a little?"

"Wait awhile," was the confident reply. "You will see be-
fore long."

Sure enough, it was not very long before it became appar-
ent that something was working in our favor. The wind
chopped about with a suddenness that took every one by sur-
prise. We found ourselves driving towards our port before a
wind as favorable to our hopes as it had been until then
untoward. I remember well a joyful morning when I stood
gazing westward upon the sea, enjoying the progress of the
vessel. We were making fifteen knots an hour. The weather
was still stormy, but it did not seem so. A fair wind steadies
a ship and it glides along with little jolting or rocking. We
were crossing the Banks of Newfoundland, or nearing them.
The captain stood at my side. He was as happy as any man on

1900.] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 511

board, and having leisure to talk was glad to do it. He listened
amiably to all my questions and was ready wi.th his answers.

" Captain," I said, " there is one thing I notice which I do
not understand, and would like to have you explain it. What
ss the meaning of that smooth water that I see?"

He was startled. "Smooth water? Where-away?" I
pointed it out. It was over the left bow, a little off our
course and more to the southward. In a moment all was con-
fusion on deck. The captain was shouting out his orders,
which were repeated by the mate and the boatswain. In a
few moments we saw the Helvetia coming about by the north-
ern bow and going backward on her course.

It was a field of sunken ice which caused all this alarm.
We had to make a wide circuit to get past this and similar
dangers. Alas for our novena ! thought some of us. But our
superior was still confident.

" Leave it all to St. Joseph," he insisted. " St. Joseph will
make it all right."

In fact there was still time to reach New York by the nine-
teenth if the fair wind should continue to hold ; so we kept
sup our novena. The wind did hold. On the fifteenth day of
March we had been out forty-eight days since we left Havre.
The seamen on the Helvetia attributed this long and perilous
voyage to the fact of having so many clerics on board. The
boatswain declared that Brother Giesen never looked at the
compass without changing the wind.

On that fifteenth day we met an unfortunate English ship
in presence of whose distress we were forced to lose sight of
our own condition. Her sails were all tattered and torn. Her
bulwarks were broken in, and her whole appearance was for-
lorn beyond description. She had been blown past her harbor,
which was Boston, before the wind changed, and was now beating
her way back against winds equally adverse to find her way into
Boston. We passed this battered vessel within hailing distance
and gathered these and other particulars from her captain
through his speaking-trumpet. The last question asked him was :

" How long since you left port?" The answer was:

" Eighty-four days out ! " The captain raised his trumpet
above his head and swung it down again as if in desperation.
Poor man, how we pitied him ! Some face more malign
than Giesen's had been peering at his compass.

Our captain admitted that with the favorable wind we then
had we were rapidly approaching New York, but not with suf-

512 REMINISCENCES OF A CATHOLIC CRISIS [Jan.,

ficient speed to bring us there on the nineteenth. As if to
meet this emergency, the wind grew stronger on the sixteenth
and continued to increase in strength.

"Ha! ha! captain," said Father Bernard. "What do you
think of St. Joseph now?"

His reply was : " I admit that St. Joseph is a great saint.
But it seems to me that he is a poor sailor. Otherwise he
would know that with such a gale as we are getting he will
either break my masts or blow away my sails."

On the evening of the eighteenth, as night approached, the
captain said :

" I dare not go on any further in this way. I have lost
my reckoning and do not know where I am. I may be near
the coast or may be a hundred miles away. I must heave to
and wait till morning." And so he did.

On the morning of the nineteenth of March, St. Joseph's
Day, when we came up on deck the coast of New Jersey lay
close at hand, Long Branch in plain sight, with a wrecked
vessel on the sand before us which had gone ashore during
the night. Soon after came a pilot with newspapers in his
hand. Under his guidance we got quickly under way to make
our entry into harbor. We were brought to again at the Nar-
rows, where we waited for a tug to take us into the inner
bay. How beautiful to see the islands of the bay and the
spires and domes of the great city glittering in the sunlight !
As Father Hecker and I stood gazing forward on this scene,
by no means unfamiliar to our eyes, something appeared which
attracted our attention. We knew very well the location of
the Battery, and it was there. In the distance it showed itself
as a mere speck lodged against the land at the water-line. It
detached itself from the shore. After a little it grew larger ;
it was moving, and towards us. Fond expectation told us
what was coming. Home would not wait for our arrival, but
was coming forth to greet us. " There is smoke that rises
above it!" "Now I see the pipe!" "It is a small tug
George Hecker has secured. He will be sure to be on it ; and
John, too." " The hurricane deck shows now plain enough
and a little group on it watching us. McMaster is* there too.
He could not be away." " Now we have caught his eye."
Sure enough the first man that showed himself distinctly was
James. A. McMaster, our old comrade of the novitiate at St.
Trond. His tall form was elevated high above a group of
friends and he was waving his hat frantically above his head.

1 900.] IN ENGLAND FIFTY YEARS AGO. 513

We will pass by without further detail the various meet-
ings and greetings, embraces and inquiries, which took place
between these two groups in which we have tried to interest
our readers. To do otherwise would involve much common-
placing and word-painting. We go at once to the dock at
New York, and up through the streets of that city to the Re-
demptorist church and convent in Third Street. This was the
first station of our new home, our spiritual home, the home of
our present vocation ; and a sweet home we found it. Here
we all found eyes that awaited our coming and looked brighter
when we came.

Father Hecker and I were destined to find duty at once
upon our arrival. That duty was to begin a series of English
missions in the United States. A 'companion was waiting to
join us in this duty, constituting a band of three preachers,
to be aided in the confessional by other Redemptorists as oc-
casion might require. This companion was the Rev. Augustine
F. Hewit, a convert like ourselves. He was too highly gifted
and is too well known in the United States to need any fur-
ther characterization here. The Rev. Father Joseph Mu'ller,
then rector of the house in Third Street, had made arrange-
ments with Rev. J. McCarron, pastor of St. Joseph's Church
in Sixth Avenue, to have a mission on our arrival. It began
on Passion Sunday, the sixth of April, 1851, and ended at
Easter. Father Hafkenscheid inaugurated this mission. His
was the spirit which had given it birth. He was present at it
throughout, as he was at many others during a succession of
years, although he took no part in the preaching. I only re-
member once that he preached in English, and that was at
old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street, in the pres-
ence of Archbishop Hughes.

Father Bernard's desire and design was to establish a house
of the Redemptorist Order in the United States where Eng-
lish would be the prevailing language, and from which mis-
sionaries understanding English well could be supplied. I be-
lieve this to have been the great culminating project in his
truly apostolic life. In this he failed. Many knew of him and
the failure without feeling free to speak. Some of these are
now gone and will come back no more. A very few remain,
but they are bound to act both wisely and dutifully. A kind
farewell to all our readers. We never know when we shall be
separated entirely from the public. We ask, therefore, the pray-
ers of all who know of us, beginning with the present moment.
VOL. LXX. 33

HOLLAND l^nr UILLAGE

BY ELIZA LEYPOLD GOOD.

THE finding of the art village was one of those lucky
chances of travel which, like the spoils of war, come not al-
ways to the most deserving. We were on our way to Delft
and had stopped at Rotterdam to take the boat up the canal.
There were four of us ; we were dusty and travel-worn, and it
was a stifling hot day, but we were sustained by visions of a
spotless hotel hung round with blue and white china, where
soon we would be reposing in high Dutch beds between cool
linen sheets. At that moment we were told that the last boat
for the day had gone. Yes, there was a train, but not for
two hours, and it had required ten minutes and the use of
four languages to extract these interesting facts from the
ticket agent. Our misery was complete when he gave us in
change a handful of unknown coin. In our helplessness we
appealed to an American fellow-traveller, who proved the
" friend in need." He was an artist and knew Holland well,

1 9 oo.J

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

5'5

and the outcome of our conversation was the abandonment of
Delft for the quaint village.

Alighting from the train of which I wrote, some miles from
Rotterdam, we were soon bowling along one of Napoleon's
military roads in a " rijting," or open carriage. Lofty elm-
trees bordering the way lifted their branches high overhead,
locking them together to form a colossal Gothic arch which
extended unbroken as far as the eye could reach.

Spreading beneath was a carpet of grass sprinkled over
with English daisies, the " wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower"
of which Burns
speaks, and be-
low the road on
both sides flow-
ed streams of
clear water
through grassy
ditches. Be-
yond lay a per-
f e c 1 1 y level
country of pas-
ture and grain
field dotted
over with Hoi-
stein cattle,
and suggesting
a gigantic
checker-b o a rd
with black and
white checkers
on green and
yellow squares.

Whilst the harvesters were piling high their last wagon load,
the delicate perfume of new-mown hay came to us mingled
with the scent of ripe strawberries, and here and there the
dark sails of a wind-mill spinning with a jerky motion against
the sky gave animation to the still landscape. The sweet
influences of the hour had stolen our fatigue long before
we reached the quaint village of Rijsoord, and as we drove
down its one street, where all the houses stand in a straight
line close beside the road, a sudden turn disclosed the river
Waal. On its farther shore there stood a chalet-like building,
picturesque, Alpine, not " Dutch " at all. A light balcony

A REPRESENTATION IN STATUARY OF A DUTCHWOMAN
WHEELING BRICKS.

5*6

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

[Jan.,

stretched far out from under low-hanging eaves and served as
a boat-house for a little fleet of skiffs moored beneath it. I
have often fished from that balcony. It was one of our after-
dinner amusements, for sliding past the very foundations of the
house the sleepy river Waal flowed irresolutely towards the
west between banks fringed with willow.

It resembled at that moment a gorgeous Roman sash, its

colors borrowed
from the glowing
sky, and indeed
the scene present-
ed from the inn
was at all times
so boldly pictur-
esque that I was
never quite sure
that I was not
taking part in a
comic opera.

The apple-
cheeked, tow-
headed madchen
who perpetually
clattered across
the bridge in their
wooden shoes
seemed momenta-
rily about to face
and burst into
song, and from
the bright red
cottage opposite,
with a mossy roof,
I expected to see
emerge at any
moment a love-
lorn tenor who would pour forth his woes to me in an aria.
Drawing nearer the inn our eyes were gladdened by the sight of
the hostess, Frau Warendorp, who stood at the door to welcome
us, smiling, rosy, immaculate. She wore a long, white apron and
a wide, white head-dress of the kind adopted by all Holland wo-
men at the age of sixteen. It was held in place by large and
conspicuous gold ornaments, called krullen. She knew " a leetle

THE QUEEN OF HOLLAND.

1 9 oo.]

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

English," and led the way to the dining-room, where the table
was laid for tea. A glance around the room reminded us that
our friend of the Rotterdam station had told us that the inn and
village were known to few save artists, Edward Everett Hale's
son having " discovered " the place and opened it up to his
fellow-countrymen of the Paris art schools. The fireplace and
panels of the door were decorated with landscapes in oil, and
canvases turned upside down served for shelves in different
parts of the room, and the group that presently assembled at
the tea-table bore out the general artistic character. Most of
the painters were Americans of widely varying types, but hav-
ing in common an expression of geniality and unworldliness

OLD AMSTERDAM.

and a spirit of what De Wolf Hopper calls " bonhominie "
that made every meal at the inn a feast. The tea-table was
lighted, according to a Holland custom, by little spirit-lamps
enclosed in white porcelain shades. They served the double
purpose of softly illuminating the table and keeping hot the
pots of tea and coffee placed on top of them. Another touch
of color was added by an earthen brazier filled with live coals.
On this we that liked toast made our own, after helping our-
selves to brown or white bread served in large loaves on a
side table. Oat-meal, blended to a sweet creaminess by hours
of slow cooking, simmered in a large pot just inside the fire-

S'8

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

[Jan.,

THE FRIESLAND TYPE.

place, and yellow Dutch cheese,
cold meat, and ripe straw-ber-
ries completed the tempting re-
past. It was served by Mein-
chen, a typical Dutch village girl
with a rose-leaf complexion, a
wealth of yellow braided hair,
and a soft, hesitating voice.
Holding her head a little on one
side, she said to each of us in
turn : " Like you an i ? " add-
ing: " Like you your i boiled
three minutes? " It was sugges-
tive of the Inquisition, but we
did not take her pronunciation
of " egg " literally, and soon she
returned with the " ies " under
her apron, from which she roll-
ed them softly on the table-cloth.
Opposite me sat a fair-haired
American lady who was making

a study of the Dutch peasant type and the national head-
dresses. These she was painting in miniature on ivory in a
manner scarcely inferior to Amelia Kiissner's best work. A
young Danish-American represented the buoyant, perennially
youthful type of artist, and yet another interesting figure
was that of a young man from Iowa, a recent winner of the
Halgarten first prize at the Academy of Design in New York.
A class of younger students had followed him from Paris to
sketch under his guidance, and every morning he and they,
laden with easels, camp-stools, and color-boxes, would troop
gaily away down the avenue of elms, returning in the evening
tired out but always hopeful.

My neighbor on my right deserves more than passing
notice. She was an Englishwoman striving to keep middle
age at bay by a bird-like and chirrupy manner. Her remark-
able coiffure consisted of a large quantity of hair twisted into
a complicated geometrical figure, dropped into a net and
fastened securely to the back of her head. This form of hair-
dressing is known in England as a " bun," and she informed
me that, although the prevailing forms in vogue were " tea-pot
handles/' and "door-knobs," she preferred "buns."

After supper our hostess introduced us to the contents of a

1 9 oo.]

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

519

cupboard occupying one entire side of the dining-room, invit-
ing us to take from it whatever we wanted whenever we
wished. The order of meals was breakfast at half-past seven,
coffee at eleven, dinner at one, five o'clock tea, and the free-
dom of the cupboard at all times. Nevertheless Frau Waren-
dorp was always a little anxious lest we should not have
enough to eat. She hoped we would not think her extortion-
ate if she charged us four guldens (about eighty cents) a day.
We did not object to the price.

Next to the dining-room the most interesting part of the
house was the studio on the upper floor. From its walls the
faces of the villagers looked down from canvas and academy
board, and the room itself, with its ancient Dutch furniture,
queer brass tea-kettles and jugs, bright-colored china and bric-
a-brac, resembled a curiosity shop where confusion reigned
supreme.

The hospitality of the artists made us welcome to their
sanctum at all hours, and when they were " not in a working
mood " they would amuse themselves by doing monotypes, a
kind of crude etching, of us. When the likenesses were finished,
we would flock with great glee to the laundry and print these
works of art by running plates and paper through the clothes-
wringer.

On rainy days, when the art-
ists could not work out of
doors, after-dinner coffee was
served on the piazza., whilst the
lazy smoked pipes and the am-
bitious fished for minnows. Al-
ways eager for their society, we
would sit for hours in a shel-
tered corner listening to " the
sound of summer showers on
the twinkling grass," and learn-
ing many secrets of art. One
of them was, why painters fre-
quently choose for models men
and women who are not con-
ventionally beautiful. It is be-
cause what the artist seeks is
the characteristic expression
showing the soul behind rather
than regularity of feature or A DORDRECHT TYPE.

520

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

[Jan.,

beauty of color ; so, among the peasants, the faces that spoke
most eloquently of hard, continuous toil, that wore the deep-
est tints wrought by sun and rain, were the faces chosen for
models. An hour in the day which we eagerly seized was the
one directly after supper when the artists would go out for a
little evening " motif." Sometimes it would be in a boat, and
our river excursions were enlivened by the musical accompani-
ment of accordeons played by the peasants as they sat through
the long twilight in their gardens along the river bank.

The accordeon occupies in Holland the place of the parlor
organ in America, and is the only musical instrument I re-
member having seen in the village homes.

The houses are usually one story and a half high, with low-
hanging gable roofs. They are poorly lighted, as there is a
tax on window glass, also on chimneys and house servants.
The owners, mostly field laborers, receiving about forty cents
per day wages, dispense as much as possible with luxuries.
Scrubbing goes on at all times, and includes everything in and
about the house, from the shingles on the roof to the rows of
wooden shoes standing outside the door to be scoured and
whitened every evening. The bed-room and parlor combined
has one or more deep recesses in the wall, in which the beds
are made. Curtains entirely conceal these coffin-like places of
slumber during the day. Brass
and copper cooking utensils of
rare design are in common use,
and bits of antique Delft ware
are not unusual among the house-
hold china. The Dutch peasant
invests his superfluous wealth in
silver, in the form of curious and
beautiful bag clasps, brooches,
buckles, vinaigrettes, and snuff-
boxes, which are worn with
great pride by both men and
women on festival days. The
marriage dowry consists of some
such pieces of silver, in addition
to the kriillen which are the
boast of every Holland woman.
They vary in material and
value according to the wealth

of the family, of which they are "AN OBJECT OF PRIDE is THE HEAD-DRESS."

1 9 oo.]

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

521

ONE WHO LOOKS FOR BEAUTY INSTEAD
OF COLOR WILL BE DISAPPOINTED."

regarded an index. Frau War-
endorp had a pair gemmed with
pearls, but ordinarily she con-
tented herself with wearing the
simple cone-shaped kru'llen made
of spiral gold wire. She called
our attention, however, to the
thickness of this wire, adding
that there was none quite so
heavy in the village. A less
pretentious spiral than the frau's
costs one hundred dollars.

Another object of pride
among the simple women is
their collection of head-dresses
made of finest lace, the work of
their leisure hours. Its filmy
whiteness brings out to perfec-
tion the Holland complexion.
The milky fair skin and pink
cheeks of childhood become in
middle age streaked with crimson like a fall pippin, but there
remains always a suggestion of the underlying fairness pro-
ducing a " warm " tint much admired by artists and contrast-
ing strikingly with the pale, straw-colored hair almost uni-
versal amongst Holland women. One who looks for beauty
except in color will be disappointed, however. Even the
children have angular little bodies and expressionless faces.
They look weary, as if the burden of toil to be their por-
tion already rested on their young shoulders. Their plea-
sures they take sadly, and being taught to knit at the age of
four, their fingers are flying even at their play. During our
stay one of the artists gave them a fete. I remember but one
or two who showed any pleasure or surprise. " Moo i " (pretty)
was the sole comment of the most enthusiastic, though one
boy did ask for " ein tooter " (a horn), then, returning, asked
for " ander tooter" for his friend.

On bright days we drove about the country or over to
Dordrecht, with its dignified old cathedral standing on the
brink of a wide river, wherein the minutest detail of its tower-
ing facade is reproduced. The interior is bare and cold, for
since the Reformation its richly painted walls and ceiling have
been hidden beneath a coat of white plaster. In places the

522

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

[Jan.,

chipping lime uncovered a bit of faded fresco. Here the mild
face of some mediaeval saint smiles out ; there a group of
cherubs sing, and both smile and song are mute but eloquent
appeals for the restoration of beauty to God's house.

The town itself is full of dreamy charm and quite un-
touched by the modern spirit, taking its time for all things
in a leisurely, old-fashioned way. The ancient drawbridges
yawn themselves open to let an occasional fat-sided canal-boat
drift through, and there is no trace of the bustling little
steamboats so numerous on the Amsterdam canals. These,
instead of waiting for drawbridges to let them pass, lower
their adjustable smoke-stacks, duck under, and " bob up
serenely " on the other side.

On the road from Dordrecht one can never fail of interest-
ing sights. It may be a milk cart drawn by three dogs har-
nessed abreast, and urged on by a lumbering driver who walks
beside them ; or it may be a vender of cherries, big red ones
heaped up in straw baskets. These he will deliver to you on

a large green leaf at the rate
of four cents a pound. It may
be a milk-maid, a most winsome
sight when the sunbeams fil-
tering through the leaves dance
in tremulous patches on her
white head-gear, striking shafts
of light from the burnished
brass milk-cans she carries sus-
pended from a yoke about her
neck.

The Holland milk-can is ex-
actly like the ancient Greek
water-jug, except that it is
made of brass and has a handle.
It is one of many instances
where the artistic spirit has been
awakened in the Dutch by the
touch of brass.

Between the trees of the
Dordrecht road the landscape
showed yellow, with wheat fields splashed over with scarlet
poppies like blood-stains, and intersected by long, straight lines
of trees marking the cross-roads.

The prominent characteristic of the Dutch landscape is pre-

" THEY LOOK AS IF THE BURDEN OF TOIL

ALREADY RESTED ON THEIR SHOULDERS."

1900.]

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

523

cision. God gave these people the materials for a country, but
they made it themselves.

Nature is never in a lavish mood in Holland. She is docile

"THE HOLLAND MILK-CAN is LIKE THE ANCIENT GREEK WATER-JUG."

and responds to all that is asked of her, but she volunteers
nothing. There is absolutely no waste. Trees never grow in
clumps scattered through the fields, and I do not recall an
acre of woodland in all Holland. The numerous trees are
planted along the edges of the dikes, and as they absorb about
the same amount of water from the ditches at their feet, they
are uniform in, size. In the canals and ditches, that form a
network over all Holland, the water is changed every forty-
eight hours by the aid of wind-mills and steam water-works,
and when it reaches the sea-coast the whole of the vast over-
flow is lifted over the sand dunes and emptied into the sea.
To bring a desolate waste of nearly ten thousand square miles
to the perfection of modern Holland means an expenditure of
labor well-nigh inconceivable. The achievements of Hannibal's
armies and Napoleon's legions are not more colossal. To the
student of history Holland presents a most interesting exam-
ple of the force of circumstances in the moulding of character;

524

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

[Jan.,

for the unflinching purpose and unwearying patience that could
wrest a country from the waters, then set bounds to the ocean
itself, have borne fruit in that national characteristic, com-
posed of tenacity and faith and hope in the face of fearful
odds, which we call " Dutch courage."

The problem of material existence has taxed the Holland
mind immemorially and left no time for the growth of imagina-
tion and fancy. Uniform stolidity of glance and deportment
attest that it is the practical view of life that prevails. Poetry
is not native to this soil. In religious thought fanaticism ap-
pears to go hand in-hand with a certain moral laxness. I saw
a 'curious sight after a church festival that occurs once a year
and assembles some five thousand country folk. The religious
service over, the young people scattered to the various inns
about the country for supper and recreation. About forty
couples came to Rijsoord, and after applying themselves vigor-
ously to Frau Warendorp's bill of fare and Herr Warendorp's
wine-list, they clearly evinced their appreciation of joys other

" UNIFORM STOLIDITY OF GLANCE AND DEPORTMENT ATTEST THAT THE PRACTICAL

VIEW OF LIFE PREVAILS."

than spiritual. The evening was still young when nearly every
one of the twenty maidens had reclined her head on the
shoulder of her accompanying swain, safe within the circle of
his arm. There were a few exceptions, but in these cases it

1900.]

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

525

A ZEELAND WOMAN.

was the young man who repos-
ed on the shoulder of the young
woman. My mind reverted to
the innocent gayety of the
French peasants, amongst whom,
I think, one could not happen
on such a sight, and although
Frau Warendorp did her best to
remove an unpleasant impres-
sion, remarking that they came
from " Zeeland," which is equiva-
lent to saying they were from
New Jersey and were not ac-
countable, I was but half con-
vinced.

At that same moment, and
within a stone's throw of this
love-feast, some over-scrupulous
Dutchmen were paying the
penalty in the county jail of a
too rigid interpretation of the decalogue. Undue zeal for
the glory of God had inspired them to prevent two young
men from riding through their town on bicycles on Sunday.
In the altercation the men of the village

" Proved that they were orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks,"

and tumbled one of the young men into the canal. He proved
to be the son of the mayor of Rotterdam, and the next day
an officer appeared with an order of arrest for these muscular
Christians.

The church festival brought together a great variety of
national costume. The Zeeland girls wore black gowns made
with short, tight sleeves and cut square at the neck. Their
hands and round white arms were bare, and they wore neck-
laces made of four rows of cut jet beads. Their kriillen were
flat and highly polished like little mirrors. The men wore
corduroy bloomers and roundabout jackets with satin sleeves.
Flat beaver hats and belts clasped with huge silver buckles
completed the rather unattractive costume. Some carried
knives in pendant silver sheaths, but on this occasion they
served only the peaceful purpose of spreading butter on bread

526

A HOLLAND ART VILLAGE.

[Jan.,

for hungry sweethearts. The artists buzzed about like bees
that afternoon, trying surreptitiously to jot down bits of cos-
tume ; but the girls were too quick for them. When they
were told, however, that the artists were only trying to " take
their pictures," they were thoroughly pleased, and one and all
offered to pose.

A few days later it came our turn to ride for the last time
down the avenue of elms, throwing pennies to the children,
waving our handkerchiefs and gazing after the Rijsoordsch
Koffiehuis until the turn of the road hid it from our wistful
eyes.

But I had not yet seen the last of Rijsoord. A year later,
as I was strolling through a picture gallery in New York, I
stopped with a cry of pleasure before a familiar avenue of
elms. It was twilight ; the road was in deep shadow, and
there was the turn ; and I peered hard into the canvas for a
glimpse of the inn and Frau Warendorp smiling at the door.
But the artist had stopped short of them. In the corner of
the canvas I read his name. It was that of our guide and
friend, the artist we met that first day at the Rotterdam
station.

THE MEN WORE CORDUROY BLOOMERS."

1900.] MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 527

MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE.

BY REV. GEORGE McDERMOT, C.S P.

'R. WILLIAM HURRELL MALLOCK contri-
buted to the Nineteenth Century for November
an article of great importance, not quite so much
for what it contains as for what it suggests.
There are most mistaken conceptions of the lead-
ing principles in which he sees the action of the church towards
the discoveries of the future ; and yet there is the recognition,
in a way, of the elementary fact to Catholics, the most recondite
fact of all facts to non-Catholics, that the church has always
looked upon science as mistress in its own domain. Whatever
science could grasp by its methods and make its own belonged
to it ; and if discoveries should render necessary a new inter-
pretation to be put on passages in the inspired writings that
is, on passages as to which the church, or the pope speaking
infallibly, has not pronounced such new meaning must be
looked upon as the true one. Mr. Mallock is altogether wrong
in implying that the church, equivalently or metaphorically, ex-
claimed Thou hast conquered, Galileo ! I do not blame him for
not appreciating a case so very difficult for persons outside the
church to understand, impossible for English-speaking people
outside the church to understand, and difficult for those English-
speaking people within the church to understand whose minds
had been formed in a school of thought hostile to her ; I only
say the church suffered no defeat, consequently she could not
have confessed defeat.

SCIENCE AND SCRIPTURE INTERPRETATION.

However, it serves as an illustration. The meaning put on
a passage in Josue, and possibly another in Isaias, by theolo-
gians and a Congregation, was that the sun moved from east
to west, as all men thought they saw it move and as their
fathers before them had thought. When the double motion of
the earth became an established fact, a meaning in accordance
with that fact should thenceforth be the meaning of the
words. Any one recognizes in the light of scientific truth that

528 MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. [Jan.,

the words were merely descriptive of physical phenomena,* but
no one could have supposed, as Dr. Pusey and other English-
men of his school have supposed, as well as the mass of
writers who belong to no school in particular, that the theolo-
gians of the church ought to have seen in the face of Galileo's
hypothesis that Josue used the words as we say sunrise, sun-
set, that is with only a phenomenal meaning.

The case comes up constantly ; f it has served as an illus-
tration of a good point which I think Mr. Mallock has made,
or at least suggested, namely, that the only effect of the most
revolutionary discoveries in science will be in the interpretation
of the Scriptures. This is really correct, and our readers must
understand that such increased knowledge in the natural and
experimental sciences will be in effect nothing more than hand-
ing to the exegetist an improved lexicon. I do not think Mr.
Mallock will say I misrepresent his purport.

I have said the case of Galileo serves as a good illustration
of this very point ; it serves also as an illustration of another
point^ the almost insuperable difficulty which a certain training
with regard to method and matter and an exclusive intellec-
tual atmosphere combine to make for the Englishman or
American in understanding the nature and quality of the
church's being. This is due to certain elements added, one
might say, to the substance of the mind, the prejudice and the
passion fostered through three centuries of conflict, either war-
like or social, when the latter meant F^ victis, fed to fatness
by literature, dramatic, political, philosophical, poetic, spread
among the masses through light literature, tracts, sermons, and
libels hawked by broad-sheets in the streets, and finally crys-
tallized in the historical literature which is the product of
all the other kinds.

A LATE RECOGNITION OF THE CHURCH.

There is a disposition showing itself recently to look at the
church in a spirit not unworthy of the most stupendous chain of
facts in the history of the race. One is tempted to pity the
men who spoke the language of Shakspere and Bacon for not
finding in the church, until the latest hour, anything but the

* Nothing can be more dishonest than the attacks on Catholic theologians from all English
sources for laying stress on the literal meaning of the words. Something shall be said about
this.

t Dr. Mivart used it a very short time ago ; immediately before him another Catholic. It
is a stumbling-block to many of them, no doubt of their own making ; but what must it be to
outsiders ?

1900.] MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 529

reality of that Babylon in which the inspired writers had be-
held the combination of all wickedness .and power, in which
men of learning could only discover the influences which wither
the intellect and corrupt the heart. This is the explanation,
however, of the notion which puts the church in antagonism
to modern science and material prosperity as the consequence
of the triumphs of modern science. Well, now there seems a
growing recognition of her unique, her humanly speaking in-
explicable place amid the organisms of all kinds that have
appeared and have disappeared in the life of the race, and
those which exist for contrast with her or comparison. Those
who regard social facts with a scientific mind, who judge by
principles the phenomena of society, see in the church that one
organism whose life, past and present, contains the promise of
the future of mankind. The dreams of Positivism have no
foundation except the ideas borrowed from her ; science can-
not be an alternative, because it neglects the moral part, that
part whose imperious claims have been troubling all the
generations since man first found the microcosm within the
mirror of the wars around him. This is the clue to Mr.
Mallock's article. He perceives that the church is not only a
moral force but an intellectual one. He puts away the
offensive plausibility that her influence under varying con-
ditions arises from the flexibility which sacrifices principle to a
particular gain there and then. It is too clear that her long
dominion could not be maintained by a makeshift policy ; it
must rest on something eternal and immutable. Mr. Mallock
in the upper and serene air sees that she is profound in her
wisdom, which is the strength that has drawn all the forces of
the past to her feet, and will draw the forces of science in the
day to come,

AN INCONSISTENCY, WITH ITS EXPLANATION.

With the calm eye of a student he sees her unchangeable
in belief, constant in the claim to exercise authority in the
Name and to teach all she had been commanded by the Lord.
To the serious mind there is something striking in the fact
that her influence is as wide and her confidence as strong in
this age of the science whose votaries thought would be fatal
to her, as when she sat as umpire amidst kings, ruled her own
schools as mistress, stood against the ancient philosophies as
the teacher of the highest truth. And here one must pause to
wonder at an inconsistency. Her triumph over the pagan

VOL. LXX. 34

530 MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. [Jan.,

schools is regarded, and rightly, as an evidence of intellectual
and moral strength ; her hold on men's mind in the Middle
Ages is looked upon as a sinister and corrupting influence.
What makes the difference ? There is no proof she used wea-
pons in the one case she had not employed in the other. She
gave the same doctrinal nourishment to each. The explanation
seems simple. The courage, sacrifice, zeal which won the Bar-
barian ancestors of the men of the Middle Ages were the
qualities that gathered to her fold the Jew, the Greek, the
Roman, the races of Africa and the East, in the freshness of
her youth. These qualities must have been inspired by some-
thing the hand cannot touch and to which this success was
due. We can count and weigh the powers to which any other
propagandism owed success. Conquest was the spring of every
one of them. Galilean fishermen taking captive Greeks, proud
of intellectual supremacy, and Romans, lawgivers of the world,
is not a more astonishing fact than that of the fierce nations
of the north and west, the descendants of those Barbari-
ans, looking to this aged Italian or to that as the authority
they were to obey in certain things against their own
rulers.

Among the difficulties which stand in the way of a fair
understanding of the church there is one which affects men
like an anodyne, namely, the theoretical and practical human-
ity of our age. Science has done much to lessen suffering;
but it forgets that the church in the rude days of medical and
surgical science was the patron of all that might help to
assuage pain and make life more tolerable. Take one instance:
her exertions on behalf of the most unhappy class of sufferers,
the lepers. I should like to say something about this side-way
knowledge on the high-road of Christian beneficence, but I
assume it. Here, at least, there is no conflict between the two
powers man's good is the object of each * as if ever there
could be a conflict between Christian and scientific truth. The
point I wish to bring -out is, that there is an illusion in the
idea that because one branch of study makes life easier and
lengthens it on the average, it has done more for man than
religion. This is neglecting the large part of nature, lying in
the affections and the moral impulses, for the intellect. It is
making man an intellectual brute, even though he covered the
land with hospitals. Yet the prejudice is there among other
prejudices, and I cannot sufficiently express my admiration for

* I mean medical and surgical science inspired by charity like that of the church.

i goo.] MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 531

the candor which enables Mr. Mallock to divest himself from
its influence.

He expresses himself, no doubt, as though there were in
some way an antagonism between the church and modern
science. He speaks of a reconciliation, or at least of the em-
ployment by the church of the weapons of science ; he allows
the possibility of finding a mod^^s vivendi between the two
powers ; he distinctly raises the question whether in the face
of advancing knowledge religion can be tolerated by science at
all ; and the most it seems that he can concede as the repre-
sentative of science is the possibility of the truth of the Chris-
tian religion.. This is the starting point of his argument, taken
as an assumption only used provisionally for the declaration of
the real issue into which the controversy is resolved : Can
men believe that the Catholic Church is true actually ? Here,
then, we gather the opinion which men of science hold that
they belong to one camp, while they look upon Christian men
as belonging to another; possibly they are the small and com-
pact forces of civilization assailed by an endless host of Bar-
barians, or possibly something like the glamour over the late
Professor Tyndall* leads them to suppose they are martyrs,
or better still, the forlorn hope, as of Spartans at Thermopylae,
but destined to a longer strife than the three hundred. There
is some part of this illusion on Mr. Mallock, but upon the
whole his eyes have been touched by some magic, and he
sees through the haze ; if not as when the sun shines on a
landscape, yet with a power to see the cities of men, the fields
of labor, the influence of the state and human instinct drawing
the separated constituents together into a union strengthened
because accredited by the profound influence of religion.

THE REAL CHARACTER OF THE OBSTACLES.

It would be an oversight not to present the real character
of the obstacles preventing appreciation of the Church
by the English-speaking peoples. In doing this I have no
interest except the cause of truth. There is a great deal
of flippant writing at this moment about the superiority of
these peoples over the nations of Southern Europe. Dr.
Mivart, who lectures the Congregations, and a few more I
could mention e. g., the half-instructed convert who thinks he

* Tyndall promised that no matter how men might persecute opinion, or to what
lengths ; how tyranny might proceed as the instrument of intolerance or something stilted in
this way these problems should still be agitated when " all things shall have melted into
the infinite azure of the past."

532 MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. [Jan.,

knows more than St. Thomas; the utterly uninstructed man
born in the faith, who takes his philosophy from magazines
and his history from newspapers these men are pushing into
prominence, as if a new discovery, or rather a new pretension,
this idea of superiority over the men whose ancestors framed
that science of right which is the basis of modern law, and
which surpassed all other jurisprudence.

The fact is, it is the revival of a theory almost as old as
the Treaty of Westphalia. The religious and political settle-
ment then apportioned Continental Europe among the creeds
very much in the proportions we have to-day. The ancient
antagonism between the Germanic Empire and Southern
Europe imported into itself the religious hatred ploughed into
the soul by the wars and retaliations of a hundred years. It
became the boast later on that wherever the Reformation had
fixed its quarters material prosperity followed ; in the nations
which retained the old faith some were decaying, some show-
ing the first symptoms of decay, some already in the last
stage of decrepitude. The English took up the idea. The
most insular and least informed people outside their own in-
terests and intellectual efforts of any in Europe, the philosophy,
the polemics, and political history of England put forth the
great fact that the reformed nations stood foremost in indus-
try, prosperity, comfort, and education, while the Catholic
nations were going back to the worst features of mediaeval
barbarism the unlimited power of the king over all with the
exception of the spiritual authority of the pope, the power of
the nobles over their vassals, the helpless submission of the
latter, and the obedience of all, without exception, to that
spiritual authority. In this favorable condition of the Prot-
estant nations England, as might be expected, in the judg-
ment of her sons, took an intellectual, moral, and financial
precedence as far ahead of the reformed states as these
were of the popish ones. In this present century, at any
rate, the Germans were too well informed to be any longer
deluded by the idea of the intellectual supremacy of the Teu-
tonic over the Latin peoples. The English remained and still
remain in a stiff and unappreciative mental state. With regard
to the science of the world, the literature and philosophy of
the world,* they are far away from the rest in a highly culti-

* There are some Englishmen acquainted with the success of Frenchmen and Italians in
the exact sciences, but they know nothing of the vast social literature of the latter people,
the high political and elegant literature of the former.

i QOO.] MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 533

vated Prospero island of their own, an Ultima Thule of conceit
and self-righteousness. We have, then, this intellectual preju-
dice and the inherited hatred of furious social and political
changes against the victims of them to account for the separa-
tion of the British mind from all knowledge of the church's
claims to be called a religious and moral force in comparison
with which all political societies are weak of themselves, and
all other creeds are the puzzle of the grave and just-minded,
the mockery of the frivolous or the cynical. The impact of that
influence shapes the English Catholic mind to some degree ;
the philosophy, the morals, the opinions, the legislation, which
have gone to create that influence are too strong for some
Catholics to resist ; so that we have some English-speaking
Catholics almost regarding the infallibility of the pope as not
conditioned by the limits of divine action so much as by their
patronage, looking at the administrative functions of the Con-
gregations as the treasury into which were flowing all the
abnormal degrees of meanness, mendacity, and fraud too great
for expenditure elsewhere.*

Mr. Mallock affords by his language and method a remarka-
ble contrast to non-Catholics, and to such Catholics as have
been recently airing themselves in magazines and newspapers,
and to such Catholics as went into paroxysms at the Defini-
tion of the Papal Infallibility and whose head-shakings at the
Syllabus were as of palsy, while they heard the roarings of
Professor Huxley and his band, or listened with sympathy to
the popguns of the press, hurt by the thought that there
should be a restraint on libel, injured by the idea that
imagination should give way to truth. Anything in the shape
of philosophy in England metaphysics, abstract politics,
economics, morals, any and all, are Protestant to the core.
All these owe their existence to the principle of the Refor-
mation, that the Bible as interpreted by each one was the
Christian religion. Scientific criticism, which is the skilled
application of the principle of private interpretation, decides
that this Bible for which the peace of Europe was broken
from end to end, for which kings and great men were
assassinated, for which priests were hanged or tortured, for
which dedicated women were subjected to outrages in com-
parison with which death at the stake would be a blessed
release, for which fertile places from the Rhine to the Vistula,
from the Baltic to the Danube, were made wildernesses such as

* What else do Dr. Mivart and others mean ?

534 MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. [Jan.,.

might be described in the language of those savage warriors who
boasted that their horses galloped without stumbling over the
sites of cities, that no grass grew where their war-steeds had
trodden scientific criticism decides that this Bible is without
inspiration, that it is no authority for itself, none for its con-
tents ; that it is literature, bad literature, foul literature, cruel
literature, blasphemous literature.

THE ATTITUDE OF ENGLISH INTELLECTUAL FORCES AGAINST

THE CHURCH.

Then the Reformation which changed the Christian doctrine,
maimed the authority of the church, degraded the priesthood,
and wiped out the sacramental system which is the central
point of advancement from the Old Dispensation to the New,
this revolution is condemned as proceeding from false princi-
ples. I must press this point of view. On behalf of Luther's
Bible the story of his finding the copy is, I think, now left to
good old ladies whose purses are open to the begging letter-
writer an'd the man in rusty black; left to school-mistresses
approved of by the parson's wife or the Dissenting minister's
lady; left to Irish Orangemen and Mr. Kensit, on behalf of
this unauthorized and impudent selection of the writings that
were from those that were not inspired a revolt more epoch-
making than the French Revolution, the only social event
with which, so far as I know, it can be compared was excited
against a society which had lasted since the fall of the Western
Empire, against institutions of teaching and charity resting on
the gratitude of nations, and against the church under whose
guidance this society had formed itself, and under whose pro-
tection those institutions had been begun and had been fostered.

If the causes of the Reformation were mistaken ones, if the
reasons put forth for its necessity were erroneous, and of these
verdicts there can now be no question, one cannot easily
understand the constitution of mind which still insists that the
church is the enemy of intellectual progress, while the forms
of Christianity which issued from plain falsehood or plain mis-
take are held up as the forces under which the human race
marched to liberty and knowledge. -Let there be no con-
founding of distinct things. It was not for science and politi-
cal liberty the Reformers rose in rebellion ; but it was in the
cause of a Christianity not later than the Fourth Council or the
Sixth against the decadent Christianity of the sixteenth cen-
tury. A reasonable student of history and Biblical criticism, in

1900.] MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 535

the light of the conclusions arrived at by , experts, would ask
for proof that authority to decide on Biblical interpretation
was taken from the church when the Fifth or the Seventh Coun-
cil sat. This is one point ; another is Mr. Mallock's the irre-
sistible conclusion that destructive criticism has established the
Catholic contention, that the Bible is only a part of the reve-
lation of God and needs a living authority to expound it.* So
far the case resolves itself into the alliterative epigram of Posi-
tivism : There is no halting-place between Rome and Rational-
ism ; but Positivism, every form of rationalism, the scientific
atheism which has " not found the soul under the scalpel," is a
development, or, if you like it better, the last analysis of Prot-
estant principles. One must welcome Mr. Mallock's fairness
and insight ; but there are misconceptions of the church's trust
to be guarded against, incorrect statements of her position with
reference to the sacred writings to be borne in mind, and a
mistaken judgment as to the inspiration of these. As I have
said, he has caught the important fact that she need not dread
a science which will only afford to her theologians additional
help in penetrating some distance into mysteries on the
outer ring of which they now must rest content to stand.
But when a man so painstaking and so fair-minded falls into
mistakes despite the evidences of labored thought, how may
one hope for appreciation from the thinking and the unthink-
ing who are fed upon the philosophy compounded of Hobbes, of
Locke, and of Hume, or upon the. husks of each one of them?
The whole of British philosophy is in one way or another
the outcome or the reflex of these thinkers. The mere state-
ment would explain the rabid hatred of the church as the
enemy of political and philosophical liberty. There are posi-
tions in which Hobbes and Hume are as far apart as the poles,
yet in spite of this there is a cast of thought over the whole
of Hume, over his principles or positions, over his method and
objections, which would make one think he had sat at the feet
of Hobbes. The political philosophy of Locke is the logical
contradictory to that of Hobbes, but both stand on the same
fundamental principle, the will of the prince, the will of the gov-
ernment ; the morality of Locke, so far as it is at all systematic,
is Christian, but his psychology destroys morality as effectually
as Hobbes' metaphysics. They are imitated by the host of able
or mediocre men who in England have engaged themselves in
abstract thought or the formulative synthesis of experimental dis-

*This is substantially what he says in a statement of several pages.

536 MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. [Jan.,

covery, who have considered a particular society with reference to
any theory of government or society in the abstract, with refer-
ence to the universal theories of legislation, judgment, and
execution ; and all these thinkers have found a monster in the
church, a diabolical intelligence and cruelty and craft, a com-
bination of the severest asceticism and the grossest debase-
ment, of the most generous sacrifice and the most calculating
perfidy. This mass of opinion is a thick and lofty wall of in-
numerable strong towers ; and who may scale them ? It is the
kingdom of the world against the church ; the old, old con-
flict the synagogue trying to strangle her, Greece to slay her
with a pitiless contempt, Rome to trample out her life by her
lictors and legions ; and yet she is here, as Mr. Mallock sees, in
the face of all the acuteness acquired by her enemies in their
pursuits in spite of what investigation, tabulation, adjustment
for experiments confer; she is here holding her own against
them, though they make light of forces and influences which
cannot be harnessed like the forces of nature ; she is here and
she must be reckotled with.

I have referred to Mr. Mallock's mistake concerning the
church's connection with Galileo that is, if I may call the
inquiry of a court an inquiry by the church.* Even at the
risk of wearying the reader I shall briefly offer one or two
points. If there be any meaning in language, the Scriptures
seemed to have declared the immobility of the earth. It was
not merely that the sun was commanded to stand still : there
were texts which must have formed part of the ratio decidendi
of the Congregation, a few of which I shall cite: "Thou didst
found the earth on its stable support ; it shall not be moved
for ever " ; " He hath fixed the earth, which shall not be
moved"; " Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the
earth?" " Upon what were its supports established?" " Then
the fountains of waters appeared and the foundations of the
world were discovered " ; " He hath corrected the world, which
shall not be moved." Against these was the Copernican
theory, suggested by a priest, and subsequently adopted and
so u^ed by Galileo, without advancing it beyond the stage of
an hypothesis, that Protestants and Catholics took scandal.
Among the Protestants was Bacon. No instructed Protestant
out of England or America holds that the infallibility of the
church or a pope was involved in the decree.

* I do not agree with Dr. Mivart that they are the same thing. Dr. Mivart as a member
of the bar should be more exact in his terms.

1900.] MR. MALLOCK ON THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 537

The text " Thou didst found the earth on its stable
support " must now be interpreted, if one wishes to be precise
into "Thou didst fix it in its orbit"; and this is what will
happen, as Mr. Mallock evidently means, with the advance
of scientific knowledge. The best part, however, of his appli-
cation of the scientific method, from his own point of view, is
the putting aside consideration of the cosmic sciences and ex-
amining the subject from the text of the historical teachings
of science. The church is in the midst of a thousand formulas
of belief, of doubt, of despair. Among these states of mind
or feeling the divine society asks humanity to hear her mes-
sage, to hear her title to speak of Him whose life has drawn
to it the best men, whose character and promises are the only
hope of those who are wearied and heavy-burdened with the
knowledge of many things and the appalling desolation of the
world. She is in the midst of the nations, yet apart from them ;
a force like a subtlest ether pervading, penetrating all things,
yet no abstraction ;* intangible, yet a power as adamant, ruling
without armies or taxes ; a moral, irresistible authority, but
visible from pole to pole, from east to west visible as a city
on a mountain ; visible with her hand on the head of infancy,
on the head of sickness, on the head of age, a hand on the
union which consecrates affection, a hand above the grave
where all the sorrows are hidden.

.She has a life; is it not worth considering? It is peculiar;
for, unlike other societies, its beginning is not in some strong
robber the other day; it passes like a spirit into and through
the cloud masses of the far-off past. As it saw Greece and
Rome, and the empires of the East and Egypt, so it looks
upon the heights where the undivided race planned to escape
the doom of their mighty fathers ; it floats on the shoreless
waters above that drowned kingdom of the world so terrible in
its strength and its wickedness ; it climbs the ages until it finds
rest in the innocence of the days before the Fall. This is her
story, this is the continuity of her knowledge ; to tell this is
her mission. Let it be borne in mind she inherits the primal
religion and the revelations which converged on the people of
God. The Jewish Church was her forerunner, and all lights
directed thither were part of the preparation for the work she
was to accomplish in the personal, social, and religious re
demption of man. Though Mr. Mallock has not caught the
full sense of this abiding consciousness, he understands that

* Pace Dr. Mivart.

HOPE. [Jan.,

she too has heard the message to Our Lady and to the shep-
herds, and bears witness to it ; she knows, if not the deeper
mysteries, the facts of the Private and the Public Life of the
Lord as they enter into her duty of teacher and into her life
as the continuation of His life on earth. Protestantism, led on
by criticism, may deny or obscure the miraculous Birth, the
Resurrection, the Ascension ; in heart and mind the church was
with Our Lady and the shepherds at the Birth, she was be-
fore Him when He emerged from the tomb, she heard His
words for the forty days, and she bowed her head for His
blessing when He ascended out of sight. In my poor words
I cannot imitate the literary fire in which Mr. Mallock has ex-
pressed his perception of her consciousness of the three great
facts just named facts inseparable from the proof of the
Lord's divinity. He sees that she alone is the witness of the
relations of God to man specifically given to her charge. Well,
I can admire the insight which enabled him to see so much, and
the candor with which he draws the inference that she will go
down to the end of time the guardian of the inspired writings,
the guardian and the witness of the whole deposit of the faith-

HOPE.

BY W. A. MALINE.

EATING against sharp prison bars of life,
The Soul immortal, to the body chained,
By lust of earthly pleasures deadly pained,
Full weary grows of Nature's ceaseless strife ;
Through thee, bright Hope, her courage is maintained ;
Through thee, blest one of heaven, is vict'ry gained ;
Thou lustrous, spotless one, with promise rife
Dost ward her safe from passion's deadly strife.
When on thy placid brow her gaze is turned,
Reflected there she sees the smiling morn,
Dark shadows fly, sweet peace the soul has earned
Through toil and prayer, is gained, content is won ;
Thy sweeping joyful wings, divinely fair,
With her ascending, pierce the heavenly air.

1900.] " BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION." 539

"BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION" THROUGH THE

LAITY.

BY M. J. RIORDAN.

ENEVOLENT assimilation" is in the air a shib-
boleth in the mouths of expansionists, a mockery
with the anti-imperialists. " The White Man's
burden " weighs heavily on many ; is a jest with
the rest of the world. A new light has come
over the spirit of our dreams ; the question of duty toward
those without the pale of our civilization is ruffling our minds.
Whether it is better to leave the tribes of the uncivilized and
semi-civilized to grope their devious way to the higher life, or
to take arms against our untutored brothers and by dint of
powder and shell "assimilate" them? that is the question.

And it is troubling us vastly. The press is full of it, the
pulpit rings with it, political parties are at clash over it. But
the strange thing of it all is, that we do not seem to realize
that it was not Kipling who laid " the White Man's burden "
upon our shoulders, not President McKinley who first enun-
ciated the doctrine of "benevolent assimilation," but that
Other, the latchet of whose shoe neither they nor any man
who has ever lived are worthy to loose. We seem to have
forgotten, in the jangle of words and the heat of discussion,
that the method and means of " benevolent assimilation" were
finally settled and " the White Man's burden " was laid for all
time when, in those days, Christ, the Holy One of Israel,
spoke to his Apostles, saying, " Going, teach all nations."

In these few words the eternal Son of God solved the diffi-
culty which is now disturbing the English-speaking world.
Unlike the pronouncements of our worthy President and the
great English litterateur, they contain not only the sum-total
of duty to those without the fold, but the method by which
duty is to be accomplished. In this, too, do the words of the
Saviour differ from the dictum of our latter-day guides, that
whereas a clash of arms and a blare of trumpets, and fields
sodden with blood, are implied in " benevolent assimilation "
and in "the White Man's burden," nothing but peace and sun-
shine, elevation of soul and tranquillity of pursuit are hinted

540 " BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION" [Jan.,

at in the divine words, " Teach all nations/' The two sets of
teaching present the contrast between force mastering mind
and love stronger than death. And the time has come when
Americans American Catholics, too must make a choice.
Which shall it be, force or love?

There can be no doubt but that a fresh field is opening
before us as a nation. From henceforth our energies will
have to do not alone with upbuilding within our present con-
fines, but with leading others strangers either to higher and
better lives or to destruction. New responsibilities have come
to us with the extension of our civil power to the Philippines,
to Hawaii, to Porto Rico, and to Cuba, and only the God of
nations knows over what other lands, over what other simple
people our flag may wave in years to come. By the dawn's
early light of a day not far distant may it not be seen float-
ing over the walls of China perchance over the domes of
Mexico? Who, in the light of recent events, can say? Quien
sabe ?

Indeed, new responsibilities have crowded upon us in the
past two years, and what the future may bring forth we can-
not know. But this we do know, that it is the part of wisdom
to do our present duty and to prepare for the new. And
American Catholics, of all Americans, have a surpassing work
laid upon their shoulders by the recent developments in our
civil life ; surpassing by reason of its immensity, surpassing by
reason of its Christliness : none other, indeed, than that they
shall see to it that our new possessions shall be fortified in
the body of Christ, which for long has been their habitation,
and that they shall benevolently assimilate to themselves, after
the manner of the Lord, so many of those that lie in the
valley of the shadow of death as means and grace and work
will permit. Indeed, white men Catholics especially have a
burden, but it has been laid by Christ, and his burdens are
light, his yoke is easy, and of this substance is it made
" Teach all nations."

It must surely be evident that American Catholics have a
work to do. And how is it to be done? Assuredly not by
talking over it, or groaning at the prospect of it. Like all
work particularly American work it must be done, after a
thorough understanding of its nature, by an efficient doing
of it.

We can have no doubt about the nature of the work, for
Christ has defined it clearly. It is teaching teaching the

1900.] " BENEVOLENT ASSIMILA TION" 541

Gospel, the law of right living, the relations of creature to
Creator, the doctrines of the Catholic Church not alone to
the rich and the intelligent and the civilized, but to all nations
the white, the black, the poor, the ignorant, the depraved.
If the Filipinos are not yet taught this lesson, which some
assert and others deny, then we must teach them ; if the
Chinese, then must they be our pupils; if the Hindoos, we must
be at their side ; if the worldly-wise in our own communities,
then must our voices be raised toward them. All all have
been made our proteges by the commission of our divine
Master, save those alone who have attained the pinnacles of
God, for at the feet of such must we sit and listen.

But teaching implies teachers, as it implies those who are
taught. To whom, then, shall we look to assume this office?
To whom but to those and their successors who received from
Christ the blessing and the command, " Receive ye the Holy
Ghost," " Going therefore teach ye all nations." The Lord's
arm has not been shortened and these consecrated teachers
we have with us yet in the persons of his ministers, the priest-
hood. To them has been delegated the function of teaching,
and their competency is assured by the gift of the Holy Spirit
that for ever rests upon them.

And the Lord provides these teachers in sufficient number,
if only we would open our eyes to see it. In France and
Italy and Belgium and Germany and Ireland and Spain they
swarm, and are an offence by reason of their swarming to over-
sensitive American and English eyes. And they are all too
willing to exercise their God-given office of teaching, if only
we would be generous enough to remember those other words
of the Saviour, " The laborer is worthy of his hire." It is not
because they are unwilling, but rather because we to whom
much has been given are not meeting rightful expectations^
that the teaching of all nations has not been advancing as it
should.

It is well to remind Catholics that the sneer, " It takes four
dollars to get five to the heathen," has never been applied to
Catholic missionary effort. It is well, also, to remind them
that the funds supplied have never approximated to the
necessities. On the other hand, the supply of teachers has
always been greatly in excess of the possibilities of employ-
ment afforded by the available funds. The whole state of the
question, therefore, is this : that while the demand for teachers
of all nations is great and the available supply is equal to the

54 2 "BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION" [Jan.,

demand, nevertheless, because of lack of funds, neither the de-
mand can be filled nor the supply utilized.

OBVIOUSLY THE CONNECTING LINK IS THE LAYMAN.

Without his aid Christ's positive command, " Teach all na-
tions," cannot be fulfilled. On the layman, therefore, rests a
great responsibility ; one which he may no more shirk than he
may shirk the responsibility of caring for his own family, for
the Creator has put upon him the one duty as the other, each
in its due measure. Here is the American Catholic white man's
burden. It has been upon him long, now pressing heavier than
ever before, and in the future it will increase in weight. How
has he borne it? how will he bear it?

In the past he has borne it at best but haltingly. He had
too many other loads more important ones to give his
shoulder to, and the needs of those who had never heard the
Gospel were lost in the closer, more pressing demands of those
about him who were in danger of losing the heritage of faith
which they had received unless safeguards were thrown around
them. Schools, churches, hospitals were needed. Here was
the first and urgent duty, and magnanimously was it met ; so
well, indeed, that it seems nothing short of miraculous; so well
that the annual saving to the State in New York City alone,
through Catholic charity and education, is reported to be more
than $4,000,000. No wonder that during these years of build-
ing the spirit of mission work among the heathen has not been
developed among us ; no marvel at all that, instead of giving,
we have been constantly receiving. Nearly $6,000,000 of
foreign contributions have been thus far put into Catholic
mission work in this country through the medium of the
" Association of the Propagation of the Faith " alone, and at
home there has been inaugurated another missionary effort,
under the name of the Catholic Missionary Union, which,
though in its infancy, is sending $4,000 a year to apostolic men
in the South in order to help to gather in " the other sheep
that are not of this fold." Nor are all our churches or schools
or hospitals built yet. We will continue to build them and
there will be need for their building till the end of time. But
the fact remains that thus far our efforts have been purely
domestic, provincial as it were, not universal, as the words of
Christ, " Teach all nations," bade them to be. In our century
of life we have sent few, very few, to teach the nations ; have
contributed little, very little, to send teachers from abroad

1900.] "BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION" 543

into the field. Whether under the conditions surrounding us
we have met our obligations to the heathen, who shall say?
Perhaps we have, but it is safe to assert that we shall be under
the necessity of extending our efforts increasingly, year by
year, if we are to fulfil our obligation for the future.

We are now a firmly established church, full of robust
vitality, well developed, well organized, in the strength of our
prime. We have much at home on which to expend our ener-
gies, but the time has come when we must expand if we would
fulfil our whole mission. Charity begins at home, and ours, by
force of circumstances, has, in large measure, been restricted to
home, but it has been well said that charity which always re-
mains at home ceases at a certain point to ''be charity and
quickly degenerates into selfishness. Expansion has already
come in our civil life ; the time is at hand when it must appear
in our spiritual life as well or decay may be expected.

Our ecclesiastical authorities are alive to the necessities, and
have already organized with a view to meeting the require-
ments of the future. A branch of the world-wide " Association
of the Propagation of the Faith " has been established, under
the presidency of Cardinal Gibbons, and the management of
Drs. Magnien and Granjon, of St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore.
This association has the endorsement of nearly every prelate
and prominent churchman in the country, and the good will of
all ; and it is hoped that it may be made the medium of the
development among us of the missionary idea and of the diffu-
sion of spiritual enlightenment to the dark corners of the earth.
Its object is to procure missionaries in countries where priests
are numerous and have them take up the work of spreading
the Gospel among the heathen. The association, of which this
is a branch, maintains 5,600 priests and more than 10,000 re-
ligious women in all parts of the world ; in China and Africa,
and the islands of the Pacific ; in India and Northern Europe
and South America in fact, wherever there is a soul to be
saved and enlightened. No salaries are paid the officers of the
association ; no salaries are paid the missionaries, jnen or
women ; nothing but the necessaries of life are furnished, and
these but the most meagre, as all know who have ever met
the Catholic missionary. Indeed, the bulk of the funds is ex-
pended in ransoming slaves, educating youth, building stations,
and caring for the infirm. The chronicle of the work being
done by these devoted missionaries is astounding a hue of
spiritual light thrown across the canvas of a material age.

544 "BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION" [Jan.,

While the church has such heroes she is surely vital, for they
vitalize her. It shall be a tremendous day for her when she shall
have them not. It is the special function of the Society of the
Propagation of the faith to provide funds for the maintenance
of the work of this noble army of heroes, and it is just at this
point that the action of the layman comes into play. Funds
must come from the layman, should come from him, not in the
way of charity so much as in virtue of the obligation that
rests upon him through direct command of Christ. We are too
fond of flattering ourselves with the thought of our charity,
when we are but half fulfilling obligations ; and in this case
there is no room for complacency, for it is duty we have to
perform, not charity to dole out.

The Association of the Propagation of the Faith has a
double office, that of gatherer and distributer of missionary
funds. It thus becomes the direct medium between the great
lay body and the actual workers in the mission field. It is not
given to all of us to be teachers ; that calling, as we have seen,
belongs to those whom God has specially appointed and con-
secrated. It is given to all of us, however, to be helpers, each
within the limit of his means, and there is no better way by
which we can make our offerings effective than by entrusting
them to the care of the association mentioned. Thus far the
contributions to this work from this country have been insig-
nificantonly $34,000 in 1897. A notable increase, due to the
untiring efforts of Dr. Granjon, was made in the receipts for
the fiscal year ending in January, 1899, the total collected
amounting to $53,600, an increase over the previous year of
nearly $20,000. But this increase is not what it should have
been, not what the labor expended in making the objects
of the association known should have produced, were the
Catholics of the country fully imbued with the importance of
the work. One hundred thousand dollars would be little to
expect from the generosity of this country ; two hundred thou-
sand dollars would not be a remarkable manifestation of our
interest.

In a*ddition to the sense of duty which the words of the
Saviour should impress upon us in this matter, and in addition
to the increased responsibility which our civil expansion has
begotten, we* are now about to enter upon the Year of Jubilee,
which our Holy Father has decreed, and surely the Catholics
of this country can in no better way show forth during this
Holy Year the faith that is in them, and of which they are

1 900.] "BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION." 545

proud, than by liberally contributing of their means, that their
God-given heritage may in some measure be made the portion
of the nations that sit in outer darkness. Fifty cents apiece
from half a million of our twelve millions of people would be
a gracious offering in this cause. And to accomplish this so
little is needed. Only a little organization, only a little good
will.

The plan of the association is to establish in parishes bands
of tens, each member of which contributes five cents per month,
or sixty cents a year. This is surely no hardship. . The bur-
den is not the difficulty, only the good will and organization.
Let those who read these words act, and that immediately,
not waiting for their neighbors, and much may be done toward
the accomplishment of a great work. The moment you have
finished the reading of these words, reader, whoever you may
be, do not put it off another moment, but write immediately to
Rev. Henry Granjon, D.D., St. Mary's Seminary, North Paca
Street, Baltimore, Md., requesting that a promoter's card be
sent you, and some literature on the subject, and when it is
received get nine of your friends to subscribe five cents a
month for the coming year, and you will have done a work
the fruits of which may be plucked in eternity. Offer but half
an hour of the Jubilee Year to this work, and you may accom-
plish more in the way of true benevolent assimilation than if
you had carried a Krag-Jorgensen rifle through the swamps of
Luzon for months.

We are scouting the notion which other denominations
have put forth of sending missionaries to our new possessions.
Let us do less of this, and more of positive, constructive work.
Thus shall we be carrying the White Man's real burden ; thus
shall we be benevolently assimilating, in its true sense, those to
whom we have a duty of assimilation, and thus too shall we
be fulfilling the command of the Master, " Teach all nations."

Flagstaff, Arizona.

VOL. LXX. 35

1900.] THE FOUNTAIN-SWIMMER OF DAMASCUS. 547

THE FOUNTAIN-SWIMMER OF DAMASCUS.

BY MRS. CLARA B. EWALD.

DAMASCUS ! fourth paradise of earth, how hotly
shone the sun over you that memorable day !
In the gardens, stilled by the heat, the rose-vines
that, climbing, clutched the tree-tops, dropped
flower-petals slowly, unswervingly on the grass
below. The water in the fountains gave back an unbearable
glare, and the fishlets hid under leaf or pebble. The house-
tops were deserted all except one, where under a tent awning
the mistress stood. With crossed hands on her forehead she
shielded her eyes and scanned the road, winding, white, daz-
zling, blinding, far towards Jerusalem, unto the south-west. Her
favorite slave waved a feather fan above her.

The slave was a coal-black Nubian. Around her neck hung
strings of glass beads, blue and flat ; on her arms and ankles
were bracelets of silver and iron.

The mistress spoke : " Men and sheep and camels have I
seen coming hitherward, but no one on the milk-white horse.
Yet this is surely the day ; the work in Jerusalem is done ;
messengers have brought the news that Saul himself has seen
to the stoning of the man Stephen. Indeed it is high time
Saul should arrive, for these people, huddled here about
the east gate, make themselves more and more obnoxious with
their sanctimoniousness. Ah ! Gigris, slave, I cannot bear this
heat!"

She turned and, followed by the slave, descended the roof
stairs. They entered a large, lofty room. Nearly overcome
by the heat on the house-top, Anata threw herself on a couch ;
other slaves entered, gathered around her, and waved feather
fans.

" However, I am sure he will come," the mistress said ;
" therefore, Gigris, see that, among the preparations for the wel-
come, the swimmers be placed in the fountains."

The slave knelt in acquiescence, and rose to obey.

" Wait ! " the mistress said, raising her hand, which was fair
and white ; her robe of striped, silken gauze, fastened on the
left shoulder with a jewelled brooch, passed under the right

548 THE FOUNTAIN-SWIMMER OF DAMASCUS. [Jan.,

arm, which thus, with the shoulder, was left bare and free.
" Where are the white slaves ? " she asked.

"The heat is such that the chief eunuch has sent them into
the serdad," Gigris answered.

" Go bring the girl Eunice here to me."

The Nubian withdrew, and after a moment returned with the
slave Eunice^ who advanced and knelt on the rug before Ana-
ta. Gigris spoke for her.

" Mistress," she said, "the sun scratches with' sharp claws
to-day. Eunice's back is all blisters."

" Rub on it oil of olives and pounded almonds ; it will do
well enough, and no one will notice."
Eunice bent low her head.

" And she says," Gigris resumed, making a genuflexion,
" that the people living about the east gate, as they pass the
fountains, hide their faces and curse the swimmers."

" Their cursing will soon be over, for their days are num-
bered ; they will be bound hand and foot ay, to-morrow
and carried to Jerusalem, or else be stoned even here. It is
the mission Saul has chosen. Come now, the hour nears the
noon ; get the slaves into the fountains."
Eunice's brow touched the rug.

" Mistress," she said imploringly, " spare me the swimming
to-day. I am sore blistered and ashamed."

" Well, well, girl, this is something new. I Ve known the
time and it is a very short time ago when you were most
proud to display your limbs to the populace, and gratified
at being called the shapeliest fountain-swimmer in Damascus."
" But to-day I am blistered with yesterday's heat."
" No one will notice."
" But it hurts"

" Not my back, thanks be to Bel ! But you have other
reasons, Eunice, and I have sent for you to speak of them.
I have seen you passing words with Saul of Tarsus. Now,
what can a Liberati have to say to a slave? Tell me at
once ! "

"Words of comfort. He pities my fate, that I, a daughter
of Israel, should be in slavery, and doomed to live, naked, in
the waters of your fountains, to swim, instead of the fish, for
the amusement of the motley crowd. And now these people
calling themselves Christians, with faces horrified at my wicked-
ness, ask me how I shall like drying myself by the fires of
Hell."

i goo.] THE FOUNTAIN-SWIMMER OF DAMASCUS. 549

"What does that mean?"

"After I am dead, they say."

" Another foolishness ! Girl, when you are dead why you
are dead, that is all. But your reason is this, Eunice ; your
back is blistered I see very much so and I admit it is no
increase of beauty. You do not want Saul to see this disfig-
urement, this reminder of servitude, for I suspect and I know
rightly that you crave this same student's admiration. O
slave and fountain-swimmer ! O ridiculous, and fool besides !
to fancy that he whose mission is to bring on the Christians
of Damascus the fate of Stephen will stoop to notice a slave.
Now this is ten thousand more words than I have ever wasted
on such as you. The times have changed indeed, when I
must discuss my commands and, O Nazarene, Nazarene! this
also is your doing. Go into the fountain, slave, and quickly
too, or the lash will add its blisters to those made by the
sun."

There was nothing more to say. The girl Eunice rose, and
the Nubian Gigris led her out.

Then the chosen slaves were made to enter the several
fountains which cooled the gardens surrounding the great
house of Anata the pagan.

All around the place preparations were being made for a
fitting reception to Saul ; but every green thing was wilted.
Even on the shores of the Abana, near which Anata's house
was built, the water plants drooped, the little birds had left
the branches of the date-palm and gone among the tall reeds,
where, close to the water, they gasped for breath. The cart-
loads of flowers gathered on the shores of the Pharpar were
dead before reaching the festal house. In" the fountains the
swimmers (supposed to be soulless and wicked beings) ex-
hibited their usual merriment ; the water was cooler than the
air, and they remained as far as possible in the scant shadow
of the ornamental shrubs.

It was two hours past the noontide. A few persons were
already crossing the garden ; among them came a little boy,
who carried a string of birds which he swung in his little
brown hands. He stopped in front of the fountain in which
swam Eunice the slave, and waited until the girl came near
him, when, greeting her, he said : " Here are the birds, Eunice
dear. I trapped them on Libanus and smothered them, taking
great care that they be nowhere bruised. They are those your

550 THE FOUNTAIN-SWIMMER OF DAMASCUS. [Jan.,

mistress loves to eat. Our mother says perhaps the gift of
them will please her, and she may allow you out of the water,
at least until your back is healed."

"Thank you, little dear; I do need a change see." She
slipped her hand under her loosened hair, which floated a
crow-black stain on the dazzling water, and passing her fingers
over her shoulders showed him her blood on them. ' Put the
birds on those twigs under this near bush. I will take them
when I am allowed out of this if I am not dead for I think
this heat and the strangeness in my heart will kill me."

" Mother says the people at the east gate tell her there is
One in Jerusalem whose touch is healing. They say perhaps
he will come here."

"I know who they mean, little dear; but, alas! he has
been crucified. I heard Saul of Tarsus say so to my mistress."

" They say he might come anyhow."

" Do they ? Then perhaps he will."

The boy placed the birds on the twigs, as he was told, and
departing said again : " He might come anyhow."

In the house of Anata all was in readiness for the reception
of Saul ; but he was late, it being the third hour after the
noon. Again the mistress mounted the house-top and scanned
the white, blinding road, beyond the greenness of palm and
fig, and tamarisk and roses, and the lightness of pomegranate
and olive, which made Damascus the fourth paradise of earth
the road on which one travels, coming from Jerusalem.

In the great fountain-basin the slave Eunice was losing her
strength. She neared a wilted shrub which hung over the
water, and rested in its shade ; then raised her eyes and sud-
denly beheld a wonderful face just above the bush. The
beautiful brown hair, parted in the centre, lay smooth on the
brow. From the tender eyes a mellow light fell on her, which
eased her pain exceedingly, and brought a taste of honey and
ineffable joy to her lips. His hand it had been pierced
rested on the bush, which greened and freshened and put forth
a bloom of snow-white flowers. Eunice floated close to the
fountain edge and beheld the stranger's feet they also were
pierced ; the trampled and withered grass around them re-
vived, anemones blossomed among it ; the sacred feet touched
the twigs on which the friendly little boy had placed the
birds, and the twigs put forth leaves and buds and flowers;
the wings of the birds fluttered, Eunice heard a joyous twitter,

1 900.] THE Fo UN TA iN-S WIMMER OF DA MA sc us. 5 5 1

as they raised themselves on their feet and suddenly flew away
far into the blue, brilliant ether.

" Ah ! " murmured the slave, looking after them, " my gift
of mercy-asking gone ; but it is He. If I can touch that
pierced foot, if I can lay my lips on it, my pain will be over
the pain in my heart, the pain in my body from the heat
wnich blisters and the lash which stings and the shame of
myself."

She laid the palm of her hand on the marble edge, and
drew herself half out of the basin her head bent over the
divine feet.

" Oh ! " she prayed, " I am but a slave I have nothing ;
but let thy mercy give me thy best gift." Her head bent
lower still and her lips touched the wounded foot.

Suddenly, as if by the simoom's lurid breath, the day
darkened. Anata from the house-top saw a fiery beam cleave
the obscurity and strike a cavalier astride a milk-white horse,
approaching on the road one travels when coming from Jerusa-
lem. He fell.

"Saul! Saul of Tarsus! " she cried, and in terror closed her
eyes.

And Eunice in the fountain touched her lips to the wounded
foot. ' O give me thy best gift!" she murmured, and slipping
back into the fountain, sank down to the pebbled bottom. In
the sudden darkness the flowers on the shrub shone like stars.
They dropped, marking a cross above the slave's body.

Within the house Anata wrung her hands and wept, for the
companions of her student friend were leading him in, struck
blind when felled to the earth, as he neared the southern gate,
on the road from Jerusalem.

Of her comforting he would have none, but moaned inces-
santly : "Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus of Nazareth!"

S5 2 A MASTER OF SACRED ELOQUENCE. [Jan.,

A MASTER OF SACRED ELOQUENCE.*

BY REV. WALTER ELLIOTT.

"NE learns an art from the study of master-pieces;
but if the rules of the art are expounded by
the artist himself amid his own master-pieces,
the pupil is doubly taught.

Francis de Sales was at once the most popu-
lar preacher in France and the most simple. In this he was
in vivid contrast with the pompous style of many even devout
priests and prelates, who in his day sacrificed simplicity to
classical elegance, thus bestowing more care on the casket than
on the jewel.

There are three victories of the preacher: one is the sanc-
tification of good souls, another the reformation of sinners, the
third and highest the conversion of unbelievers to the faith of
Christ. In all these achievements Francis de Sales was the
foremost preacher of his time. He began with the most diffi-
cult undertaking, converting the Protestants of the Chablais,
before he was thirty years of age. All through his life, it is not
too much to say, no sinner could resist him, and he frequently
conquered the most obstinate kind of sinners, namely, dissolute
members of a proud and warlike nobility. As to the doctrine
and method of Christian perfection, he is head master in the
modern church for the laity, the clergy, and the sisterhoods.
And now Canon Mackey has undertaken to narrate the making
of the orator in the person of our saint.

"In the period immediately preceding his own," says our
author, " the divine commission, ' Go and preach the Gospel to
every creature/ was less closely heeded than it perhaps ever
has been in the history of Western Christianity. The general
causes are not far to seek ; too great a sense of security on
the part of the teachers, slowness to discern the signs of the
times, the distractions of profane learning, dissolution of morals,
and consequent religious apathy."

As befits a preacher of truth, and therefore the most prac-
tical of men, St. Francis was careful to study the men and

* St. Francis de Sales as a Preacher. - By the Very Rev. Canon Mackey, O.S.B. Lon-
don : Burns & Gates ; New York": Benziger Brothers.

1900.] A MASTER OF SACRED ELOQUENCE. 553

affairs, the social and political no less than the religious condi-
tions of his time. "I have taken into consideration as I should
do," he says in his Preface to the Love of God, "the state of
the minds of this age : it much imports to remember in what
age we are writing." And in what age we are preaching, let
us add because if one is a writer of books he may pick his
audience, but with a public speaker, as a rule, it is just the
reverse. Let but a religious teacher feel wrenched out of joint
with his age, and as a consequence his auditors will feel out
of joint with him and soon, if he is to get any audience at
all, he must put up with grumblers and malcontents.

It is noticeable here as elsewhere in the history of religion
that from the last and darkest hour, a period of the decadence
of preaching, sprang forth the brightest examples of successful
achievement. For between St. Bernard's marvellous career as
God's trumpet and our own day, France has not known so
powerful a public teacher of religion as Francis de Sales. This
is saying much, for since his time we have had Bossuet and
Fnelon, Massillon and Bourdaloue and Lacordaire. Yet these
mighty names but show off to advantage the more universal
fame of our saint. " It is greatly to the honor of Monsignor
Freppel," says Canon Mackey, " that in his brilliant discourses
on Bossuet he vindicates this distinction for St, Francis. M.
Hamon, the saint's chief modern biographer, asserts it with
force. The decree of the doctorate explicitly styles the new
doctor of the church ' Restorer and Master of Sacred Elo-
quence.' '

It is doubtless true that as a pulpit rhetorician St. Francis
must yield the palm to others, especially to Bossuet. But not
as a pulpit persuader, not as the real teacher. He gained his
point better than did Bossuet, and he had a higher aim to
achieve ; Bossuet obtaining by his preaching greater fame as
an orator, and St. Francis obtaining the honors of the univer-
sal doctorate, first from the unbidden suffrages of the Christian
world and then from the sovereign placet of the Holy See.

A fair test is shown by the ordeal of translation. Bossuet
is so perfectly French that only a few of his works, and those
not the finest, are read in other tongues. And St. Francis is
so universal that all he said and wrote has the gift of tongues
and is both read and lived in every nation under heaven. His
works are among the novice-master's manuals in every religious
novitiate, and all devout families in Christendom must have
his Introduction. Let it be noted, furthermore, that all that

554 ^ MASTER OF SACKED ELOQUENCE. [Jan.,

he writes is sermon-writing in its style and method and choice
of matter.

The making of a sermon is the forging of a link of union
in the fire of personal contact between one soul and another,
and may be in form of a letter, a magazine article, or a pulpit
address. Many of St. Francis* letters are sermons ready made.
Every chapter in The Devout Life has that directness and con-
centrated emphasis of living speech peculiar to public speak-
ing. As to the Treatise on the Love of God, it is but the col-
lation and orderly division, as the saint himself tells us, of his
addresses to the original Visitandines. " For you must know,"
he says in his preface, " that we have in this town [Annecy] a
congregation of maidens and widows who, having retired from
the world, live with one mind in God's service, under the pro-
tection of his most holy Mother, and as their purity and piety
of spirit have oftentimes given me great consolation, so have
I striven to return them the like by a frequent distribution of
the holy word, which I have announced to them as well in
public sermons as in spiritual conferences,, and this almost
always in the presence of some religious men and people of
great piety. . . . She who is the mother of them and rules
them," continually urged him to write out these discourses in
systematic order and publish them. So St. Francis de Sales'
liber aureus is his book of sermons on spiritual doctrine of the
higher kind.

St. Francis, therefore, knew the uses of preaching as they
are educational to the preacher himself. Scholastic training
can do no more than give the mind its weapons and its armor ;
preaching to the people gradually teaches the mind what
armor to put on, and how to wield, and, betimes, how to
sharpen the weapons, as well as what choice and change to
make of them as the exigencies of the holy war of love and
truth arise. It was thus by the private preaching of directing
souls that he learned how to write his incomparable work, The
Introduction to a Devout Life. And by preaching, as already
stated and as he says in the preface to the Treatise on the
Love of God, he learned how to write that golden book. We
quote from Canon Mackey's excellent translation : " I have
touched on a number of theological questions, proposing sim-
ply, not so much what I anciently learned in disputations, as
what attention to the service of souls and my twenty-four
years spent in holy preaching have made me think most con-
ducive to the glory of the gospel and the church."

1900.] A MASTER OF SACRED ELOQUENCE. 555

Thus it is by preaching that the theologian becomes the
apostle. The growth from a learner in the schools to a
teacher in the church is experienced in evangelical practice
among the people. The best result of a theological training
is not in any victorious concursus in the aula maxima of a
university crowded with professors and students, but in saving
the souls of men by the spoken word, uttered amid throngs of
Christians or unbelievers, planting in them the living root of
holy faith and cultivating it unto the fruitfulness of holy love.
The difference between a learner's mind and a teacher's mind
is marked by an interval of the public and private exercise of
the evangelical ministry. The professor who stocks minds with
the stuff for sermons is the ideal professor, though his doctors
of divinity may happen to be graduated only later on in the
people's university. +

Hence, too, the need of having priests highly educated just
for the sake of being popular preachers. Fairly good preachers
are not rare, but a man who knows all divinity and can ser-
monize it all, able and willing to teach synods or sodalities, is
exceedingly rare. Men who are highly trained in lecture-
rooms are no longer scarce ; but when our brilliant minds
shall add additional years to their seminary and university
course for the sake of their Catholic and non-Catholic brethren,
that they may "teach them all things whatsoever " our Saviour
has commanded, we shall have what is perhaps now our only
lack preachers of the first class engaged in the ordinary minis-
try of the word.

To one in the least degree interested in the divine art of
converting and elevating souls nothing can be more interesting
than Canon Mackey's narrative of the formation of the Chris-
tian preacher in the person of St. Francis. He traces it from
the time the charming little boy at the Castle of Sales preached
his mother's instructions to his playfellows, through all his long
course of study, during which he preached like a seraph to his
associates in the college societies, until his graduation honors
in the university of the non-Catholic Apostolate among the
Calvinists of the Chablais.

His zeal for preaching was such that he never refused he
himself affirms he never was able to refuse a request for a
sermon. He was the great preacher at solemn obsequies of
princes and princesses, at assemblages of political notables and
in the presence of monarchs ; he was the little preacher for a
handful of nuns or a little circle of devout ladies at court.

A MASTER OF SACRED ELOQUENCE. [Jan,

During one of his visits to Paris Bourdaloue says of him that
he was the "Apostle of the Court." " Why not add that he was
the Apostle of the City? that 'theatre of the world,' whose
population," says Canon Mackey, "abandoned itself with a
sacred passion to the magic of his eloquence. He preached
ordinarily twice and often thrice a day. The largest churches
could not contain the crowds that flocked to his discourses.
Men got up by ladders to the windows and made holes in the
roof to catch at least the tones of that celestial voice. All
this in spite of the fact, or perhaps in consequence of the fact,
that in this seat of worldliness and vanity the saint adopted
his very simplest style, divesting his own word of all extraneous
ornament to leave God's word in its intrinsic beauty. . . .
St. Vincent de Paul said that he listened to our saint as to the
Gospel speaking (Evangelium loquens)."

The perusal of these pages will aid any earnest priest in
acquiring qualities and in correcting faults with a view to be-
coming an effective persuader of men. Though treated in the
form of a narrative, and abounding in much valuable historical
reading, the book is mainly a plain summary of the Salesian
spirit and practice of preaching.

We cannot conclude without noticing the author's account
of the co-working of our saint with St. Vincent de Paul in
the reform of pulpit eloquence, throwing light as it does on the
co-ordinate action of minds, very different in some things, yet of
full accord in all good works, especially in that of elevating the
intellectual and spiritual condition of the standard and ordinary
clergy of the church.

Daily Thoughts * is an effort on the part of a
skilled spiritual doctor to supply nutriment in such
form that it may be the more readily assimilated by
priestly souls. Dr. Hogan, of the Boston Seminary,
is known throughout the country not only as a
deep and original thinker on the questions of the day but
as one of the great adepts in soul-training. His skill is the
result of many years of experience in training the young levite
as well as in directing sacerdotal retreats.

The judgments of such a man are worth listening to, and
anything from his pen is to be treasured as veriest wisdom.
His late work, Clerical Studies, is still widening the sphere of
its influence, while this latest work, Daily Thoughts, is calcu-
lated to supplement the suggestions of the former work by
supplying the soul pabulum. It consists of a series of chap-
ters on moral and spiritual topics almost too long to be ac-
counted meditations, and yet not long enough to be, charac-
terized by the name of treatises, and every one is as full of
spirituality as " an egg is full of meat." In the preface the
author hints that if these Daily Thoughts are well received,
more will follow. We bespeak for the book a hearty reception,
for Dr. Hogan's pen is too valuable to be permitted to rust.

No book on Matthew Arnold can fail to be interesting, and
no book by Professor Saintsbury can be anything but clever.
And still a disappointment attends the perusal of his last vol-
ume,f even though it be the biography of the "Apostle of
Culture." It is indeed true that things literary played so large
a part in Arnold's life as to make other facts insignificant by
comparison, and that, perhaps, explains why we must swallow
our disappointment. Still there is an honest desire in most of
us not all " curiosity " either to make closer personal ac-
quaintance with the actual historical details of a character we

* Daily Thoughts for Priests. By Very Rev. J. B. Hogan, S.S., D.D., President of St.
John's Seminary, Brighton, Mass. Boston : Marlier, Callanan & Co.

\Matthew Arnold. By George Saintsbury, M.A. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

558 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

have come to know, to revere, and to dream over. And this we
have come to claim as a right when our hero has passed away
from life. Hence chagrin, if our cherished expectation of a
biography meets with nothing more than a splendid critical
analytic resume. This time, however, we must admit to having
analysis and criticism in such sort as almost to compensate for
our disappointment. Honest, deep, comprehensive, compara-
tive, sympathetic the critic is what else, indeed, could Mr.
Saintsbury be? We read and mark admiringly, and mentally
note the page that we may return to it again, after we have
again perused the passages commented upon.

Most interesting of all is the chapter " In the Wilderness, "
devoted to a period in Arnold's life which, in his critic's judg-
ment, was well-nigh wasted. The decade of years ending with
1877 was given over to writing of sufficiently religious or political
cast as largely to destroy its literary worth, and Mr. Saints-
bury both laments this temporary infidelity to the Muse, and
makes rather a savage polemic against the actual productions
of Arnold's pen during this period.

One limitation we would make, namely, that it was quite
natural and consistent for the author of Culture and Anarchy,
the knight-errant of anti-Philistinism, to run his tilt in the re-
ligious field. Church and formal religion have their large in-
fluence on the individual's general culture an influence deeper
and more controlling than many of us suppose. Not strange,
therefore, was Arnold's evident desire to sway the religious
opinions of his contemporaries, whose philosophy of life he
aimed at altering. Not stranger is his onslaught on Puritan
morality and Church-of-England dogma, for these things were
pleading for thorough-going hostile criticism. But it was in
the crusade against dogmatic Christianity known to Mr. Ar-
nold, indeed, only by caricature that he ran foul of reason,
reverence, and common sense; and the critic's verdict on this
ill-omened work is a delicious composition of keenness and
grace.

Mr. Saintsbury has done his devoir honestly and charm-
ingly. He has avoided small sneering, as he has refrained
from extravagant laudation. We lay down his volume grateful
to its writer, won back to our old affection for its subject,
ready again to look for the dawning of light over dreary
Philistia :

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade.

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 559

The Sisters of St. Joseph will undoubtedly find not a little
spiritual profit in the meditations which have been prepared
by one of their own number, and therefore, as one may well
suppose, embodying in them the spirit of the community, and
gathering in one bunch some of the sweetest flowers that grow
in their garden. Nor is the usefulness of this volume* to be
confined to the community to which it owes its origin. Medi-
tations are the staple food of the religious life, and food pre-
pared by skilled hands, and pronounced genuine by collabora-
teurs who can be depended on, is acceptable to all souls.

The author of the Romance of Liidivig //.f brings to her task
one excellent disposition in a biographer, a love of her hero ;
but there are limits within which the feeling should be kept.
While helping the exercise of advocacy where right, while
aiding the judgment in deciding in the instances where a nice
calculation of probabilities is demanded, this affection is fatal
when it can only see one side where delicate adjustments
ought to be made, and when in matters of defence advocacy
becomes passion or prejudice instead of explanatory palliation.
The unfortunate Ludwig had a taint of madness in his blood
which might never have been developed if his education were
judicious.

It is not necessary to go so far back into his ancestry as to
the Welfs, almost in the twilight of time, whose courts were
filled by Minnesingers who gave life to the ideas of chivalry
and love, to the music and the mystery with which the very
air of Bavaria was in a manner laden to go back, we say, for
the shadow which darkened the soul of this ill-starred and
gifted prince. There seemed a wild strain in his grandfather
he was one who performed acts most unlike a king ; and yet
the darkness had not fallen on him. Possibly the joyousness
of an unconventional nature served as a safety-valve. How
many of the Welfs, so strong, so daring, so romantic and
passionate, such dreamers of dreams and captives of poesy and
music, would have stood the test of nineteenth century social
strait-waistcoating ! They acted their dreams in the hills,
on the wolds, in huntings dangerous as war acted them in

* Manual of Meditations, preparatory to the Feasts of Our Lady's Immaculate Concep-
tion, of St. Joseph and of the Visitation of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, followed by Medita-
tions for the Feasts of St. Francis de Sales and St. Teresa, and a Novena in preparation for
the Feast of Pentecost. For the use of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. St. Louis,
Mo. : B. Herder.

t The Romance of Ludwig II. of Bavaria. By Frances Gerard. London: Hutchinson
& Co. ; New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

560 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

battle and in bower, acted them in civil war, and in the mighty
movements of hosts over Europe and Western Asia for the
Cross.

Ludwig's devotion to Wagner was akin to idolatry. We think
the opinions expressed that it was a selfish craze or a boyish
caprice are by no means near the truth. It may be that in
reality he had not the truly educated ear, as one or more
say of him, but there may be an informing spirit which reveals
the mystery of an art more absolutely than technical educa-
tion. How much in all things rests upon association ! He was
in a world of fancy in his childhood. We are told that one
day he was found by Professor Von Dollinger nearly lost
to] sight in the depths of a sofa in a dark room. It was
necessary he should be kept from the light on account of the
delicacy of his eyes. Dollinger, who pitied him, said : " Your
highness should have something read to you ; that would
serve to pass these tedious hours." " Oh ! they are not tedious
to me. I think of lots of things, and I am quite happy."
To him, living in such reveries, the maestro who gave new
voice to so much of the old echoes of the Minnesingers would
not be merely a composer. He would be the embodiment of
whatever belonged to the magic of the Niebelungenlied, the
enchanter at whose spell the airy nothings of his own brain
took shape. In the friendship between the boy and Wagner
there was an element which tickles the palate x of those gour-
mets of the mind to whom the pettiness of genius is a de-
lectable morsel. The great artist used his influence with the
young king with a cold-blooded duplicity which would have
done credit to a pupil of Macchiavelli. We do not agree
with our author in condemning the people of Munich for their
dislike of Wagner. It is seldom one finds so sad a history as
we possess in these pages : a young man born to the highest
fortune, and endowed with abilities and tastes which would
have made his own life enviable and been the means of con-
ferring on his fellow-creatures, such a measure of happiness as
it is seldom in the power of man to bestow, smitten by a blow
which blots him out of the world as though he had not been.

The Jubilee will call out a literature that is peculiar to
itself. There will come up many questions of a theological
nature which will demand a thorough discussion, and as the
questions of indulgences are always to be strictly interpreted,
many interesting queries will arise about the conditions of

i goo.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 561

gaining the Jubilee. We anticipate not a few pamphlets and
booklets that will eke out our meagre supply of literature.
Father McGowan * is the first in the field with his sermons for
priests. His volume, in a handy form, besides a discourse on
the Jubilee, contains strong and persuasive sermons on such
topics as Sin, Divine Grace, Prayer, Temptation.

The Children of Mary f is an ever-growing organization,
and while its membership already reaches into the thousands,
it is constantly widening the sphere of its influence. Its meet-
ings are gatherings composed of many very intelligent young
people, and for a director to supply the right kind of spiritual
food and to have it seasoned in the proper way is no easy task.
A book of addresses that will furnish his own mind stimulation
and suggestion along the line of subjects fitting their needs
will be found very helpful.

Religious in general and the Sisters of Mercy in particular
will be interested in a volume $ which provides meditations
for candidates who are preparing to enter into the religious
life. Together with the meditations on the very fundamental
truths there are included " lectures " on topics akin to the
meditations, the whole carrying one through a retreat of eight
days. While the printing is very creditably done by the
colored boys who are gathered at the Industrial School in
Clayton, Del., still it indicates a lack of business instinct not
to put a book like this in the hands of a publisher who has a
known place of business, so that it may be obtained by those
who want a copy.

Each one of the Gospels was written with some particular
purpose in view. St. Matthew evidently addressed his words
to the Jews, and was anxious to convince them that Jesus was
the one who fulfilled all the Messianic prophecies ; while St.
John's Gospel is a most luminous defence of the divinity of
Christ. It may be called the Gospel of Testimony. A cur.
sory reading of it makes it very plain that St. John had for
his special object the gathering of the various testimonies to

* A Series of Ten Sermons for a Jubilee Retreat. By Rev. F. X. McGowan, O.S.A.
New York : Pustet & Co.

The Jubilee Manual. Prayers and Pious Exercises for Private and Public Devotion dur-
ing fubilee Year, iqoo. New York and Cincinnati : Pustet & Co.

f Home Truths for Mary's Children. By E. C. B., Religious of St. Andre. London :
Burns & Gates ; New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Brothers.

\ R -treat for Reception : A series of Meditations especially adapted for the private use
of Candidates preparing for entering into the religious life. Translated from the French by
a Sister of Mercy.

VOL. LXX. 36

562 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

Jesus. With this in view he dwells on the statements of
John the Baptist, of Nicodemus, of the people, of Pilate, and
of many others. He tells us how some rejected and others
accepted the professions of the Son of God. For these
reasons, if we may institute a comparison in values between
the various Gospels, we would account the Fourth Gospel by
all odds the most useful to our modern world. Rev. John
Mclntyre, the professor of Scripture at St. Mary's College,
Oscott, has gathered into an exceedingly handy volume * a
great deal of erudition and not a little useful commentary on
the words of St. John.

" No man drinking old, hath presently a mind to new: for
he saith, the old is better." The movement to return to the
old is not confined to the Church and to the Episcopalian
body. It is very strong, also, in what goes by the name of
literature. It would be difficult to enumerate the editions of
Sir Walter Scott which have appeared within a few years,
while of the novels of the last century and of Elizabethan
dramatists, and of the still earlier writers, various editions have
been published. For the great middle-age writers the demand
is so great as to justify the reprint of works of from forty to
fifty quarto volumes. The Flowers of St. Francis cannot be
called a great work, if judged by the number of pages ; but it is
more likely to last to the end of the world than some of its
more voluminous compeers. Many editions and reprints of
this book have recently been published. With the possible
exception of the Life of St. Francis by St. Bonaventure, the
Flowers of St. Francis f manifest more of the touching sim-
plicity of the Gospels than any book written up to the present
time. This edition is the most beautiful of all that have ap-
peared, and the one most in harmony in every respect with
the work. The most notable feature are the illustrations by
Mr. Paul Woodroffe. These we make no attempt to criticise,
but an artist friend .assures us that they are singularly beauti-
ful in so far as they represent reality, but are lacking in the
presentation of the visions. The latter are too realistic.

Dean Farrar^: is one of the most popular writers of the

* The Holy Gospel according to Saint fohn. By the Rev. John Mclntyre, D.D., Professor
of Scripture at St. Mary's College, Oscott. London : Catholic Truth Society.

f The Little Flowers of. St. Francis of Assist. With eight illustrations by Paul Wood-
roffe. London: Kegan .Pa ; uV& Co. ; New York : Benziger Brothers.

\ Texts Explained ; or> Helps to understand the New Testament. By F. W. Farrar,
D.D., F.R.S. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 563

present time, and also one of the most prolific. He has claims
to be looked upon as a scholar, having been a master of one
of the great English public schools, and the author of a Greek
grammar. But the great number of his writings has seriously
damaged his reputation for accuracy the soul of a scholar's
life and the most he can lay claim to is the faculty of ren-
dering popular, more or less acceptably, the scholarship* of the
more profound students.

The present work of three hundred and fifty pages is writ-
ten to call attention to a large number of verses which have
been inaccurately rendered by the Protestant authorized ver-
sion and which the Revised Version so recently made does
not make perfectly plain. This is the case, too, in matters in
which points of doctrine are involved.

The dean is an ardent Protestant and loses no opportunity
to weaken the force of the texts which support Catholic doc-
trine ; see, e. g., John x. 16 ; vi. 55; xx. 23. He is dogmatic
and assertive in the extreme, and would lead credulous readers
to think that there is not the smallest basis in Scripture for
the sacrificial character of the Lord's Supper, for Transubstan-
tiation, for the power of absolving. So sweeping, however, are
his assertions and his denials that they will deceive no one
who does not wish to be deceived.

On the other hand, the corrections made by the dean of
the Protestant versions, and his remarks upon them,<vindicate
at times the conformity of the church's doctrine with the Gos-
pel, as, e. g., John ii. 4. Even here, however, the dean cannot
refrain from an unwarranted attack on Catholic doctrine.

To the student able to test and qualify Dr. Farrar's asser-
tions the book will be interesting and useful ; to others it will
be in the highest degree misleading.

The author of Nooks and Corners * has made out to give us
a great deal of useful information concerning New York City
in brief space. He has done it by plain statements, reinforced
at times by interesting comments, and now and again by the
quaint and beautiful illustrations drawn from authentic sources,
so that text and picture blend together in making a volume
which will be prized and often read. Of whatever antiquity
we of the United States may be said to possess New York
City has its full share, and of historical events and happenings

* Nooks and Corners in Old New York. By Charles Hemstreet. Illustrated by E. C.
Peixqtto. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

564 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

the Dutch Settlement, the English Occupation, the stirring and
fateful scenes of Colonial struggle and victory, its place is al-
together unique. Unfortunately, the causes incident to rapid
growth, which elsewhere have in a measure worked to obliterate
and destroy historic places and buildings, have nowhere done
their work so radically as in New York City. Its position as
the great port of entry, its limited area previous to the late ex-
tension, and the consequent fabulous value of land, may explain
in part this demolition. As a city we have few and scanty memo-
rials to tell of what has been ; here fewer buildings survive, fewer
spaces have been untouched, than anywhere else in America.
With much of present interest, value, and beauty, we are
singularly poor in what serves for reminiscence. Hence the
service of such books as Nooks and Corners. If now we see
but little, by the aid of reading we can again people spots
with associations and invest scenes with the realities which
have thereon transpired, and what yet remains will have an
added interest. To the author, and also to the Sons of the
Revolution, to the Colonial Dames, to the New York Historical
Society thanks are due for recalling and perpetuating an inter-
esting and a noble past. No one, however utilitarian or pro-
gressive, lives by bread alone, and Nooks and Corners will help
to stir sentiments and memories amid the din and grinding and
oppressive rush of every-day life.

CHRISTMAS JUVENILES.

The deep concern manifested by all the world to-day (for
no one seems without it) that THE CHILD shall have the very
best that life can give it in order to its most perfect de-
velopment physical, moral, and intellectual (we would like to
say spiritual, but alas ! all the world does not feel this con-
cern), is the thing among all its virtues of which the age may
be the proudest. There is much to be said against the present
overweening ambition to outdo the parents and teachers of all
previous generations in the training of the child. That so
many good people have already been born and have lived and
died in spite of the imperfect methods of the past, does not
reflect very badly on their mothers and fathers and teachers
after all. However, we will consider here only the above-
named healthy motive to give the child the very best of
everything and will not stop to discuss the errors of judgment
in the attempt to realize this.

The publishers have been as busy as the rest of the world

i QOO.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 565

lately in taking care of their part of the children's education
or entertainment. An endless series of improved text-books
for school use have been issued by the publishers during the
past year, one vicing with another to combine in the most
perfect way what are evidently thought to be the two things
necessary amusement and instruction.

The very latest effort of this kind is the Baldwin Primer
issued by the American Book Co. The most up-to-date methods
in color-printing have been used in its manufacture, and the
child who would not learn from such a pretty book would be
hopeless indeed.

The best efforts of the publishers, though, have been put
into the books designed for amusement pure and simple. A
republication of many of the books which amused even the
grandmothers of the present generation of children is no small
argument in support of what is implied above about the
ancient methods being not so bad after all.

A new edition of the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Ander-
sen, recently issued by Truslove, Hanson & Comba, is a striking
instance of this. Edward Everett Hale, who writes a character-
istic preface to the book, seems to think that the creating of
child literature has periodical changes, and says that once in a
generation a decline sets in, which would argue in the present in-
stance that we have happened on a time of reaction from such
an unhappy state the state of having fallen into " the ruts of
the sentimentalist or of the mechanic " in the making of child
literature ; or what is a more pointed way of putting it of
holding the false theory that "anybody can write a child's
book." He touches the very spot here, and proves it by stat-
ing as actual fact that ninety-nine hundredths of the contribu-
tions to child literature are from those who have never had
charge of either boy or girl. Here is certainly a very illumi-
nating fact in explaining why from a financial stand-point the
success of juvenile publications is so precarious. No wonder
that the publishers prefer to bring out over and over again
books written for children which have been tried and have not
been found wanting. Such puddings have indeed stood the
proof of the eating, and the children are still crying for more.
There are many and rich plums within the handsome covers
of this new edition of Andersen's Tales, and likewise in the
new edition of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shak-
speare, with an introduction by Andrew Lang, published by
this same company. Longmans, Green & Co. have brought

566 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

out another story-book about animals, prepared by Andrew
Lang, and given one of those suggestive and captious titles he
is so happy in selecting The Red Book of Animal Stories.
Every funny and fascinating animal under the sun, and some
which it is doubtful if the sun ever shone on, seem to have a
chapter or so to perpetuate their queer doings. There are many
who are used to point a moral, but many more seem destined
for no other purpose than the adornment of their respective
tails. The pretty story of St. Jerome and the Lion has not
been overlooked in this charming collection. The pictures
alone do not do justice to the book at a time when the art of
illustrating has been so perfected. G. P. Putnam's Sons have
touched the perfect mark here, it would seem, in a recent
publication of theirs for the children, Sleepy-Time Stories, ex-
quisitely illustrated by reproductions of drawings by Maud
Humphrey, an inimitable child illustrator if this book is a fair
sample of her work. Pictures mean so much to children that
it is doubtful whether effort expended in this direction could
ever be overdone. The author, Mrs. Booth, certainly comes
within Mr. Hale's requirement of knowing children personally
in order to write for them. Every word of her text proves it.
Chauncey M. Depew dignifies this charming book with an in-
troduction. Every one in the world, as we said before, seems
to contribute his or her mite to the great cause of child
literature. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, have made one of the
brute creation the important hero of a very pleasing story for
children. Bruno is his name and Byrd Spilman Dewey is his
historian. It would, perhaps, be difficult to say which are the
dearer favorites of the children, the animals or the fairies, but
it is easy to know which have the best effect in the deepening
and the development of the human instinct in their little
hearts.

Our Catholic writers have not been idle in this cause, and
it is by no means because they have been outdone by the
others that their publications are here named second. It is
rather because they come within such an altogether different
estimate that they have been reserved for later and more care-
ful consideration. They have been so prolific in their pro-
ductions of entirely new literature for children that it would
be difficult to find time or space for a review of each book.
Father Finn and Marion Ames Taggart could captivate both
the heart and soul of any little human with a healthy mind

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 567

and sound body, and such captivation would be sure to have
the best results for both. Father Finn's latest book for the
boys, The Best Foot Fonvard, is not more stimulating and en-
ticing, even in its very title, than Miss Taggart's Loyal Blue
and Royal Scarlet (Benzigers). The latter has already been pub-
lished as a serial and has paved the way for itself for a very
wide reading in the child world. Anna T. Sadlier in her True
Story of Master Gerard has used the same well-tried theme,
knowing that the children's interest can be reckoned on as
surely as their elders' when it is a subject of war or rumors
of war.

There is serious question of the wisdom of publishing such
a book for children (if designed for children) as the translation
from the French just issued by this same house of A Round
Table of the Representative French Catholic Novelists. One
could hardly reckon on 'the deleterious effect of putting into
the minds of our healthy Catholic American children, sur-
rounded as they are as a class with unassailably good and right
conditions of life for their best development in every way, the
ideas which are depicted in this book for the children of the
French, brought up (if we are to judge by the statements made
herein) under such totally different methods. The book may
have a mission with parents as teaching some lessons in par-
ental discipline in a very strong way, but it would be better
kept on their top shelf for personal reference only.

H. L. Kilner, of Philadelphia, has given us for the children
four new books of unquestioned value. Two are translations
from the French of Henri Ardel : 'Tivas to Be, which is a
romance designed more for the big brothers and sisters, as is
also Little Arlette, or My Cousin Guy. Lot Leslie's Folks, by
Eleanor C. Donnelly, and lack Chumleigh at Boarding School,
by Maurice Francis Egan, are a charming pair of juvenile
stories, the writers of which need no introduction to our
children.

The Art and Book Co., of London, send us two new books
of the older style of Catholic juvenile stories : TJic Sifting of
the Wheat, a tale of the sixteenth century, by C. M. Home,
and In the Brave Days of Old, historical sketches of the Eliza-
bethan persecution, by Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B. Burns &
Gates, London, have just published a book of this class also,
Clement of Rome and other Tales of the Early ChurcJi, by the
Rev. John Freeland. It is good to bring before the children,

563 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan.,

as this book does, some of the strong flesh-and-blood heroes of
the early faith. They will love and imitate them none the less
for the remoteness of their day from our own.

Among the translations B. Herder, of St. Louis, contri-
butes an attractive little book of stories from the German of
Konrad Kuemmel, In the Turkish Camp and Other Stories. The
Germans can scarcely be outdone in their child lore.

The John Murphy Co., of Baltimore, have published two
dramas, each in four acts, which will undoubtedly have a good
field among the aspirants for theatricals in the academies :
Pontia, the Daughter of Pilate, by Very Rev. Father Felix,
O.S.B., and The Shepherdess of Lourdes, or the Blind Princess,
by the same author. William H. Young, of New York, has
also brought out a drama of this kind : The Witch of Bramble
Hollow, by Marie Cot, and besides this, this house has recently
published a book concerning the dearest of all interests with the
children, The Child's Name, a collection of nearly five hundred
uncommon and beautiful names for children, with an intro-
duction on the tasteful use of Christian names by Julian McCor-
mick.

A rare book for the child is Father Tabb's Child Verse, just
issued by Small, Maynard & Co., of Boston. Within the nar-
row bounds of a handful of quatrains he has told the sweetest
stones, " grave and gay," of every dear object that enters into
the child life, sun, moon, and stars, birds and flowers, and all
the living things that charm or amuse or interest this little
sovereign in nature the child. An Idolater he calls him in
one of his sweetest bits of verse :

" The Baby has no skies
But Mother's eyes,

Nor any God above

But Mother's Love.
His angel sees the Father's face
But he the Mother's full of grace ;

And yet the heavenly kingdom is

Of such as this."

Father Tabb has so divined the child as to remember its fine
sense of humor (a thing child writers too often forget or ig-
nore), and in many a clever little verse he has tickled its fancy
by some subtle play on a word or two, as in Bicycles ! Tricycles !

IQOO.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 569

" Bicycles ! Tricycles ! Nay, to shun laughter,
Try cycles first, and buy cycles after ;
For surely the buyer deserves but the worst
Who would buy cycles, failing to try cycles first " ;

or in Washington's Ruse:

" When Georgie would not go to bed,

If some one asked him why,
" What is the use ? " he gravely said ;

"You know I cannot lie."

And this one :

" O Lady Cloud, why are you weeping ? " I said.

" Because," she made answer, " my rain-beau is dead."

He brings the CHILD of Bethlehem very close and makes him
very real to the little ones in some of these verses, as in the
Child's Prayer:

" Lord, I have lost a toy

With which I love to play ;
And as you were yourself a boy

Of just my age to-day,
O Son of Mary, would you mind

To help me now my toy to find?"

It is a pity that so choice a collection of children's verse
was not embellished somewhat by illustration. While the usual
blanks left on the pages under Father Tabb's verse may be
an artistic arrangement for their elders, the children can hard-
ly be blamed for wishing that some pretty pictures occupied
this extra space. And such verse as this is picture-making
enough to the imagination to make an artist of any one.

S/o AN EDITORIAL SUGGESTION FOR THE \ EAR 1900. [Jan.,

AN EDITORIAL SUGGESTION FOR THE YEAR 1900.

IN the summer of 1897 the subjoined letter was sent to all
the bishops of the Christian world and was published very
largely in the press, so that the project of celebrating the end
of the century by religious exercises recalling the wonderful
triumph of the Cross was cordially acceded to by the spiritual
leaders in the church, and bishops, speaking for their own dio-
ceses, signified their intention of doing what may be, within
their own jurisdictions. But (and this is my object in bringing
the matter to the American public just now) is it not fitting
that we in the United States, who have been blessed per-
chance more than any other people, should in a more united and
a more emphatic way celebrate the closing days of this century ?

Probably in all history there has not been a more remarka-
ble growth than the last one hundred years has brought to
the Church in these United States. This unique fact should
have a unique celebration. As the merest suggestion, to be
taken up and discussed by the Catholic press, to be approved
or to be disapproved, to be excised or expanded, I submit
the proposition of bringing about a gathering of priests,
bishops, and laymen, under the auspices of the Hierarchy, in
some important centre a gathering which will have as its
clearly defined purpose the manifestation of the glories of the
Church in these United States during the century, in the
various departments of human knowledge and human activity ;
a gathering in which may be presented by the ablest writers
carefully prepared papers on the achievements in the various
religious movements of the times. Such a gathering will be
epoch-making in its results.

It will undoubtedly have a far-reaching effect not only on
the many who, though not of the faith, still look to the Catho-
lic Church as the mainstay of religion, and who say if organ-
ized Christianity is to be found anywhere it must be enshrined
in Catholicism ; but such a celebration will have the other
effect of further uniting us against a common opposition, of
eradicating whatever differences may have crept in among
us on questions of policy, and of presenting to the world of
irreligion the spectacle of a united, progressive, and aggressive
church which speaks with authority, which settles the perplex-
ing difficulties of belief, and which, finally, claims to be and is
the ark of salvation to all the world.

1900.] AN EDITORIAL SUGGESTION FOR THE YEAR 1900. 571

CARDINAL JACOBINI'S PLANS FOR CELEBRATING THE END OF

THE CENTURY.

MOST ILLUSTRIOUS AND MOST REVEREND SIR: You have doubtless be-
come aware of the project, advanced by a number of men of great piety, to get
the faithful throughout the universe at the close of the present century to affirm
in a solemn manifestation, by a series of religious exercises, their love and
gratitude to the all-powerful Redeemer of the human race.

The design of these men in this initiative was to respond to the desire of our
Holy Father Pope Leo XIII., who wished to consecrate this epoch of transition
from one century to another by an extraordinary invocation of the divine assist-
ance of Jesus Christ as a happy presage of peace and concord.

Now, the project of these personages having received the full approbation
of His Holiness, and Catholic delegates from all nations having assembled in
congress at Rome to promote its realization, it has pleased the Sovereign Pontiff
to select me, without any merit on my part, as honorary president of the com-
mittee.

Here, assuredly, is a noble task, and I own that I am proud and happy to
undertake it. For what could be more agreeable to my feelings than the occasion
so favorably presented to me at the end of my days to employ all the strength
that is still left me in promoting the glory of our Saviour all the more, too, in
these last days of a departing century? And what a century has been this of
ours in which proud men, relying on a science unworthy of the name and display-
ing an activity which might be called feverish, have carried their audacious
temerity to the extent of calling in question the origin of Christianity, or even
presenting as a fiction, as a lying legend, faith in the divine person of the
Saviour!

Wherefore we shall fervently strive to make reparation for the great injuries
done to our Master, to appease God's anger by our prayers, to exalt in paeans of
praise the holy name of Jesus Christ, who is the splendor of the glory and the
perfect image of the substance of God. Such will be the task in which we shall
put forth all our zeal at the dawn of the new century.

Uniting, therefore, as closely as possible under one head the efforts of all, by
striking acts of piety and reparation, by the publication of desirable works, by the
great voice of the best daily papers, and, finally, by public demonstrations of
affection for the Roman Pontiff, we shall easily succeed in celebrating these
grand solemnities in the joy of our hearts, and in an imposing concert, as it were,
of the voices of all nations. In this way we shall clearly show forth our close
alliance of will, the wonderful unity of the church, and the perfect union of the
faithful with its head. Moreover, the triumph of the cross, the only source of sal-
vation, being thus verified throughout the universe, human society will escape un-
harmed from the perils of imminent ruin, and will happily enter upon a path of
peace and prosperity at the beginning of the next century.

I entertain the happy expectation that your lordship, as well as all other
bishops, will consent to give your powerful support to myself and the committee
established at Rome, and, above all, that you will devote your best efforts to the
creation of a national committee for the same object.

Awaiting your answer, in order that we may all agree on the measures to
be adopted, I earnestly implore the Lord Jesus Christ to vouchsafe in his infinite
bounty to hear your lordship's prayers.

Yours most fraternally and devotedly, CARDINAL JACOBINI.

572 THE SHAKESPEARE NAME. TJ an ->

THE SHAKESPEARE NAME.

ASSUME for the nonce that Bacon wrote the Shakespeare Plays. It may
be interesting, then, to consider why he selected Shakspere, of other men, to be
his mask. There are some points that would go to show that it was partly on
account of Shakspere's name, which Bacon adopted because of a resemblance
to his own and because he could adapt it to a good pen-name.

It was a great age for playing with words ; witness the Plays themselves.
Now Francis Bacon, in discussing his name, doubtless discussed it in the radical
sense of the word and shook it to pieces. Let us notice some of the findings.

According to the popular derivation, Francis means free. Philologists,
however, tell us that Francis means French, which comes from France, which
comes from Frank, which further, in the language of the Franks, meant spear.
Bacon also had closer at hand an Anglo-Saxon word, franca, spear.

We can easily shake from Bacon the Greek akon, spear, c and k being
transliterals for the two languages. To have a closer correspondence, we may
take an old variant of the word, bakon ; and we even find that the philosopher
on one occasion signed his name with this spelling. The Shakespearean, Mr.
Waite, cites this as showing a careless man, and puts the name in large capitals,
BAKON. Francis Bacon is thus a reduplicated name; the central B bristles in
both directions ; a spear is shaken to the right and left.

This may seem to the reader like the proof of the identity of eel-pie and
pigeon : an eel-pie is a jack-pie ; a jack-pie is a john-pie ; a john-pie is a pie-
john ; and a pie-john is a pigeon. But this celebrated sortites is for the purpose
of rebuses strictly logical ; though it is nonsense, there is method in it. If
Francis Bacon rang the changes on his name, after the fashion of the day, these
things did not escape him. This is enough that he should recognize spear as a
fanciful meaning of his name. He need not even apologize, " Priscian a little
scratched ; 'twill serve."

We are not in such haste but we can stop to notice that our next most cele-
brated case of secret authorship, that of the Letters of Junius, is connected with
another Francis, Sir Philip. Francis Bacon and Philip Francis there seems to
be a contradiction of nominal frankness, as if Francis a non. "Francis!
Anon, anon, sir."

The approved spelling of the actor's name is Shakspere. The name is thus
written in the register of his birth and in the register of his burial. The
marriage-bond gives Shagspere. A shag is a woolly dog.

William means golden helmet. The form of the helmet is well preserved
in Wilhelm, and we can see the shimmer of the gold in Guillaume. Trans-
ferring to the German helmet the French gilding, we have Guil-helm, which is
plain enough.

This, then, may have helped to lead Bacon to take up with Shakspere
Shakspere's name ; it being easily understood that the young aristocrat would
not publish stage-plays under his own ambitious signature. Let us suppose
that, while looking about for an esquire, he has heard at the theatre of one
Will Shakspere; he might ponder thus: "What an agreement that name has
with mine. "I am Shoat-spear and he is Shak-spear ; lam Hog-spear and he

i goo.] THE SHAKESPEARE NAME. 573

is Dog-spear. Will? William is golden helmet ; a helmet hides the head and
gives protection; a helmet is a mask; and gold? yes that's my object too.
William Shakspere make it William Shake-speare ; it is a fair name."

Mr. Edwin Reed says : " It is significant that in many of the quartos the
hyphen is inserted between the syllables (Shake-speare), perhaps (as has been
suggested) to give the name a fanciful turn and distinguish it in another slight
respect from that of the actor. The true explanation, however, may lie deeper
than this. In Grecian mythology Pallas- Athene, the Roman Minerva, was the
goddess of wisdom, philosophy, poetry, and the fine arts. Her name originally
was simply Pallas, a word derived from pallein, signifying to brandish or shake ;
she was generally represented with a spear; Athens, the home of the drama,
was under the protection of this Spear-shaker. In our age, such a name would
be understood at once as a pseudonym."

Besides this, in Middle English and in the earliest modern English, we find
sphere pronounced spear. Thus spear-shaker is world-shaker high-sounding,
yet, as the event shows, not altogether inaptly chosen. We know that Bacon
was an unassuming man, but one of his early productions was styled The
Greatest Birth of Time ; and it was he who quietly wrote : " I have taken all
Knowledge for my Province."

Further, Mr. Reed's acute remarks on the hyphenated name do not touch
the significance of the hyphen in itself. Hyphen means under one, its parts being
hypo, under, and hen, one (the number i). This easily takes on the meaning of
that which is under the number i, namely, zero, the cipher. Shake hyphen spear
thus becomes Shake cipher spear, as though written ShakeOspeare. Naught is
the non-significant digit ; though it means nothing, yet it counts for so much.
Here we have it the digit of digits, the finger of fingers, a veritable right-hand
index to point out the syllables one at a time, so that a child or he who runs may
read.

Lord Verulam himself tells us that we shall sometimes discover that objects,
which of all others appeared to us the most useless, remote, and inapplicable to
our purpose, possess the very properties we are in search of.

In the ancient story, when the people were looking towards the east, each
man anxious to be the first to catch the light of the sun, there was a slave who
turned his face to the west. Great must have been the laughter. But before the
sun glanced above the horizon, it gilded some high projections in the Occident,
and it was the slave that cried " I see the sun-tight." Sometimes an efficacious
method is overlooked, perhaps despised.

I have assumed that Bacon wrote the Shakespeare Plays. I would ask leave
to state here as an announcement, to be substantiated later, that I have dis-
covered this to be a fact. When the Plays were written they were larded with
various peculiar kinds of lard. In particular, I have found what I now wrap in
an anagram :

: NESO ALTO NESO : FFF CHIRB GGG TU TU.

When this is unveiled, there will shine forth easy proof like day-light that
FRANCIS BACON WROTE THE SHAKESPEARE PLAYS.

NEAL H. EWING.

574 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. (Jan.,

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

AT the Catholic Club of New York City a reception was given last month to
representatives of the Auxiliary Board of Trinity College for the higher
education of women, now building in Washington. There was a large attend-
ance of prominent women deeply interested in the success of the new project.
Archbishop Corrigan presided. Miss Olive Risley Seward, secretary of the
Auxiliary Board, explained the national scope of the movement, stating that
there has not been any place where Catholic young women wishing to take
a post-graduate, course could go except to some college not conducted under
the auspices of their church. That is the reason for Trinity, which is to be
wholly Catholic. The land already is bought and paid for and the corner-stone
laid, and it is expected that the college will be opened early in October, 1900.
Boston has promised a library and California will establish an art section.
Speaking of the enormous amount of work done, Miss Seward said : They say
an American man sees what he wants and goes for it. The American woman
..says what she wants and gets it, for it is given to her by her countrymen.

Rev. M. J. Lavelle, president of the Champlain Summer-School, asserted
that the educated woman makes a better wife and mother than a simpering
idiot who knows nothing but fashion and novels. If women were lacking
in intelligence, as some argue, it would be no wonder. The history of the
world is the emancipation of women. Many cares that surround them now are
-chains of slavery. When the time comes that man stands before the same bar
of public opinion for conduct as woman a change will take place in the
world.

Senator Carter, of Montana, stated that by order of Miss Seward he was
drafted into the service. These nice ladies brought me along from Washington
to look after the luggage, and now they assign me to speak. The time has
passed when ignorance is regarded as a necessary virtue. He looked forward
to the time when women, with their keen minds and strong characters, will be
in the astronomical observatories and chemical laboratories ; when they will go
more into the sciences. If any man thinks a woman wouldn't discover a new
star, he got away from his mother before she got the run of him, and he never
was married. Whereupon his wife, who also was on the platform, tried to
frown upon him, but decided to laugh instead.

The last speaker, former Justice Daly, remarked that he too was there by
order of Miss Seward. Senator Carter had come all the way over from Wash-
ington, and he had come all the way from down-town, which in these days
of interlacing trolleys was far more dangerous. Then he praised Trinity Col-
lege and the women who had projected it. He advocated the highest education
for women.

Mrs. T. W. Ward, president of the New York Associate Board, was on the
platform. Some of the other New York members, all of whom were present,
are Miss Leary, Mrs. John E. Grote Higgens, Mrs. Geraldyn Redmond, Mrs.
Edward Henry Anderson, Mrs. Joseph F. Daly, Mrs. John A. Sullivan, Mrs.
De Navarre, Mrs. Thomas Addis Emmet, Mrs. James Rich Steers, Miss Drexel,

1900.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 575

and Mrs. V. O. Dahlgren. Some of the guests from Washington included Mrs.
Carter, Mrs. M. F. Egan, Mrs. W. C. Robinson, Miss Marie Clotilde Redfern,
Mrs. Zebulon B. Vance, Miss Sherman, Miss Catharine Roach, and the Countess

de Lechtervelde.

* * #

In the Grand Hall of Studies, Academy Mount St. Vincent on the Hudson,
December i, Miss Marion J. Brunowe gave the first reading in her series of
papers on Distinguished Women. The paper was entitled: Mrs. Oliphant
as Woman and Author.

The subject was one of great interest, owing to the fact that at the present
time there is the most lively discussion going on among the critics as to whether
or not Mrs. Oliphant was a great author. Miss Brunowe concluded that Mrs.
Oliphant was a wonderful woman, a most industrious woman, a woman of
beautiful and noble character, an interesting and sane writer, but not a great
literary artist. She lacked restraint, sense of proportion, charm of style. Hers
was not " the golden word that leaps forth immortal." She did good work, but
she did not do great work.

Miss Brunowe's paper was written in her usual attractive style, and the
many anecdotes which she recounted in connection with Mrs. Oliphant's
life moved her audience at times to the most lively mirth and again to the
deepest sympathy for this interesting writer, this heroic and lovable woman.
The Alumnae Society of Mount St. Vincent held a grand reunion lately at the
Waldorf-Astoria. An elaborate musical and literary programme was given ex-
clusively by the members.

* * *

To those who are,anxious to know how permanent town or village libraries
may be established in New York State the following information is given :

It requires only $100 as capital to establish a library which will afford plenty
of reading matter for the first year. All that is necessary beyond the $100 will be
a little free service from the people, and the State will do the rest. If twenty-
rive taxpayers petition for a library, the law requires a popular vote to be taken
upon the question. This vote may be taken at any election of the village, town,
or school district, or it may be done by the village trustees or school authorities.
At the same time five trustees should be elected, one of whom shall go out of
office each year, and a tax of $100 should be levied for the maintenance of the
library.

Should the raising of the $100 by tax prove impracticable, an association could
be formed, trustees elected, the money raised by private subscription, and a like
sum pledged to continue the work for the second year. In that case it is said
there is little doubt that the Regents would grant a charter.

When the formalities of establishing the library are complete and the money
in hand, the State will pay as much (up to $200) as the local authorities will pay
for approved books, serials and bindings, or for approved library supplies in the
case of libraries just starting.

The aid extended by the State to libraries under its charter or control is a
yearly gift, and in the second year of its existence the library could again call
upon the State for as large a sum (up to $200) as it could raise from local
sources. The incidental expenses of such a library in the second year would
be less than in the first, and if $100 was raised locally considerably more than
one hundred new books could be added.

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Jan., 1900.

In any community of a few hundred inhabitants such a library as is indi-
cated could be founded if two or three enthusiastic men or women would take
up the project. If any one wants to make the attempt and will write to Public
Libraries Division, State Library, Albany, N. Y., circulars and blanks covering
the subject will be promptly furnished. We are much pleased to get the in-
formation given in the following letter from one of the best workers for the dif-
fusion of sound literature :

Several days ago I made application to Albany to have the History of the
Catholic Church in the United States, by John Gilmary Shea, put on the approved
list of books for public libraries in the State of New York. I am happy to inform
you that Mr. Eastman replied promptly, saying that he was willing to authorize
the payment of public money for that work. Doubtless you are aware of the
new edition which D. H. McBride & Co. are now bringing out. The binding
and print are much better than the first edition, published for $20 per set.
Prices are now reduced : cloth binding, $12 ; half morocco, $15. I am very glad
that we have this work in the Regents' list of approved books.
* * *

Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, has submitted his first annual
report. It contains as an appendix a personal sketch of John Russell Young,
late librarian, and Mr. Putnam's predecessor. The report is made up mainly of
a statement of what the library contains up to date in the line of books, pam-
phlets, maps, charts, music, manuscripts, and prints.

This mass of material has never been catalogued on a modern basis, and
Mr. Putnam states in great detail just what should be done in this line. He
recommends a considerable increase in the working force of the library to ac-
complish this and other necessary work. In the estimates the total force is
raised from 134 to 229. He is now getting together a working reference library
for the use of members at the Capitol. Special collections will be sent over on
deposit from time to time bearing on questions at the moment under considera-
tion. Mr. Putnam says the reading and music-room for the blind has been
decidedly successful.

It would be very interesting to know in what way the books by Catholic
authors are arranged in the Congressional Library. As the publishers send
copies of each book to secure copyright, there should be a very complete col-
lection. Who will look into this matter, and make a report for the Columbian
Reading Union ? This is a fine opportunity for volunteer service.

M. C. M.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LXX. FEBRUARY, 1900. No. 419.

THE EVANGELIZATION OF CITIES.

HE problem of the salvation of the city life in
America is causing no end of trouble to the
thinking men of the times. The fact that the
present generation of children is largely growing
up without the ingrained spirit of religion, to-
gether with the existing " worldliness " of the
men and women who are on the scenes of present-
day activities, makes far-seeing men at times fear that there is
little hope of the future moral regeneration of our civic life.

The word " worldliness " is used to signify that peculiar
American spirit which is the resultant of the numerous
agencies of our civilization which may be catalogued under the
following heads : the striving for wealth, the disruption of
domestic life, the decaying spirit of reverence for things sacred,
the eager pursuit after pleasure, the vanishing belief in the sanc-
tions of the moral law. All these agencies combine to create a
typical urban American who follows no religious form, who tries
to get all he can out of life, and who is legally moral because he
dreads the consequences of any infraction of the civil law.

This spirit of worldliness which constitutes the atmosphere
of our modern city is like a contagion that infects the souls of
many and poisons their religious life. It is a damp, sunless
atmosphere, very favorable to the culture of vice germs, and
very unfavorable to a healthy religious life. It is little wonder,
then, where this spirit is most rampant, as it is in our great
cities, there is a gradual decay of church-going, and there are
loud complaints by earnest church-workers of the growing
paganism and irreligion of the day.

STATE OF NEW YORK. 1899.
VOL. LXX. 37

578 THE EVANGELIZATION OF CITIES. [Feb.,

But it is altogether peculiar that the loudest and most
aggravated complaints come from non-Catholic church-worker?.
The story of empty pews has become a twice-told tale. The
constant reaching after " sensations " is no indication of a
steady, healthy life. The violent efforts in census-taking,
house-to-house visitations, the Baxter Street Jew methods of
" pulling in," savor very largely of the futile and fatal struggle
for life. Mr. Moody was undoubtedly a sincere man as well
as an earnest missionary, and in his day did not a little to
awaken the slumbering religious sense of his people ; but when
he attempted, as he did during the last few years of his life,
to penetrate the dense " worldliness " of our largest cities, he
failed completely. He made scarcely a ripple on the surface.
His voice was as an arrow that was shot through the air and when
it was gone there was none to mark its path or notice its fall.

There is even now as we write a shrewdly advertised effort
to evangelize Brooklyn. The great papers have been enlisted
in the effort, the theatres have been borrowed for the purpose,
the street-corners have been utilized in the endeavor, the
Y. M. C. A. halls have been given over to the movement.
And what will be the result of the agitation ? Not many
days will have passed after the revival has subsided before
there will be a cooling of individual fervor, a relapsing from
personal effort, and a backsliding from church-membership.
The reason is simply because there is no organization to hold,
there is no dogmatic life to steady, there is no authoritative
moral teacher to guide, and finally, there is no satisfying de-
votional life to constantly attract. Still we cannot but com-
mend the zeal of the church-workers. If they had an organ-
ization behind them that was so complete in its detail that it
could take the child from the mother's arm, and surround him
all through life with such safeguards as would make it difficult
for him to fall away, they might hope to see some lasting
results from their labors.

In the first place, if they are anxious to preserve the
streams of religious life pure, they will be obliged to begin
nearer their source, in childhood. If they desire to have these
same streams flowing full and strong, they must feed them
from a thousand springs by the wayside as they rush along
through life. What are the facts ? Non-Catholic churches are
open as a general rule but for an hour during the week, and
the impressions that are received during this short time are
easily superlaid or dissipated by the ever-active agencies of

1900.] THE EVANGELIZATION OF CITIES. 579

the world during the rest of the week. When they do open,
at the very best the religious impressions are very much di-
luted. There is little deep-searching prayer, there is less of
the cultivation of that humble and contrite spirit which makes
the best soil for the operation of divine grace. There are
many other things that contribute to make up the powerless-
ness of the non-Catholic churches to cope with the problems
of city life. What is the result? The people have turned
away from the broken cisterns that will not hold the soul-
satisfying draught. Helen Clark, of the Evangel Band, pub-
lished figures showing that while there are Protestant churches
for every fifty-five hundred of the population in Greater New
York, yet only seven per cent, of people are church members,
and this is one per cent, less than ten years ago. In the West,
where there is less respect for time-honored customs, the evil
reveals itself in more glaring characteristics. In Chicago the
number of non-Catholic churches that are untenanted all the
year round is absolutely deplorable.

But what will become of our city life? Is the spirit of
religion to die out ? Is there no efficient means to regenerate
the urban masses ? The shrewdest social workers are looking
to the church, which still holds the affections of the people.
Wherever the agencies of evil are active, it has been the policy
of the Catholic Church to multiply the helps of religion. She
instils into the child's heart during its best years a deep spirit
of faith, a love for the fundamental principles of morality, a
reverential respect for authority. She cultivates his conscience
by means of the confessional. She provides strengthening in-
fluences to invigorate weak human nature when the season
of temptation comes. As he enters man's estate she still
asserts her claim on him by demanding Sunday attendance at
Mass, daily prayer, frequent confession. She provides abundant
extra services at times of missions when the deep searching
truths of eternity penetrate the innermost folds of his heart.
She follows him to the sick-bed, and when death comes again
calls his mortal remains back to her altar for the last blessing
and then lays it in the consecrated grave. Her organization is
effective to keep the delinquent within safe barriers, her hand
is strong to pick up the fallen, her lash is heavy for the recal-
citrant, her heart is sympathetic to the weak and the erring.

The deepest students of our civic problems look to the
Catholic Church for the regeneration of city life.

580 NATURE.WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. [Feb.,

NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT.

BY REV. JOSEPH McSORLEY, C.S.P.

'O conceive of Catholic doctrine as the* synthesis
of all truth would be a notion neither false nor
exaggerated. Whatever the Church fails to teach
formally, she yet recognizes and rests upon, in so
far as it is true. The laws of nature and the
principles of art, the dogmas of science and of philosophy, the
verities of history, ethics, and social studies, all are but divisions
of a splendid whole outward expressions of the eternal Un-
created Truth. And so it happens that every falsity and
every exaggeration is bound to prejudice in some degree that
perfect harmony, toward the realization of which the Church's
acti9n is ever tending.

PANTHEISM ROBS GOD OF PERSONALITY.

It is perhaps to be expected that misunderstanding and dis-
tortion of a particular truth will recur with a frequency cor-
responding to the loftiness and beauty and attractive power of
that truth. Hence the reason why the artist, the philosopher,
the theologian notice the wonderful persistency of a certain
class of errors which, exaggerating the loveliness of this fair
world, would make of it the Ultimate Reality, substituting it
for the Being who has, indeed, but vested himself therewith as
with a clinging garment of beauty.

All through the history of philosophy and religion, from
Eleatics to modern Hegelians, we cross and recross the trail
of this error. Now in a materialistic garb, again psychological,
social, or mystical in form, it pervades the speculations of
Germany, France, England, and America, as it did the older
thought of India, Persia, and Greece, naturally enough, too,
since the creature, made for God, is ever seeking knowledge of
him, and in untaught ignorance will frame to itself a divinity
out of the noblest elements it knows : the round ocean, the
mighty firmament, or the living mind of man. Thus it ever
happens that the souls of those who love sweet Nature best
are most readily deluded into an unreal worship, that because
it is unreal leaves brain bewildered and heart unsatisfied.

1900.] NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. 581

It is precisely on account of apparent nobility that the
pantheistic notion has become so fatally dominant. To wor-
ship Nature is an instinct strong within the loftiest of our
race. Adoration of the universe seems to be but one remove
from adoration of its Maker ; to be, at worst, but a single step
downward. In this creed Divine Truth, Divine Goodness, and
Divine Beauty are still upheld, however vaguely and imper-
sonally; and after Deism or Calvinism the systems which re-
present the world as either ignored or hated by God we turn
to this worship of Nature as a refreshing, ennobling, elevating
alternative. That men should thus react is perhaps, on the
whole, an encouraging and a welcome sign ; but still, though
their error be only a step distant from truth, that step measures
a fatal interval for it robs God of personality. That this mis-
take practically identifies religion with atheism, that it stulti-
fies philosophy, benumbs art, and deadens ethics, is a necessary
and evident consequence ; what is more, it preys upon the
very flower of human possibilities, man's power of attaining to
personal intimacy with Almighty God.

We have, then, touched upon a serious question of practical
importance for high and noble natures. To such ideals are as the
breath of their nostrils. Characteristically honest to whatever
light is given them, they live and die true to their world-view,
their philosophy of life ; and born for the successful achieve-
ment of high resolve, their progress is limited only by the
falsehood, or obscurity, which bars " the road upward." Hence
the Church's concern for them, as being truly her sheep
strayed from the fold of her Master.

THE NATURE CULT OF THIS CENTURY.

Our own century, just ending, perhaps has seen some of
the fairest fruits of this cult of Nature. In so great an
abundance have its votaries communicated the results of their
musings, through the medium of fine literature, high thinking,
and noble ethics, that many a splendid soul has been won to
seek in it the solace of that divine unrest which is ever urging
man toward God.

With the reaction from the mad individualism of the Revo-
lution and the unrestrained Idealism of the Critical Philosophy
came a renewal of the instinctive longing for Divinity, and an
acknowledgment of the mystic sympathy between man and
the visible world. Germany, that has played so mighty a role
in shaping the history of our century, marked the transition by

582 NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. [Feb.,

a renascence in poetry, painting, and history, and a rejection
of morbid religiosity. Romantic realism, so to call it, was
substituted for lifeless Classicism, and subjective Egoism gave
way to objective Pantheism, to a passionate worship of the
outer world. In philosophy, Schelling, the boy-PJato, with a
fervid poetic imagination and a deeply mystic bent of mind,
and in letters, Goethe, with his startling assault upon tra-
ditional models, were influences that colored a whole school
of writers and made a marked impression on the English-
speaking world. And near enough to home we have a bril-
liant representative in the Sage of Concord, Emerson's poetry
exhibiting much of that dreamy mysticism which has proven
attractive to so many of his countrymen.

None who are sensitive to the bewildering charms of visible
nature can repress a stirring of sympathy at sound of Emerson's
verse. The lyrical magic of the " Ode to Beauty," utterly
sensuous, mad with cravings indefinable and the languishing of
impotent desire, sounds the note of completest devotion to the
loveliness of

" The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn's cup, the rain-drop's arc,
The swinging spider's silver line,
The ruby in the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond."

We pity the reader capable of ignoring the poetic fervor,
the soft refinement, the glowing descriptive richness, the
matchless music of the verses in ''Wood-Notes" and "May-
day." Our language is the richer for the production of these
verses, and to many a soul, no doubt, they have given intima-
tions of a lovelier world and purer thoughts than previous ex-
perience had ever revealed. We can see the poet threading
autumn thickets and pacing the flower-besprinkled aisles of
woodland, lifted up in ecstatic thrills of sympathy and love for
his beautiful mistress the curtains of whose dwelling are raised
at his approach. The smokeless incense of the Spring, the
darkling lake, the pendent mountain's shade, melody of wind,
and amorous note of bird, we now seek expectantly in scenes
formerly cold and uninspiring. " Nature is loved by what is
best in us," he says. " Concerning it no man can affect an
indifference or incuriosity."* His garden was the forest ledge
above banks sloping to the blue lake's depths. The voice of

*" Essay on Nature."

i QOO.] NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. 583

the sea was his music morn and eve. The rainbow, and the
sunset, and the coursing orbs knit his whole world into a glow-
ing harmony of perfect beauty.

ELEVATING THOUGH COMFORTLESS.

Undeniably such thinking is as wholesome as it is lovely.
The meanest of men becomes less mean and more a man for
having learned to stand out in the open and face the search-
ing, summoning, menacing presence of universal Nature. And
the refining influence of this worship is to be traced in the
high sentiments and lofty aspiration of men and women who
love Nature as Emerson loved it. An earnestness, a deep and
noble solemnity, becomes visible in souls that have cultivated
this best side of their character; and from a merely human
standard of excellence their attainment is, perhaps, not to be
surpassed. But the very nobility of these souls, and their
capacity for splendid achievements, leaves us with a sense of
bitter disappointment at their failure to attain to things
divine ; for, after all, earth is not Heaven, man is not the
Deity, and the great world throbbing with omnipresent beauty
is the shadow and not the reality of that Infinite One who
leans forth out of the farthest recesses of being to fire human
souls with a divine yearning, and win them to Himself. There
is the sublime realm beyond the ken of the pantheist, who
knows the Divinity immanent in the world, indeed, but fails to
recognize the Divinity transcendent. First Cause he can ap-
prehend ; but he is without notion of a Personal God, dwelling
beyond this visible world, surrounding and surpassing all real
and possible creatures as a limitless ocean might surround the
tiniest animalcule contained in one liquid atom of its mass.

Emerson's is a grand conception of Nature, we confess,
but after all it is of Nature, and Nature can never utterly
satisfy "the best in us." To be sure we are rapt in wonder-
ing admiration before the vast universal pattern of things
which gives us count of "bird, beast, flower, song, picture,
form, space, thought, and character," and identifies the weaver
of the wood-bird's nest with "the hand that rounded Peter's
dome, building better than it knew." None of us will stop
short of humble reverence in contemplation of efficient Nature,
natura naturans, publishing "itself in creatures, reaching from
particles and spicula, through transformation on transforma-
tion to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate re-
sults without a shock or leap." But if Efficient Nature be not

584 NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. [Feb.,

a personal, free, intelligent God, then it cannot satisfy the
soul, and we must wander dissatisfied, passing allotted days
in allotted spheres, and finally dying as dutiful children of
Buddha, to be blown out in Nirvana, or slip like dewdrops
into the shining sea. This, then, is the comfortless promise
held out in the pantheistic philosophy; this the disquieting
pang that must mercilessly haunt men, though a beautiful
world lies at their feet supplicating love and worship.
" The fiend that man harries

Is love of the Best :
Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature

Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect
Which his eyes seek in vain."*

No ; there is something in man too divine to be contented
with anything less than Infinite Perfection, and every negation
of personality, consciousness, or freedom robs the Deity of its
essential charm. 'Tis a blessed life, no doubt,

"When man in the bush with God may meet,"f

unless, indeed, it turn out after all that the God encountered
is only a bush. That gives our adoration pause. Yet the pan-
theistic notion implies a divinity who is but a bush on a giant
scale, at least, in nowise essentially distinguishable from the
totality of existent creatures.

" He is the axis of the star,

He is the sparkle of the spar;

He is the heart of every creature ;

He is the meaning of each feature;

And hi-s mind is the sky

Than all it holds more deep, more high." \

" Draw if thou can the mystic line,
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine."

"And his will is not thwarted;

The seeds of land and sea
Are the atoms of his body bright
And his behest obey." ||

* " The 9J>hinx," Emerson. f " Good-by," Ibid. \ " Wood-Notes," Ib.

" Worship," Ib. \ " The World-Soul," Ib.

1900.] NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. 585

A world that contains nothing beyond what Emerson tells
us of is, after all, a world dismally incomplete. The very sun-
shine loses its glitter, and the forest songsters seem less melo-
dious when not conceived as creatures of a Lord who made
them and maintains them in being. If Nature's real glory is
in the fact that she voices forth Divinity and leads men there-
unto, her loveliness to any intelligent admirer must ever be
dependent on the fidelity with which she manifests her Begin-
ning and End. One might envy the poet able thus to sing :

" I inhaled the violet's breath :
Around me stood the oaks and firs ;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground ;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity."*

But what sadness would replace our delight did we realize
he could aspire no further than this most unsatisfying con-
summation :

" Beauty through my senses stole ;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole."

Tender and sweet is Nature, beyond the comprehension of
any man; still she has no capacity to quench the deepest
yearning of his soul, the instinctive human desire for God.
With all his poetry, his philosophy, his refined taste, and his
ardent heart, Emerson's highest imaginable ideal is infinitely
below that which commonplace Catholics are encouraged to
cultivate, and to which not infrequently they attain. The per-
sonality of God the Father, imaged in its splendor by the
glorified humanity of Jesus Christ, and knit close to the
Catholic heart by the indwelling Spirit of Grace the love and
pursuit of this ideal transfigures laborer and servant into sera-
phic worshippers of the One Who Is, and carries them up-
ward into the ineffable regions of celestial bliss. If purity,
sublimity, instinct-proven reality be the gauge of poetry and
mysticism, then the pantheist is but a voiceless infant when
compared with those whose faith teaches that Jesus, the In-
carnate God, comes bodily to dwell within them as they kneel
at the altar-rail.

The evidences of Christianity are to be sought for else-
where than in the present paragraph, yet we may for a mo-
ment insist on the sublime superiority of the Christian idea of

* " Each and All," Emerson.

586 NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. [Feb.,

God over any that differs from it by the subtraction of the
personal note. Let us refer to a practical test, a test all too
likely to come clamoring into the lives of each one of us that
of pain. What is deeper, holier, more effective in shaping
human lives, reaching as it does into the very innermost re-
cesses of man's spirit ? The hour of pain is the acceptable
time for the uplifting of our souls, the moment when we can
make great leaps toward perfection, if properly urged and as-
sisted. But what sort of consolation or betterment is to be
gathered from the blind fatalism of nature-worship Oriental,
German, or American when the knees are bowed with grief
and the heart heavy ?
We are told indeed :

" I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds." *

But is this true? Antecedently, even we would have said
that such words must be the offspring' of a joyous imagination
and begotten in the fervor of poetic rapture. As it happens
we can appeal to an actual experience of the same writer,
elsewhere recorded. The infinite pathos of his " Threnody " has
brought tears to many an eye, and remembering pangs to
many a soul, whose well-beloved are gone, and who can find
but poor consolation in turning to Nature. When death had
snatched away his heart's idol the son so rich in promise, on
whom his hopes had centred then the sorrow-stricken father,
in unanswered lament, showed all too clearly the quenchless
frenzy of his grief :

" Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stop to heal that only child,
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth?"

* " Musketaquid," Emerson.

IQOO.] NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. 587

"What does he know who hath not been tried?*' asks
Holy Writ; and many a philosophy of " sunshine-and-flowers "
has vanished into thin air at the correcting touch of pain or
grief. Which one of us, foreseeing the likelihood of woe some
day entering into our own lives, will be tempted to embrace a
religion whose last word is the assurance that the blessed dead
are on their rounds through the "cyclical marvel," at present
a bird, a vegetable, or a beast, mayhap ? Yet no more com-
forting prospect can be held up to those for whom love of
Nature touches the outer margin of positive creed.

" I that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bunch of grass."

Such may be the song our dead are chanting ; such the
refrain we ourselves shall voice. Pantheist, Buddhist, Material-
ist, Agnostic will have little to dispute over when in their
persons shall be realized the doctrine of fatalistic evolution,
laid down in the " Essay on Nature." " It is a long remove
from the granite to the oyster, and farther yet to Plato, and
the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must
come as surely as the first atom has two sides." *

Must we not declare it to be a poor, distorted view of
life which seeks such refuge when confronted by present pain?
Must we not proclaim it to be a weak philosophy which
confesses darkness as deep and ignorance as helpless as the
old Persian cynic's singing :

" 'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays ;
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

" And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky

Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help for it
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I."f

Mr. Emerson varies the expression of this sentiment, but
his faith is the same. Indeed, his translations seem to indicate
that he claimed kinship with Hafiz, Ibn Yemin, and Omar
Khayyam, and the following is inspired by their Muse:

* Emerson. t Rubaiydt.

588 NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. [Feb.,

"Alas! the Sprite that haunts us

Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious gods,

And leaves us in the mire.
We cannot learn the cipher

That's writ upon our cell :
Stars help us by a mystery

Which we could never spell."

" But our brothers have not read it,

Not one has found the key ;
And henceforth we are comforted
We are but such as they."*

The error that we complain of, then, is one of fatal defi-
ciency. That all this world thrills with divine beauty is a
welcome truth. That bonds of kinship and sympathy run
through all the kingdom of life from singing-bird to saint and
poet, is a corollary of Creation. That he is dull and less
than human who fails to hear the Voice of God in the music
of the waters and the majesty of the thunder, to see His might
in the towering mountain-peak and His beauty in the shy
floweret and the scarlet songster of the wood all this is easy
of admission. But are these things God? Or is there a
Mighty One who in His wisdom maketh the sun to shine and
the planets to speed their ordered march, One who, as truly
as the best among our race, is a thinking, conscious, loving
Person, distinct from us, as we, by His decree, are distinct
from Him? Have we a Father in Heaven, a Father who is
in the truest sense all that a perfect earthly parent would wish
to be ? Or must we content ourselves with reverence paid to
a blind force, to a necessary Law, to a God with whom we
may become identified by annihilation ?

" Before beginning and without an end,
As space eternal and as surety sure
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good :
Only its laws endure.

" It slayeth and it saveth, nowise moved

Except unto the working out of doom ;
Its threads are love and life; and Death and Pain
The shuttles of its loom.

- .

*" The World-Soul."

1 900.] NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. 589

" It knows not wrath nor pardon ; utter true

Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs ;
Times are as naught, to-morrow it will judge,
Or after many days."

" The Dew is on the lotus ! Rise, Great Sun !
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave.
Om man! padme" hum, the Sunrise comes!
The Dewdrop slips into the shining sea ! " *

There is no chance to deny the poetry of this pantheistic
dream, for it holds fast to the beauty of many a God-born
truth. Nor are we loath to admit that its ethical system, how-
ever illogical, is ennobling and inspiring. The last book of the
Light of Asia, for instance, is replete with sublimest moral
teaching, and the loftiest of merely human concepts. But the
Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path do not say
the last word on spiritual doctrine. Neither can any Emer-
sonian juxtaposition of terms, such as World-Soul, God, Nature,
Most-High, Pentecost, Beauty, Over-Soul, Holy Ghost, confuse
the keen-sighted human instinct that searches for the Divine
Person who gave it being. Sure as the well-aimed arrow seeks
the mark, the spirit flies to God who made it. Having poetry
and ethics, it would have real religion too ; and growing in
knowledge of and affection for the great loving Parent of Man,
the humblest of us will attain to truths and joys that human
minds could neither originate nor fathom. Recognizing Nature's
beauty we go beyond it a fact that perhaps can be illustrated
in no better way than by copying a few words which will show
the kind of poetry to be found in the soul of a Catholic
mystic :

HENRY SUSO, THE CHRISTIAN MYSTIC.

"Now let us remain here awhile, and contemplate the high
and excellent Master in his works. Look above you and around
you, look to the four quarters of the world, how wide and
high the beautiful sky is in its rapid course, and how richly
the Master has adorned it with the seven planets, each of which,
with the exception of the moon, is much larger than the earth,
and how it is beautified by the innumerable multitude of the
bright stars. Oh ! how clearly and cheerfully the beautiful sun
rises in the summer season, and how diligently he gives growth
and blessings to the soil ; how the leaves and the grass come

* Light of Asia, Book viii.

590 NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. [Feb.,

forth, how the beautiful flowers smile, how the forest, and the
heath, and the field resound with the sweet airs of the nightin-
gale and other small birds, how all the animals which were
shut up during the severe winter come forth and enjoy them-
selves and propagate their species, how young and old mani-
fest their joy in merry and gladsome utterances ! O tender God,
if thou art so loving in thy creatures, how beautiful and delight-
ful must thou be in thyself ! Look further I pray you, and be-
hold the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, and all the
wonderful things in them, the variety and diversity of men,
quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and sea-monsters, all of which cry
aloud and proclaim the praise and honor of the boundless and
infinite nature of God! Lord, who doth preserve all this?
who doth feed it ? Thou takest care of all, of everything in
its own way, of great and small, rich and poor; thou, O God!
doest it ; thou art indeed God." *

Between the Divinity worshipped by this man and the God
adored of Emerson lies an infinite interval. We sum up the
difference when we say, Personality. A personal God is
nobler than a mere Law of Nature, even as the purest human
love is indescribably above the court paid by the wind to a
swaying rose. True affection and real worship cannot exist
apart from personality ; for such is not the constitution of the
human heart, ever craving to love some one, and to be loved
by some one. A personal response, and that alone, can satisfy
the void which comes to a man when he has consecrated his
life, given all his substance, utterly extinguished joy and
desire and the passion of selfishness in his soul. Some one
who knows and appreciates, some one who sympathizes, some
one who sings an answering harmony to his cry this is what
the lover seeks with a craving quenchless as the thirst of
fever. The loneliness and the self-sacrifice of his love can
submerge but never annihilate his sense of personality. A
person he is, and lower than a person cannot be his equal.
If not for self, then for some other person must he toil and
suffer. Nor can he live, nor will he die nobly and intelli-
gently, unless his life and death are dedicate to some one.

This some one the Christian finds in the Reality under-
lying all effects and manifestations of the visible world, still
distinct from and superior to them, even as our soul is with
regard to our garments or our bodily members. The loving
study of that Reality beneath appearances gives clear convic-

* Henry Suso.

1900.] NATURE-WORSHIP A PAGAN SENTIMENT. 591

tion of Its Personality. Absolute He is in the sense of Un-
li.nited Perfection and Infinite Being, but not in the sense of
vague and indefinite impersonal Force, or Law. For this
reison we are justified in representing Him as entitled to the
highest devotion and affection which human souls are capable
of bestowing a tribute surely beyond the claim of an imper-
sonal Thing. Hence the simplicity and the jealously guarded
purity of that divine communion between God and man ;
hence the peculiar fulness attaching to the Christian concep-
tion of Christ, the Incarnate Divinity though to the faithful
disciple the Incarnate Christ is no more real than the Invisi-
ble God. It is a double knowledge and a two-fold love, mak-
ing completest harmony. " This is life eternal, to know Thee,
the only true G:>d, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent."*
Here we come upon the explanation of those boundless
extravagances intelligible only in a lover which holy men
and women have manifested in the impassioned ardor of a
mighty love; they were swept out of themselves into a Presence
flashing forth His Divine Beauty into their souls, in a face-to-
face embrace. Then there blazed up in them a great self,
consuming, rapturous love, something that never could attach
to a blind law, or a supreme force, nor indeed to any object
other than a Divine Person, loving and beloved. This, and
this alone, is a sufficient explanation of the countless series of
mystics and saints in the Catholic Church, who have deified
nature and transfigured the world as by the rush of a living
flame. Their achievements stand as unique, not comparable
with anything else in the records of human history, for they
were true Transcendentalists, and not confined by nature. Still
they did understand the real value of nature ; since for the
mystic the visible creation is ever clothed with an impalpable
glory, a rich depth of meaning, unsuspected by the mere
" artist." To the man of prayer, creatures glow forth as so
many faint, imperfect images of the Absolute Beauty, every
lovely sight and sound storing his mind with fresh elements of
knowledge, and contributing new strength to his conception of
the ineffable Loveliness of God. The Christian then, and not
the Pagan, the saint rather than the poet, John the Divine,
Catherine, Francis, Teresa, in place of Plotinus, Schelling,
Emerson, Thoreau such is the exchange suggested by a study
of Nature in its true relation to Divinity.

* John xvii. 3.

I^ON^ON^OMA.

A beautiful lake in Long Island around which are woven many Indian legends.
BY JOHN JEROME ROONEY.

lONKONKOMA!

In what far Spring or Indian Summer fair
Fell first thy name upon the evening air?
Was it some dusky hunter of the wood
Who named thee thus, as on thy beach he stood,

Or yet, perchance, some tribesman, bold and free,

Who knew the tempest-thunders of the sea,

And, wandering inland, marvelled much to find

Thy gentle breast untouched by any wind,

Ronkonkoma ?

Ronkonkoma !

When the young moon is up and midnight's hour

Has woven round thee her weird, ghostly power,

Say dost thou see, within thy secret cave,

The anguished spirit of the love-lorn brave

Who sought the depths where the dark currents flow

Flying to thee for solace of his woe ?

Are the strange risings of thy moonless tide

His lover's tears for a long vanished bride,

Ronkonkoma ?

Ronkonkoma !

Where, like a diamond, gleams Geneva's lake

On prouder shores the silvery waters break :

'Mid the sweet music of the Irish rills

Killarney smiles between her emerald hills

Yet, tho' thy charms be not so bravely blown,

They are no less for being all thine own,

They are no less, but sweeter, better far

That they are calm, as gentle maidens are,

Ronkonkoma !

Not from the lowland sources hast thou sprung :

No gossip thou with every brooklet's tongue !

The hills the hills thy eager springs supply

The granite hills and the o'er-reaching sky.

So, may thy hidden fountains, coming down

All undefiled by touch of field or town,

Tell us our springs of life and joy are stored

Untainted in the Mountains of the Lord,

Ronkonkoma !

; SCRC 1Uin$
JJRD

SBOP SIGHS

OEO

BY EMMA ENDRES.

ROBABLY nothing more accentuates the pro-
gress of the age than the marked improvement
made in modern times in the laying out of
cities. In Europe and particularly in London
the ancient system is to be seen in all its con-
fusion, while in the United States we have the system in its
perfection. It is not a difficult task in an American city to
find one's way about, the very plan and classification of the
streets being in itself a guide. But in London the reverse is
true, there being no system in the ground-plan and no index
in the names of the streets. To the transatlantic visitor the
highways and byways of the world's metropolis are a bewil-
dering puzzle, but when he is confronted with their grotesque
and apparently meaningless names he registers a profound
conviction that the people who laid out such a city were stark
crazy.

VOL. LXX. 38

s, - " 2

594 STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. [Feb.,

What in the wide world, he wonders, could have possessed
the people to give the streets such names as Hangman's Gains,
Bull and Mouth, Houndsditch, Spitalfields, Threadneedle-street,
Budge Row, Rotten Row, Mincing Lane, Gutter Lane, Hang-
ing Sword Alley, Tripe Yard, and Amen Corner. And when
on top of this he recalls that the Great Fire of London, in
1666, started in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner, he
begins to reckon it a hopeless task trying to give London in-
telligibility. Really it is outwilding the Wild West, where no

frontier community
is complete without
its Dead Man's
Gulch.

It might at first
thought be conjec-
tured that these odd
street names are the
result of a wild
levity or a love of
the grotesque, but
such traits do not
enter into the char-
acter of the Eng-
lish. These names
were bestowed in
all seriousness and
with the same gravi-
ty are respected to
this day. True, in
many instances they
are corruptions of
the original title,
perpetuated by an illiterate populace when printer's ink was not
the finger-post to knowledge. And whatever for generations
has been so is fore-eminently correct with the Londoner, and
he is totally indifferent as to the why or wherefore. The rest
of the world, however, is not as incurious, and when it is
realized that these whimsical street names provide a key to
much of the history of the world's greatest city, the study of
their origin becomes at once both entertaining and instructive.
Hangman's Gains, a street near St. Katherine's Dock, is a
corruption of Hammes et Guynes, a place near Calais. In the
East London byway the refugees from Hammes et Guynes

WEST GATE TAVERN, CANTERBURY.

i goo.] STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. 595

sought an asylum when that town was taken from the
English. Bull and Mouth-street, near the General Post-
office, derived its name from the historic old coaching
inn of that designation. Boulogne Mouth was the origin-
al name, in commemoration of the capture of that har-
bor by the English in 1544. Houndsditch, now in the
Jewish quarter, originally stood outside the city wall, and was
so called because all dead dogs were here cast into a ditch.
Spitalfields got its name from the fact that that district for-
merly belonged to the priory of St. Mary Spital. Threadneedle-
street was originally Three Needle-street, and doubtless derived
its name from the three needles in the arms of the Merchant
Tailors' Company, incorporated in 1466, and whose hall still
stands in the rear of this busy thoroughfare.

Budge Row was the place of business of the dealers in
budge, or sheepskins, while Rotten Row, the fashionable drive-
way of London, is a corruption of Route du Roi. Mincing
Lane was once the site of houses belonging to the Minchuns
of St. Helen. The word is Saxon, and means nuns, but in the
course of ages it has evolved into Mincing. Mark Lane, famed
for its corn exchanges, originally enjoyed the more appropriate
name of Mart Lane. Of Lane, lately destroyed, used to be
an enigma to many people who
tried to solve the origin of its
name. The story is this: When
the half-witted George Villiers,
second Duke of Buckingham,
sold York House
and its grounds
for building pur- ._--_, =
poses, he stipu- Jzk^~"
lated that his _T;J
name and title J ^
should be per-
petuated in the <-
names of the
streets construct- \
ed on his proper-
ty. Thus we
have leading off 2
the Strand a
group of thor-
oughfares named

596 STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. [Feb.

CHAUCER'S "TABARD, "OR PLAY-HOUSE.

respectively George-street, Villiers-street, Duke-street, Of Lane
(formerly) and Buckingham. street making George Villiers, Duke
of Buckingham.

Gutter Lane, is an inelegant perversion of Guthrum's Lane,
and Tripe Yard was originally named after John Strype.
Fetter Lane got its name from the faitors, or beggars,
with whom this byway was a favorite place of congrega-
tion. Two interesting historical characters once lived
here : Praisegod Barebones, the leather-seller, and his
brother, Damned Barebones.* Press Yard has nothing
to do with newspapers, as the name might suggest, but
commemorates the punishment of pressing to death that, in
former days, was practised on this spot. Paternoster Row, the
fountain head of English literature, got its name from its
rosary-makers and sellers of religious books. Ave Maria Lane,
Creed Lane, and Sermon Lane are all in the vicinity of St.
Paul's Cathedral, and indicate the same religious source of
title. Amen Corner was where the street psalm-singers usually
terminated their perambulations, the "Amen" coming in with

* The unabbreviated name of this gentleman, as the record of his baptism shows, was
Mr. If-Christ-had-not-died-I-should-have-been-damned Barebones.

1900.] STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. 597

mathematical exactness as this corner was reached. Panyer
Alley is a short cut into Newgate-street, and in the fourteenth
century was the home of the pannyers, or basket-makers. A
stone built into the wall of one of the houses has the carved
figure of a boy sitting on a wicker basket, and beneath it is
the inscription :

" When ye have sought the citty round
Yet still this is ye highest ground.
August ye 27, 1688."

Hanway-street was named after Jonas Hanway, who was dis-
tinguished for being the first man in London to carry an um-

brella ; at that time, 1750, it was considered an article only
for women. Pall Mall derives its name from Paille-Maille, a
French game introduced into England by Charles II., and
often played on this site by the king and his courtiers. And
so we might go on through hundreds of
curious street titles with which London
abounds.

Still more curious and interesting, how-
ever, are the old inn and tavern signs.
Before numbers were given to houses
every tradesman had his symbolic sign
swinging over his door, by which he was \
known more than by his name. A per-
son did not inquire for Mr. Smith the

598 STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. [Feb.,

INTERIOR OF THE LEATHER BOTTLE INN.

mercer, for there might be a dozen such, but for the sign of
the Golden Fleece. On the same principle heraldry came into
use among the nobility, as a means of distinguishing one family
from another of the same name. Richard II. adopted the
White Hart as his emblem, Richard III. the Blue Boar, Ed-
ward IV. the Three Swans, the House of Lancaster selected
the Red Rose as its symbol, and the House of York the White
Rose. The various companies and guilds also had their signs
and insignia, and from these as much as from the armorial
bearings of the nobility the early innkeepers chose subjects for
their sign-boards, always with an eye to what was popular and
likely to draw trade. Thus we have the " Elephant and Castle, ' r
symbol of the Cutlers' Company; the " Bull and Crossed Axes,"
the arms of the Butchers' Company; the " Wheatsheaf," the
Bakers' Company; the "White Horse," symbol of the present
reigning House of Hanover, and the " White Lion," of
Edward III. The sign of the " Adam and Eve" tavern
shows the parents of the race with an apple passing be-
tween them, the device being the arms of the Fruiter-
ers' Company. The " Green Man," mentioned in the
Roxburghe Ballads, is of doubtful origin, but said to
be "an adaptation of the "Green Man and Still," the

1900.] STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. 599

escutcheon of the Distillers. Biblical and mythological char- |V
acters have contributed generously to the London tavern
signs. There are innumerable Angels in every variation, from
"white" to "dark" and from " sleeping" to " flying." Fleet
Street once boasted of a " Devil's Tavern," a favorite resort
with Ben Jonson, and largely patronized by the lawyers of
the neighborhood, whose office doors in conse-
quence often bore the very appropriate legend,
"Gone to the Devil." The "Flying Horse " is but
the popular conception of Pegasus, while the sign
of the "Two Spies," the men bearing between them
a huge bunch of grapes, interprets its own origin.
Amusing cases are to be met with where the characters of
sign boards have been misconceived, the error being perpetu-
ated to this day. The famous tavern on Ludgate Hill, where
Sir Christopher Wren often presided with friends, was origin-
ally designated the " Swan and Harp," symbol of the Com-
pany of Musicians. The skill of the artist, however, was in-
adequate to the conception, and the unlettered public inter-
preted the sign, "Goose and Gridiron," which name the tavern
still bears. The "Angel and Steelyards" was a misconception
of the well-known figure of Justice, and the "Bull and Bed-
post" had for its justification a bull fastened to a stake to be
baited. The "Bag o' Nails" was originally the Bacchanals,
while " Peg and Wassail " was translated into " Pig and Whis-
tle." The odd sign "Queer Door" had its origin in " Cceur
Dore" meaning Golden Heart, and
" Cat and Fiddle " owes its exis-
tence to the English conception
of Caton Fidele, the faithful cat.
Probably the worst case of vulgar
perversion is that where " Goat
and Compasses " evolved out of
the saying, "God Encompasseth
Us," a once popular sign of mo-
nastic origin.

There are a number of signs
that defy all attempts at explana-
tion. The origin of such names as
the "Bombay Grab," the
" Moonrakers," the " Q in
the Corner," the " Whis-
tling Oyster," and the

6oo STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. [Feb.,

HOCKLEY-IN-THE-HOLE, CLERKENWELL.

" Essex Serpent "
must ever remain
a mystery. On
the other hand
we have legends
that are perfectly
intelligible and
unpolluted, such
as the " Catherine
Wheel," commem-
orating the mar-
tyrdom of St.
Catherine on the
wheel; the
" Crown and An-
chor," suggesting
the navy ; the
"Crossed Keys,"
indicating the
keys of St. Peter

and the Pope ; and the " Daniel Lambert," perpetuating the
memory of the at one time fattest man in London, who
weighed 53 stone, or 742 pounds. The " Quiet Woman " is
self-explanatory with the accompanying picture of a decapi-
tated female, while the meaning of " Man Laden with Mis-
chief" becomes clear when we observe him chained to a woman
with the word " wedlock" on the padlock. The "Turk's Head "
tavern, where the Literary Club, founded by Dr. Johnson and
Sir Joshua Reynolds, held its meetings, was so named from
the number of Turks residing in the neighborhood.

An old and famous inn is the " Mother Red Cap Inn."
The sign-board formerly bore the old woman's portrait with a
scarlet hood over the head and shoulders, and beneath it the
following lines :

" Old Mother Red Cap, according to her tale,

Lived twenty and a hundred years by drinking this good ale ;

It was her meat, it was her drink, and medicine beside ;

And if she still had drunk good ale, she never would have died."

Such incongruities as the " Fox and Seven Stars," the
"Three Nuns and Hare," the " Sun and Thirteen Cantons,"
the " Angel and Cucumber," the " Salutation and Cat," and

1900.] STREET NAMES AND SHOP SIGNS OF OLD LONDON. 60 1

the "Crow and Horseshoe" appear at first sight to be beyond
the possibility of rational explanation. But when it is pointed
out that it was a custom with the innkeeper moving from one
house to another to combine the signs of both, in the hope of
retaining his old as well as new customers, the duplication of
sign legends is easily comprehended, and becomes no more
ridiculous than in the case where two American newspapers
consolidate.

While many of the famous old taverns still stand as of
yore, a great number have disappeared before the ruthless
march of improvements, but happily the old sign-boards have
largely been preserved. In the Guildhall Museum of London
Antiquities the greater number of these are on exhibition, in-
cluding the famous " Boar's Head," the Eastcheap tavern kept
by Dame Quickly, once so dear to the heart of Falstaff.

602 WALTER PATER : A STUDY. [Feb.,

WALTER PATER: A STUDY.

BY REV. A. D. MALLEY.

LTHOUGH judicious critics are slow to admit
that any one author can be taken as a mirror of
his times, yet the late Walter Pater may be
selected as the best representative of that grow-
ing school of English litterateurs who have de-
voted themselves to subtle appreciations of sensations arising
from contact with the beautiful and to the expression of them in
exquisite language. For Pater, as well as for his model in style,
Flaubert (model at least in regard to conscientiousness), out of
the many possible words for one idea there is but one word
that fits exactly, which word must be sought with most pains-
taking care, and when found this serves as a mysterious con-
nective between the minds of the author and reader, starting
in the latter what Pater calls " brain waves," cognate ideas
and sensations which in loose and slipshod selection of words
would otherwise lie dormant. The French writers have always
devoted this care to their exquisite prose. " A word is a
human being, a soul," said Hugo ; or rather, when the right
word comes glowing from one soul into another it is charged
with life and partakes of the personality of the writer or
speaker, truly clothed with that mind-stuff Clifford dreamed of
in his atomistic philosophy.

THE ART OF SELECTING WORDS.

A delicate selection of words is, then, the whole art of
Pater. He looked out on this world rather lazily ; it was to
him a multicolored spectacle of pleasure with varied interests
and passions. Within himself he beheld another world, sensa-
tions evoked, which were fleeting, tangled, complex. A word
seizes, clarifies, describes these transient feelings, and therefore
a word was sought with all the care a jeweller bestows in the
selection of rarest gems. As a consequence his style has
sweetness, harmony, color ; not the concentrated robustness of
Flaubert, for the temperament of the master was widely diver-
gent from that of the pupil, but the calm, reflected sensations
of an aristocrat of art, subtly aesthetic, clothing his thought in
phrases of chastened pontifical dignity.

1900.] WALTER PATER: A STUDY. 603

Such exquisiteness renders Pater fastidious, academic, im-
patient of the wish ; he would have a cult, not general admira-
tion. There was something higher than popularity which he
strove for his own approval. As a necessary consequence of
such a self-centred standard of judgment, he. is often relative
and elusive. But his sensations are of the keenest importance
to himself; the "jewel flame of life" must be kept burning at
the greatest intensity. The whole world, physical, spiritual,
affords material ; it is to seek the most delicate, to know the
more complex, to become perfect by gazing on beautiful forms.
Beauty can be seen in all things, from the natural sensuous
enjoyment of ancient Greek life to the Christian ascetic in his
cell, striving to subdue the flesh, yearning to lead on earth
the life of the angels. As a psychologist he would analyze
simply for the sake of analysis ; not to pass judgment, for
that, according to him, is the province of the moralist.

This devotion to beauty wherever found won for Pater the
title of "hedonist," a term he hated to find in descriptions of
himself, as it led the people, he said, to believe him something
bad or uncanny. But he truly had won the title. His philoso-
phy of life would do away with all hard-and-fast rules of
morality, making pleasure or beauty the sole criterion of action.
He was indeed, as he prided himself, a modern Greek. Not
an ancient one, for between himself and Aristippus there is a
whole world. How can one be a follower of the school of
Cyrene, even if he would ? It is impossible for such men to
eliminate from their personality nearly nineteen centuries of
Christian training. Our religion has so revolutionized man's
thoughts in regard to life and death, and relations with another
world have so convinced him in regard to sin and judgment,
and the life to come is so intimately interwoven in the very
warp and woof of modern society, and its customs, laws, and
language itself penetrate the mind through so many hidden
and unobserved avenues, that it is utterly impossible for the
modern hedonist to enter with unremorseful buoyancy into the
unreflecting sensuousness of the Greek. The whole modern
world lies under the shadow of the Cross ; men cannot escape
it, nor close their eyes to it. Hence, when this is attempted, the
inevitable note of sorrow is heard. As Catholics we must
often have wondered at the prevailing sadness that tinges, or
rather permeates, all literature not our own. We do not very
well understand it ; our own lives have sorrows enough, but
we are so buoyed up by the great old faith that the expres-

604 WALTER PATER: A STUDY. [Feb.,

sions of sadness, gloom, mystery, unrest, which we come across
in the newspaper, read in the novel or poem, awaken in us
only a vague sympathy, but more wonderment. We can never
fully realize the state of the souls of those who are in darkness
but hesitate to come towards the light, or the terrible and
grim misery of the others who deliberately turn their back on
the light and walk towards the valley and the shadow.

So also with the other questions which were once uncertain :
Whence came we? Where are we going? How do we enter
into relationship with God ? Revelation has answered, though
reason itself can answer somewhat, so that it is impossible to
doubt now in the same frame of mind as they did in the days
of Pyrrho or Lucian. A modern Epicurean and sceptic differs
from the ancient in kind, not degree ; he has had Moses and
the prophets.

HEDONISM TRACEABLE TO KANT.

This modern hedonism of Pater, however, seems to owe its
origin, not so much to a deliberate wish to throw aside Chris-
tianity and its restraints, but rather to the influence of German
subjectivism propagated by the doctrines of Kant. According
to him, the judgment has been deceived by the information con-
veyed through the medium of the senses. They reported to him
that substances existed outside himself, that he could rely on
their permanency and trust implicitly to the truths deduced from
them ; but when he examined closely, when he strove to verify
these observations, he was convinced that outside realities re-
solved themselves into mere sensations, and these were found
at last to be only modifications of the sentient personality.
How, then, could he ever be sure that anything did exist out-
side himself, since he knew it only by a modification of him-
self, and never as it was in itself? Thus what was hitherto
permanent begins to crumble into instability, truth becomes
relative and subjective, things lose their individuality, or are
resolved into manifestations of some one force which is
supreme. The only things, then, that we can be certain of are
sensations ; let sensations, then, be as exquisite as possible,
concludes the hedonist.

Kant's doctrine of Beauty found in the Critique of Judg-
ment, namely, that "the judgment of taste is not a judgment
coming from scientific rules, and therefore does not pertain to
logic, but it is aesthetic, that is, the determining principle is
purely subjective," has been adopted by many or by most of the

1900.] WALTER PATER: A STUDY. 605

literary men in Paris and London, and therefore spreads the
influence of scepticism and hedonism in polite circles. Flau-
bert, who is perused day and night by those who would attain
force and grace of style, makes one of his characters exclaim
dramatically, yet summing up succinctly the whole system :
" The necessity of thy reason, does it not create the law of
things ? Do not things become known to thee only through
the intermediary of thy mind? Like a concave mirror, she
defaces objects, and all means are lacking to thee for obtain-
ing truth. Form is perhaps naught else but an error of thy
senses, substance but a vain dream of thy thought, and beyond
thyself there is Nothing ! " It is to Germany, and not to
Greece, we owe modern scepticism ; Pater, like so many others,
adopted these views, concerning himself simply with sensations
arising from contact with the beautiful, and hence only a
superficial agreement can be found in him with the old philoso-
phers of the Garden.

HIS GREAT STUDY OF LIFE.

This mixture of Christian training, modern psychology,
ancient love of beauty, are welded together in his great study
of life, Marius the Epicurean. The work is really a master-
piece, the only example of its kind in English, It has the
same effect upon one as a piece of pure Greek art; yet with
an after-feeling of sombreness which comes from a lost Chris-
tian hope. Yet Greece too had something of this gloom ;
there are her epitaphs that cry to us across the ages, with
their great burden of woe : " O thou who readest this rejoice,
rejoice in life! After this there are no more smiles, nor joys,
nor bright laughter!" "Friend, hearken unto my counsel;
prepare the cup for wine, crown thy head with the rose ; be-
hold, all else comes to naught. Thou must sink into horrible
night, eternal exile, a subterranean sleep ! " Greece had not
yet been instructed ; modern hedonism has the greater sin.

In Marius Pater expressed his ideal of the human _being :
a youth, high-born, chaste, priestly, cultured ; a flush of the
world about him through his subdued Epicureanism. An un-
finished life, with the subtle charm of leaving the reader's in-
tellect unsatisfied, provoked towards more serious speculation.
And the style of the work suits accurately this conception : it
is chaste, polished, austere ; yet again, in places, delicately
flushed. The advice which Marius' monitor gives him when he
asks for a rule of life is Pater's advice to the world : " If thou

606 WALTER PATER: A STUDY. [Feb.,

wouldst have all about thee like the colors of some fresh pic-
ture, be temperate in thy religious motions, in love, in wine,
in all things, and be of a peaceful heart with thy fellows.
Keep the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and
cleanliness, extending even to the dwelling place ; discriminate
ever more and more fastidiously, select form and color in
things from what is less select ; meditate much on beautiful
visible objects on objects, more especially those connected
with the period of youth on children at play in the morning,
the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the fashions
and amusements of young men; to keep ever near if it were
but a single choice flower, a graceful animal, a sea-shell, as a
token and representative of the whole kingdom of such things ;
to avoid jealousy in thy way through jthe world, everything re-
pugnant to sight ; and, should any circumstance tempt thee to
a general converse in the range of such objects, to disentangle
thyself from that circumstance at any cost of place, money, or
opportunity!" This advice is, of course, beautiful; but it is
the advice of decadence too refined to be vigorous or healthy.
It enervates ; it is the soft Companion with his baths and his
perfumes. Nevertheless it must be confessed Pater's mind is
strong and masculine ; he never trips daintily over a problem,
but strives to sound the bottom. His tastes, though, are thor-
oughly feminine, delicate, keenly sensitive to the rarest opales-
cent shade in either thought or object. He would catch even
the filmiest, most evanescent feeling and give it its proper ex-
pression ; a labor, of which the engraver blowing off invisible
grains of dust from the finished gem is the ideal.

ONCE A CATHOLIC.

A mind of this kind cannot be judged by the same stand-
ards we would apply to a Macaulay ; it sets its own standards,
and must be appreciated in its own settings. Pater's family
was once Catholic ; he himself was baptized in the church,
but fell away through dilettanteism. It is interesting to
note the Catholic purity which permeates all his pictures and
which he reads into the old paganism : " Early on that day
the girls of the farm had been busy in the great por-
tico, filling large baskets with flowers plucked short from
branches of apple and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew
before the quaint images of the gods, Ceres and Bacchus and
the yet more mysterious Dea Dia, as they passed through the
fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white-

1900.] WALTER PATER: A STUDY. 607

clad youths, who were understood to proceed to their office
in perfect temperance, as pure in soul and body as the air
they breathed in the firm weather of that early Summer-time.
But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the
priests, clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and bear-
ing ears of green corn upon their heads, secured by flowing
bands of white, the procession moved in absolute stillness, all
persons, even the children, abstaining from speech after the
utterance of the pontifical formula, Favete linguis!"

This yearning in his blood, as it were, for the faith of his
fithers finds full vent in his wonderful description of the Mass
as it was celebrated in the second century: " For the silence
silence amid those lights of early morning to which Marius
had always been constitutionally impressible, as having in them
a certain reproachful austerity was broken suddenly by re-
sounding cries of Kyrie eleison ! Christe eleison ! repeated al-
ternately, again and again, until the bishop, rising from his
chair, made sign that this prayer should cease. But the voices
burst out once more presently, in richer and more varied
melody, the men, the women, and children, the deacons, the
people, answering one another somewhat after the manner of
a Greek chorus. Certain portions of bread and wine were
taken into the bishop's hands; and thereafter with an increas-
ing mysticity and effusion the rite proceeded. It might have
been thought the business, the duty or service of young men
more particularly, as they stood there in long ranks, and in
serene and simple vesture of the purest white a service in
which they would seem to be flying for refuge, as with their
precious, their treacherous and critical youth in their hands, to
One, yes ! one like themselves, who yet claimed their worship
a worship, above all, in the way of imitation. Adoramus te
Christe, quia per crucem tuam redemisti mundum ! "

HIS RELIGIOUS INSTINCTS NEVER EDUCATED.

Yet notwithstanding this devotional tendency in many of
Pater's works, a tendency which we cannot help feeling is some-
what akin to the Catholic, a legacy from his forefathers, yet it
is only superficial, for he holds himself aloof from the really
great religious problems. " The fire so bright, the love so
sweet, the unction spiritual," are no longer his. Modern culture
has taken from him the true beauty of childhood faith, nor
has it left upon him the scars of much questioning and search-
ing after God, whom to seek is to find scars which are manly

608 WALTER PATER: A STUDY. [Feb.,

and honorable ; but rather, it has left him the vacancy of
worldliness, moral triviality, and the sad, wistful lassitude of the
baffled seeker after pleasure. Compare the death-scenes of the
wayward, brilliant pagan, Flavius, and the half-converted
Christian, Marius : " But at length delirium, symptom that the
work of the plague was done and the last resort of life yield-
ing to the enemy, broke the coherent order of words and
thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony, found his
best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient's mind.
No longer battling with the disease, he seemed as it were to
place himself at the disposal of the victorious foe, dying pas-
sively, like some dumb creature in hopeless acquiescence at
last. At length, about daybreak, he perceived that the last
effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as Marius
understood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of
him there. 'Is it a comfort,' he whispered then, ' that I
shall often come and weep over you?' 'Not unless I be
aware, and hear you weeping ! '

Flavius had enjoyed life as the pagans did ; Marius, his
friend, had restrained himself, living a life half in accordance
with the maxims of the Stoics, and then again following the
Epicureans, yet good, to all seeming, " anima naturaliter
Christiana'' declared Pater. His death, nevertheless, was
neither better nor worse ; " It was after a space of deep sleep
that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who
had .kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness,
now kneeling around his bed ; and what he heard confirmed in
the then perfect clearness of his soul the inevitable suggestion
of his own bodily feelings. He had often dreamt he was con-
demned to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape,
was arrived ; and waking, with the sun all around him, in
complete liberty of life, had been full of gratitude for his
place there, alive still, in the land of the living. He read
surely, now, in the manner, the doings of these people, some
of whom were passing out through the doorway, where the
heavy sunlight in very deed lay. that his last morning was
come, and turned to think once more of his beloved. Often
had he fancied of old that not to die on a dark or rainy day
might itself have a little alleviating grace or favor about it.
The people about his bed were praying fervently Abi ! Abi!
Anima Christiana ! In the moments of his extreme helplessness
their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a
snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had

1900.] WALTER PATER: A STUDY. 609

applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the
senses, through which the world had come and gone, a medi-
cinal oil. It was the same people who, in the gray, austere
evening of that day, took up his remains and buried them
secretly, holding his death, according to their generous view in
this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom ; and
martyrdom, as the church had always said, was a kind of
sacrament with plenary grace."

Modern hedonism is at the bottom hopeless also ; the old
Greek inscriptions could still be carved over its graves. Yet,
if we mistake not the signs, this theory of life is being rapidly
adopted by the cultured classes here in America. A prevailing
conviction of God's presence to us, of his gracious intents and
purposes working in and through our best thoughts and en-
deavors, is by no means characteristic of the times. Rather
there is the growing acquiescence that he is unknowable, and
that man's desire for communication with the spiritual world
can never be hardly more than

" The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow."

To define God is to put limits to him, they say, and the moral
order is not absolute for all times and all places. But the
man who first wishes for a thesis proving the existence and
nature of the Deity before he condescends to worship, and the
man who desires to have the moral order proven absolute be-
fore he will restrain himself, have both committed spiritual
suicide, and will never obtain the overwhelming answer. These
facts are a Divine consciousness within us, they are "the light
which illumineth all men coming into this world." Struggle to
do away with them, and you commit the unpardonable sin
against the light ; the punishment thereof is darkness, intellec-
tual and moral. Hedonism will ever have the aspect of the
sad Ophelia crowned with her wild flowers, " fennel, rue, and
columbine," wandering in pathetic solitudes babbling.

VOL. LXX. 39

6io BETROTHED. [Feb.,

BETROTHED.

BY MRS E. W. LATIMER.

APA, what was your most interesting and impor-
tant case?" asked Judge Marlowe's youngest
son, at the judge's Christmas table, spread for
three generations, glittering with silver and cut
glass, and weighted with good cheer.
" My practice, George, has not been among interesting
cases. It has been chiefly connected with patents and prop-
erty. No case ever interested me so much as a little incident
to which I indirectly owe my present prosperity and this feast
of good things, since the great case that first brought me into
notice at the bar was put into my hands by the Italian em-
bassy at Washington. Up to that time I had not been pros-
perous in my profession. I was making my way upward very
slowly. Your mother and 1 had a large family to educate and
to provide for. We could not afford to live in New York,
so I took a house at Yonkers, and went backwards and for-
wards to my business every day.

" You older ones, my children, recollect Kathleen, our
maid servant, who came to us about twenty-five years ago.
She left us, George, when you were a little fellow. She was
what is called amongst her people * country born ' ; that is,
her father and mother were Irish, and she herself was a
Romanist very devout. Indeed, I am not sure that I ever
saw religion so permeate a whole life as hers. She had been
brought up in some orphan school ; she came to us without
friends, and she adopted us as her family, though she never
swerved ' one jot or one tittle ' from fidelity to her religion.
Though one with us in everything else, her religious life she
led apart, never obtruding her opinions or the practice of her
duties ; but their influence was felt in every act of faithful
service. Your mother never knew her to slight anything, nor
to forget anything. Her whole life was one of obedience,
faithfulness, and satisfaction.

" She attended a Roman Catholic chapel in Yonkers, where
the priest, as we always heard, was a good man. He was an
Italian by birth, but spoke excellent English. He was the

i goo.] BETROTHED. 611

true curt, who concerned himself little about things outside of
his flock, but adopted all the cares and interests of those
within his care. However, as I said, Kathleen kept her re-
ligious life to herself, and we rarely heard the name of Father
Fortano.

" At last your mother fancied she observed a change in
Kathleen. There had come into our neighborhood a new
shoemaker Pietro, an Italian. We thought he must be under
the patronage of Father Fortano, for Kathleen was his first
customer. One day he kneeled before her on the kitchen
floor and took her measure. The next Sunday she tripped to
Mass in a dainty pair of patent leather shoes.

" Pietro's dark hair, regular features, brilliant eyes, soft
voice, refined manners, and guitar made him a very different
person from the sleek tradesmen, mechanics, and Irish laborers
of our neighborhood, among whom had hitherto lain Kath-
leen's prospects of matrimony.

" The very fact of possessing such pretty shoes seemed to
rouse in her an instinct of refinement. She learned to dress
herself not in vulgar finery, but with those simple arts by
which we sometimes recognize the first gleams of a new happi-
ness.

"The shoemaker had his dwelling near our house, and,
after the fashion of his own land, he often brought his tools
and work-bench into the open air. He used to watch Kathleen
as she went about our yard busying herself with her various
household duties ; and sometimes they exchanged a few sen-
tences over the privet hedge. On Sundays he generally con-
trived to join her on her way to Mass, and to see her home
after it was over. But Kathleen's conscientiousness never al-
lowed her to linger in his company, and when she came back
happy to her household work, with a flavor of the pleasure she
had tasted still lingering about her, she always seemed more
earnest, humble, faithful, and thoughtful ; more anxious to
minister to all the family, and to make the children happy
Your mother used to say afterwards that Kathleen's happy
moments had never been lost time.

" One day the colored boy who did our chores was absent,
and Kathleen had to bring up from the spring the water for
her washing. Pietro saw her coming with the water-pails, and,
on her second journey to the little spring-house, he leaped over
the privet hedge and came to help her.

"' Bella Catarina,' he said, 'this task is too much for you.

6i2 BETROTHED. [Feb.,

If it depended upon me, you should never carry a heavy
water-pail again.'

" Kathleen smiled as the young fellow spoke, and turned
away her head. Her heart beat fast; but it was washing day.
She could not stop even to hear her own praises from him.

"Taking the pail out of her hand, he continued: 'If you
were my wife, Catarina, I would not let you tire yourself with
anything any more.'

" ' Your wife ? ' she said. ' Oh ! no. You know too much ;
you are too much above me ; too good, too different from the
rest, to think of me. You know I don't know anything; I
have no friends ; I have laid by very little money.'

" They were almost up to the wash-house by this time.
She held out her hand for the water-pail. Pietro retained it
for a moment, as he whispered : ' Bella Catarina mia, I love
you, and if you will only smile upon my hopes we will be
married.'

*'Oi hearing these words she hurried rapidly into her
wash-room.

" Kathleen was one of those meek who inherit the earth
without ever having thought that they deserve good fortune.
Her great joy struck her with astonishment as a thing too
good for her.

"She had no time until her work was done to brood over
her happiness. She went on with her washing. The clothes
were whiter than ever that day as a thank-offering to the God
who had sent such joy into her experience. Kathleen was
truly, earnestly, rapturously in love.

" During that busy day nothing but the tender wistfulness
in her brown eyes betrayed her secret, but when night came
and she sat sewing in her nursery, surrounded by the cribs of
sleeping children, she became greatly moved. She wept, she
prayed. She thought, How would her mistress bear to part
with her ? She knew her to be very delicate ; she foresaw how
the little children would trouble her. They all dearly loved
their Kathleen. Suppose some rough, unfaithful woman should
replace her in the family? . . . But then came the idea of
being wife to Pietro, and that thought subdued everything.

" She was anxious to speak with your mother the next
day before things went further. She could not be easy with-
out her sanction to her happiness, and Heaven's too. She
got up before daylight and knocked at our chamber door, to
say that if your mother pleased she would like to go to church

1 900.] BETROTHED. 613

that morning. In the little chapel at .Yonkers as she told
your mother afterwards when trouble cameshe knelt before
the high altar and asked God's blessing on her happiness and
his direction in the new life that seemed before her. Then,
crossing herself, she rose, and got home before the rest of us
were stirring.

" All that morning she went about thinking over the little
speech it was so difficult to manage in words. Unfortunately,
your mother had company that day, and Kathleen could not
get a chance to have any conversation with her.

"Pietro stood watching about dusk beside the privet hedge.
All Kathleen would do was to shake her head and say : * I
have not been able to speak to her.'

"The next day, however, with many blushes and great em-
barrassment, she told her story.

"'And so you want to leave me?' said her mistress.

"'Oh! dear madam, it makes me cry every time I think
of it ' ; and the tears began to flow until your mother said :
* It is all as it should be, Kathleen. He seems an honest,
steady man. You must judge if he will make you happy. You
will live next door to us, you know, and will hardly be parted
from me and from the children. I shall give you all your
house linen, and, when your marriage comes, your wedding
supper.'

"When I came home that Anight your mother told me, and
I went to see Pietro. I was very much pleased with him. He
had a good trade, and had saved some money. It seemed to
be a love match, supplemented by all other good and pleasant
things.

"The engagement soon became known in the village, and
Kathleen had to stand many rough jokes, though her modest
reserve and the retired life that she had always lived spared
her a good deal of pleasantry that would have displeased
Pietro and have jarred upon her delicacy.

"One day on board the boat coming up from New York I
met Father Fortano. I began to talk to him about Kathleen
and Pietro. I asked him what he knew about the antecedents
of the young Italian. ' Nothing,' he said. ' He is from a vil-
lage near Florence. I come from a small town in Romagna ;
but I have great confidence in Pietro. He is an honest
man.'

"'He strikes me so/ I replied, 'but I thought you would
know more about him.'

6 14 BETROTHED. [Feb.,

" ' So I do so I do in one sense,' he replied ; ' but I rely
most on what he has told me of himself and on my own im-
pressions.'

" * It might be as well to write and inquire about him in
the place where he once lived in Italy,' I suggested.

" ' True true,' said Father Fortano, ' I will write to the
curate of the parish he belonged to, or to the podesta of his
village.'

"'How soon will you get an answer?' I said. 'Will it
come before the time fixed for the marriage?'

"'Oh, certainly; I presume so. They need not be married
till the week before Advent. But,' he added, as we parted, ' I
have much experience in character, and I am quite sure Pietro
is un galantuomo?

"The more we saw of Pietro the more we were all of the
opinion of Father Fortano. His pleasant voice, his broken
English, and his guitar were now often in our kitchen. A new
girl to replace Kathleen had come to live with us, and was
learning her duties. The shoemaker's little cottage had been
fitted up. Each one of your brothers and sisters was busily
engaged, in secret, preparing wedding presents for the bride
and bridegroom, and in the bustle of the marriage prepara-
tions and in the confidence that she would still live within
sight of our nursery windows, much of the pain of parting
was removed.

" The wedding had been fixed for November 23. In the
Roman Catholic Church there are no marriages in Advent.
Father Fortano had received no answer to his letter. ' I am
quite sure Pietro is all right,' he said to me. ' In our profes-
sion we are almost sure to know.' Nevertheless he asked him,
in my presence, for the papers that every foreign workman
carries about with him. Pietro produced from his breast
pocket a thick leather pocket-book, which contained his pass-
port, his certificate of baptism, another certificate of good con-
duct from the magistrate of his village, and a little picture of
his patron saint, by whom he evidently felt himself more pro-
tected than by the red tape of the civil authorities. In my
eyes, too, the simplicity and good faith of the poor fellow
were vouched for by the store he set upon this little colored
card as much as by his testimonials from the office of the
podesta.

"The 20th of November came, and no letter for Father
Fortano. There had been a great shipwreck, news of which

1900.] BETROTHED. 615

used to fall upon the ears of the whole country with horror.
We all concluded, as we compared dates, that the letter we
expected must have been on board of her.

"'Why need they wait for it?' said my wife. * Everything
is ready. We are all satisfied. Advent is very near, and it
will be so much better for us all to have it over. If the mar-
riage is put off till after Christmas it will unsettle me entirely,
and make Kathleen very uncomfortable.'

" She pleaded this with Father Fortano, who we now saw
frequently. He never had had any misgiving about Pietro,
and his letter of inquiry, I think, had been written solely to
convince us that he was very careful about the lambs of his
congregation.

" So your mother prevailed, and Pietro and Kathleen were
married in the little chapel at Yonkers, about dusk, on Novem-
ber 23, after which they returned to our house with a few friends
for the wedding supper. Pietro appeared, as almost every
bridegroom does appear, shyly proud of his new rank as hus-
band, and the bride blushed when we addressed her by his
name.

"The wedding guests were just sitting down to supper in
our dining-room when one of our neighbors rode up to our
gate. ' I 've just come from the post-office,' he said, * and they
asked me if I would n't bring up this big letter for Father

Fortano. It must have been on board the A . The ink is

all washed yellow by salt water. I saw they had picked up
two or three of the mail-bags on the coast of Nova Scotia/

" I carried the letter into the house, and beckoned Father
Fortano into the parlor. He opened it at once. I saw that
it contained some dreadful news by the change in his ex-
pression.

" It was from the podesta of Poppi, Pietro 's native village,
and was covered with red seals and attestations from some
official source. It ran as follows :

" ' The person inquired for Pietro Vagnioli was born in
Poppi, July 17, 1829. He married, at the age of twenty, a girl
from Lucca. This woman Tessa Baldi eloped from him a
few months after with a brigand from Naples. The felucca
on which the guilty couple went away was wrecked on the
Sicilian coast, on its passage to Squillace, in Calabria. Their
deaths were reported, but falsely. The brigand spread the
rumor to facilitate his return to his own troop, in the moun-
tains of Assulia, and nothing was heard of the woman for

616 BETROTHED. [Feb.,

seven years. She has recently come back, and is now residing
with her family. Remorse, ill-treatment, or extreme poverty,
probably, induced her to return. She is living under a false
name and in all possible obscurity. Her husband was a very
honest and industrious workman. He has been away for seve-
ral years, and is possibly quite ignorant of the reappearance
of his wife or even of her existence.'

" After standing stupefied for some moments, gazing at
each other, Father Fortano said to me, * Let us call in Pietro.'

" He entered, evidently surprised at the summons, but not
uneasy, though he saw the great official letter in the father's
hand. Father Fortano asked him, ' Had he ever before been
married ? '

" He answered promptly : * Yes ; but that his wife had dis-
graced herself and him, and had been drowned as a swift
punishment for her sins from Heaven.'

" * Are you sure ? ' said Father Fortano, gravely. ' Do you
know it for a certainty ? '

" * Everybody knew it, father, in our village.'

" ' But you ought to have made strict inquiry yourself.
Did you never do so ? '

" ' I wanted to forget all about her, father/ said Pietro. * I
seemed always to have a dread that that woman would some
day do me harm. I wanted to be rid of her.'

" ' Did you never think, my son, about the risk you run of
marrying two women a crime that would bring on you the
penalties of bigamy ? Did it never occur to you, besides, that
you might bring upon some other woman some good woman,
whom you loved a sorrow and disgrace that she could hardly
bear ? '

" * No, father. I only wanted never to hear her name again ;
and now that I am going to be happy, it seems hard to have
it brought up to me at my very wedding. However, she is
dead, and there's an end of her.'

" ' Have you ever received positive proof of her death?'
persisted the father, still hoping against hope to find some
error.

"'If you will write home, father, every one can tell you all
she did. I do not like to talk about her.'

'"Unhappily, I have written, and I have just received this
letter. My poor son, your wife, Tessa Baldi, is still living.'

"' Alive! No, father, no; impossible!' cried the poor fel-
low, with -sharp anguish in his voice, which pierced our very

i goo.] BETROTHED. 617

souls. * Who wrote the letter, father? Where does it come
from ? '

" Father Fortano trembled like a leaf. He said : * I had
better read it to you.'

"'Let Catarina hear it! Let me call Kathleen!' At his
call the poor young bride came running in. The look upon
our troubled faces changed her bridal smiles and blushes into
terror.

"'Poor Kathleen!' I exclaimed, and took her hand; but I
think she hardly noticed me. She stood up by the man she
had just married. She slipped her hand out of mine, seized
his and pressed it between both hers fervently.

" When she heard the words, ' He was married at the age
of twenty,' she looked hurt, surprised, and troubled. Doubt-
less she felt he ought not to have concealed such a passage in
his life from her.

" As the letter went on ' the traces of unutterable thoughts '
passed over her face. When Father Fortano read, ' She has
recently returned and is now residing with her family/ Pietro
stood shaking with emotion. Kathleen gave a little shriek and
drew her hands away. Then she burst into tears, and re-
proached him with disgracing and deceiving her.

" * My child,' said I, * I shall see that your marriage is
properly dissolved. No stain and no reproach will ever fall
on you. Father Fortano, is there no probability of Pietro's
obtaining a divorce from that other woman?'

" ' He could obtain no divorce that a devout daughter of
the church could profit by/ was the answer.

"'What have I done? What have I done?' cried Pietro.
' I am innocent yet God has punished me. Perhaps I too
much wished her dead. But Kathleen ! Oh, Catarina never
hated anybody ! '

" ' Pietro, why did you deceive me ? ' she spoke reproach-
fully.

" ' I was deceived myself, my dearest. Catarina mia ! ' he
cried, trying to clasp her in his arms.

" She drew herself away from him. * Why did you never
tell me about her?' she said.

" * Oh, she was wicked, Catarina mia, and you were good
so pure, so good/ he cried in anguish.

"'Is it quite true you married her?'

" ' Quite true, Catarina.'

"' Oh, Pietro, you have two wives ! '

618 BETROTHED. [Feb.,

" ' I meant to have but one you only none but you. Oh,
listen to me, Catarina ! '

" ' You must go away, my poor Pietro,' said Father Fortano ;
' you must go at once. That is all you can do now to repair
the mischief you have done.'

" ' Can I go back to Poppi, to inquire ? Perhaps it is not
true ! There might be some mistake,' he cried, looking eagerly
at Father Fortano.

"'Yes,' I said; 'probably that is the best thing that you
can do. Go home and make inquiries. If all is right, come
back again ; you will find Kathleen waiting for you. If the
facts are as they say, let us hear no more of you. I will go
down with you to New York to-night, and take your passage
on to-morrow's steamer.' Then Kathleen, who at first had been
utterly beside herself who had showed for the first time in
her life, probably, an Irish sense of her own wrongs raised
her head again, and recovered some of her courage. She set
about getting his things together for his abrupt departure.
Pietro, under her influence, became calm. He obeyed her like
a child. They understood and they accepted the terrible
situation. The moment of parting came, and they fell into
each other's arms. One long last kiss they took, the poor
bride's head resting with its shining braids, for the first time,
on his bosom.

" He tore himself away from her at last. She called him
back. She threw around his neck a little chain by which hung
a little cross she always wore ; then she dropped down upon
her knees, and hid her face. Her honeymoon and married life
were over. I drew the poor fellow away.

" No word ever reached us from Pietro. Kathleen resumed
her duties in our household. She was as devout, as self-con-
tained, as invaluable as ever. After a year or two the war
broke out. In its third year your Aunt Wilmet, who had been
one of the ladies attached to the Sanitary Commission on
board hospital transports in the York River and the Pamunkey,
was appointed by the government lady superintendent of a
soldiers' convalescent hospital in Rhode Island. One day,
after she had been with us, and had been talking of her new
post, and of its duties, Kathleen came to your mother, and
asked if she could spare her to go with Miss Wilmet to the
hospital. We had seen her for some time pining away day by
day, and your mother was rejoiced to think that she was will-
ing to *make any change in the monotony of her existence.

1900.] BETROTHED. 619

" We sent her to your aunt, who was most thankful to re-
ceive such an assistant, and wrote that she was invaluable in
the hospital.

"One day, in my office in New York, I got a telegram
abrupt and very pressing :

" LOVELL HOSPITAL, ETC.

" ' Come to us immediately. Something about Kathleen.'

" There was just time to catch the Newport boat. I tele-
graphed to Yonkers that I should not be at home that night,
and, picking up my travelling shawl, started to obey the sum-
mons. The boat landed me about daylight at the wharf of the
hospital,

" 'What is it?' I asked your aunt, as she met me in her
graceful dress of blue flannel, decorated with United States
buttons.

" The hospital, I may premise, consisted of ten long, de-
tached wards very much like monstrous bowling alleys.
These wards were beautifully clean but very rough, not being
even painted. Within the enclosed grounds were several
separate buildings; viz., quarters for the officers, the superin-
tendent and her assistants, the surgeons, guard, and hospital
stewards. Coming out of one of these wards in the gray of
early morning, Aunt Wilmet had greeted me.

" ' Yesterday,' she said, ' we had an arrival a boat-load of
sick men, under charge of a surgeon and two hospital stewards.
Among them were three prisoners; we have them sent to us
sometimes. They are smuggled in by some surgeon in whom
they have excited sympathy. One has typhoid ; the other two
are amputation cases. The surgeon in charge whispered to me
that the typhoid case was an Italian. Perhaps I did foolishly,
knowing Kathleen's story; but in a hospital one always thinks
first of the patient, and I sent for Kathleen to see after him,
knowing that she could speak a few words of Italian. That
steady, calm, strong girl, the moment that she saw the patient,
fainted away. We brought her to with some difficulty, and
she showed genuine Irish wilfulness and excitement, claiming a
right to go back to him. At last I said she should go if she
would promise to be perfectly calm, and to behave only as if
she were no more than an attendant in the hospital. But I
doubt my power to manage her, should she break out again.
She says he is her husband.'

" ' Does he know her?'

" ' No ; and I don't suppose he ever will. It 's a bad case o

620 BETROTHED. [Feb.,

typhoid, aggravated by being sent on here. She is still sitting
by his bed, thanking God for his mercy in letting her be with
him ; but I think it is a dreadful pity that this has come to
unsettle her.'

'"What do you want me to do?'

" ' I don't suppose he will live through the day. I want
you, when it is over, to take her away.'

" I went into the ward and saw them. I recognized poor
Pietro, with the flush of typhoid in his face and in his glassy,
restless, gleaming eyes. Kathleen, as calm as if her eyes had
never shed a tear, sat fanning him. 4 He talks about me in his
delirium,' she said. ' I pray God he may hear me say how
deeply I have grieved for the cruel words I said to him that
that that day when Father Fortano ' Here she stooped
down and kissed his restless fingers.

" When the boat for New York touched at the wharf that
night there had been no change in him. The doctor in charge
told me he was stronger than he had thought. He was wiry
and had probably been a man of temperate habits ; he had
considerable vitality. I might be detained several days if I
waited until all was over. I had professional business that was
pressing in New York, so I left word with Aunt Wilmet to
telegraph for me again when the end came, and I would re-
turn in time for the funeral.

" I took leave of Kathleen. * I think him a little better/
she said ; * I see signs of improvement that the doctor does not,
in him.'

" I said something about her coming back to us if if I
could not form the words.

" ' Ah, yes ! ' she said, ' if he gets better, I know that I must
leave him. If only, please God, we could have both died, we
should have been together.'

" I went back to New York, but did not go home to
Yonkers the next evening. It was a stormy night, and I
thought I would spend my time by going to see a celebrated
actor. There was an immense crowd ; for he played Hamlet.
I could get no place in the stalls, parquet, or dress circle, and
was going away, when a man ran after me in the street and
offered to sell me a place in one of the stage boxes. I was
willing enough to buy his seat, for the rain was falling fast,
and I had no clothes in New York but those I stood in. As
I went in the usher in charge of the stage-boxes recommended
me, as the box was very crowded, to leave my wet overcoat

1900.] BETROTHED 621

and umbrella in the cloak-room. The girl who had charge of
the room was very attentive and obliging. * See, sir,' she said,
'I put your things into this compartment nearest to the door;
there will be a great crowd when you come out of the
theatre.'

" I was an unwelcome intruder into the box, and found my-
self very uncomfortable ; but I dreaded the rain, and stayed
out the performance. As we were all crowding into the lobbies
after it was over the gas suddenly went out, and there was a
cry of 'Fire!' Women fainted, and men struggled. There
were some very severe accidents, and it was some time before
the excited crowd could be made to understand that the
theatre was perfectly safe, and that the disappearance of the
lights was a blunder on the part of a new gas man. Mean-
time, I did not want to lose my overcoat and umbrella. I was
near the djor of the cloak-room, and putting in my hand,
drew out my property. I had not shared the general fright,
feeling sure that there could be no fire in the building; and
after awhile I reached the street with my coat over my arm
and my umbrella in my hand. By that time it was bright
moonlight, and I walked on without putting on the coat or
examining the umbrella. In the morning, to my great annoy-
ance and surprise, I found they were not mine. My first act
was to examine the pockets of the overcoat for some clue to
the owner. I found a large pocket-book, containing cards,
money, and papers, which convinced me I had got hold of the
paletot of an Italian gentleman belonging to the Italian em-
bassy. He was staying at one of the great hotels, and I set
out at once to restore his things to him. My eagerness to see
him had been increased by the sight of a sealed letter in
his pocket-book addressed to Pietro Vagnioli, Stati Uniti
d'America.

"I was shown into the parlor of the hotel, where the
Italian gentleman came to find me in a few moments. 'Very
much indebted, etc.* ' Signor/ said I, when he had finished
his acknowledgments, ' may I, without indiscretion, ask what
you know of Pietro Vagnioli ? '

" * Certainly/ said he. ' I have an important communica-
tion for him. He sailed from Leghorn a year or two ago for
this country; but whether he landed in the Stati Uniti of the
North, or the Stati Confederiti of the South, we cannot tell.
A relation of mine, who was interested in his story, asked me
to take all pains to deliver this letter.'

622 BETROTHED. [Feb.,

" ' I know where he is now,' I said ; and told his story.
"' [ believe the letter is to tell him that his wife is dead/
said the attache.

" I carried off the letter, and started by the earliest train
that would take me overland to the Lovell Hospital. My first
inquiry upon the wharf was for the typhoid case the rebel
prisoner.

" ' He has rallied considerably, and may get well now/
was the answer.

"Aunt Wilmet met me before the door of her own quarters,
and drew me into her pretty little band-box of a room.

" ' I am quite at a loss what to do about Kathleen/ she
said. ' If you can get her to go with you, you had better
take her home. Her man may possibly get well, and how can
I have love-making in the wards of my hospital ? It is such a
peculiar story. He will hold her hand all the time ; and now
he knows her.'

"'My dear girl/ I said, 'I have good news for them, and
I am sure you will overlook any little irregularities. If they
are not man and wife, they are i promessi sposi betrothed
lovers. Besides, the Italian embassy if he continues to im-
prove will make an earnest appeal to our government for the
release of Pietro Vagnioli. It is not often one announces with
satisfaction to a man that he is a widower ; but I am happy
to carry such good news to poor Pietro. Help me to do my
errand, Wilmet, and come along.'

" At the furthest end of a long ward, on the neatest of
beds, with cheerfulness and peace around him, lay Pietro.
Beside him sat Kathleen, her eyes swimming in tears. Pietro
knew me in a moment. ' Ah, Eccellenza ! ' he cried, * I am so
blessed to be allowed to die here with my Catarina ! '

" ' Pietro/ said I, solemnly, ' men get well who want to get
well. That is understood in hospitals. You must not talk of
dying. You must live for Kathleen's sake. She has suffered
very much, and now you must make her very happy. Tessa
Baldi, your wife that bad woman has been dead two years.
Here is a letter to you from Poppi to say so; and the certi-
ficates of her death and burial are in Washington, at the
Italian embassy.'

"The announcement, probably, was injudiciously abrupt;
but no harm came of it. Pietro looked up at me with eyes of
gratitude ; while Kathleen, falling on her knees, raised the

1 900.] AHNENA KHIEVE. 623

little cross she had given him at parting which now lay upon
his breast and held it to his lips, then pressed it to her own.
I heard her murmur to herself, 'Five years! This is our
wedding-day, November 23.'

"'Then, Kathleen,' said Aunt Wilmet briskly, 'if you wish
him to be well by Christmas Day, and to eat his Christmas
dinner at Yonkers, leave him to me. I shall sit by your hus-
band while he lies here thinking over this good news. The
doctor and the patients have been wanting you very much the
last two days in your own ward.' '

I^HIEYE

BY LAMONTI D'CRESONA.

CUSHLA MACHREE, oh! how can it be,
Such lovers as we for ever must sever our ways ?
Ah ! have you forgot ? Love's Aidenn we sought
Its guerdon came not ; but memory stayed on and
stays.

Through all the white years, when faith banished fears,

Our troth knew no tears. Mavourneen, oh ! why must we part ?

While aeon bells toll eternity's roll,

The spirit is soul ; and you are the soul of my heart.

You're the faith and the spirit and soul of my life ;

Must our love drown in dungeons of chaos and strife ?

Dost hear, O mavourneen : dost hearken to me?

" Mavourneen, mavourneen, a cushla machree."

'Mid life's mad turmoil of trouble and toil

Our vows proved a foil to cunning of treachery's schemes.

We must not let fall a curtain o'er all

Our mem'ries recall, of days of fond lovers' dreams ;

No banshee of doubt can put love to rout.

Though earth lights go out, shall the bright sun e'er cease to

rule?

No matter what pain, o'er mountain and main
God's spirit shall reign when the blood of man's pulses is cool,

624 AHNENA KHIEVE. [Feb.,

Oh ! come to me, come to me, light of my eyes ;
I yearn for you, pray for you, star of my skies.
Mavrone ! O mavourneen! but smile upon me,
" Mavourneen, mavourneen, a cushla machree."

My arid eyes grieve, dear Ahnena Khieve,

For the gardens you leave, and the smiles, and the talks, and

the books.

In the lands where you go fair promise trees grow,
And balmy winds blow, and crystal the green valley's brooks;
But no spot is so fair, in the realms over there,
As the June ingle, where we loitered while plighting our troth ;
No raiment so fine, though golden its shine,
As yours, sweetheart mine, in bodice of modest gray cloth.
Oh ! strength of me, life of me, love of my soul,
May not the high angels yet lengthen life's dole?
Come back, O mavourneen ! oh ! come unto me : .
" Mavourneen, mavourneen, a cushla machree."

Mavourneen, come back, o'er the age-trodden track.

But alas and alack ! no traveller's steps e'er return

From those valleys of rest, whose splendor unguessed

Makes thy sleep sweetly blessed. But, darling, I gaze and I

yearn

For thy presence, vague lost ; and on billows I'm tossed ;
Aid in dreams comes the cost of a life from whence love has

flown.

Ahnena ! guide me over the tide,

That I may abide with love and you, ever my own.
Oh ! list for me, pray for me, reach to me, love

1 come, dear, to greet you in Heaven above.
I'm coming, mavourneen, I'm coming to thee,

" Mavourneen, mavourneen, a cushla machree ! "

igoo.] DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION.

625

DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION.

BY WILLIAM SETON, LL.D.
" In the beginning God created" (Gen. i. i).

jN this article we do not propose to discuss the
question of organic evolution as opposed to the
old-time theory of the separate, special creation
of numberless organisms, which was followed by
numberless extinctions going on during millions
of years. This would be superfluous ; for, to quote the words
of Bishop Hedley, of Newport,* " . . . It should be well
borne in mind that the foremost Catholic men of science of the
day not only hold a theory of evolution, but consider that
there can be no doubt on the matter." Our object is to defend
and support one of its main factors, namely, Natural Selection,
from a purely scientific point of view, and to show that this
factor is, when properly understood, not only not opposed to
the idea of God's creative act, but that, on the contrary, His
wisdom is manifested in it. As we know, Charles Darwin was
guided to the discovery of his celebrated hypothesis (for this
discovery, however, we are equally indebted to Alfred Russel
Wallace) by the study of what Man has accomplished through
artificial selection. He cites the common opinion of naturalists
that the various breeds of the domestic pigeon the carrier,
pouter, tumbler, fantail, and others are all descended from
the wild rock-pigeon through slight differences accumulated by
pigeon-fanciers during many successive generations.

Man has done this for his own pleasure, until finally he has
changed the original rock-pigeon not only outwardly, but he
has brought about modifications in the skulls of the different
.breeds. The same thing man has done with the dog, horse,
sheep, and other animals. The different breeds have been pro-
duced by man's selecting and accumulating in one direction
the variations which suited his purpose, which variations are so
slight that an uneducated eye cannot appreciate them. The
same principle of continual selection of slight variations has
been followed in regard to plants. The gardener cultivates the

* Dublin Review, October, 1898, p. 246.

VOL. LXX. 40

626 DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION. [Feb.,

best variety ; then when a still somewhat better variety springs
from its seeds, he selects it, and thus little by little the vege-
table and the flower are modified and improved.

With these remarks on what man has done in a compara-
tively brief time through artificial selection, let us speak of
natural selection. As every naturalist knows, animals and
plants present individual differences under changing conditions
of life. And here we declare our belief that when the Almighty
created the first plants and animals, he did implant in them the
power to respond to extrinsic factors acting on them.

These extrinsic factors arouse, call forth, so to speak,
dormant variations which are thrown out promiscuously in all
directions, and there being far more births than there is room
or food for, severe competition ensues * and certain ones among
these variations are (of course metaphorically speaking) selected
by Nature as the fittest to survive in a changing environment ;
and the environment is, as a rule, always more or less chang-
ing. This is what we mean by natural selection.

Only for this God-given tendency in animals and plants to
respond in a favorable way to outward changes and only for
such response there could be no selection the Creator must
have been continually working fresh miracles through new
creations in order to adapt organic life to new conditions ; for
vast indeed have been the changes in sea and land and climates,
in food and in enemies, since organic life first appeared. And
we know by fossil remains, by the testimony of the rocks, that
vast also have been the changes in animals and plants.

To give only one example of what a changed environment
may produce in a bird in a comparatively few years, we may
instance the wingless Dodo (now extinct) and the Apteryx.
The dodo which inhabited the islands of Mauritius, Bourbon, f
and Rodriguez bore undoubted evidence of being an abortion
from a more perfect type, which under changed conditions of
life had become little by little practically a bird without wings.

* "Nothing is easier than to admit in^words the truth of the universal struggle for life,
or more difficult at least I find it so than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet
unless it be thoroughly ingrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature, with every fact
on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite mis-
understood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabun-
dance of food ; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us
mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life ; or we forget that
these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey ; we
do not always bear in mind that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all
seasons of each recurring year." Origin of Species^ page 49.

f The wingless birds on the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez were closely allied forms.

1900.] DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION. 627

Here we quote from Wallace's Island Life, pages 400-401 :
" If we suppose some ancestral ground-feeding pigeon of large
size to have reached the group (of islands) by means of inter-
vening islands afterwards submerged, and to have thenceforth
remained to increase and multiply, unchecked by the attacks
of any more powerful animals, we can well understand that the
wings, being useless, would in time become almost aborted. It
is not improbable that this process would be aided by natural
selection, because the use of wings would be absolutely pre-
judicial to the birds in their new home. Those that flew up
into trees to roost, or tried to cross over the mouths of rivers,
might be blown out to sea and destroyed, especially during
the hurricanes which have probably always more or less de-
vastated the islands ; while, on the other hand, the more bulky
and short-winged individuals, who took to sleeping on the
ground in the forest, would be preserved from such dangers,
and perhaps also from the attacks of birds of prey which may
have visited the islands. . . . It is perfectly certain that
their existence depended on complete isolation and freedom
from the attacks of enemies. We have no single example of
such defenceless birds having ever existed on a continent -at
any geological period, whereas analogous though totally distinct
forms do exist in New Zealand, where enemies are equally
wanting." The wingless New Zealand bird here alluded to by
Wallace is the Apteryx, which consists of four species. And
we know that not very long ago other birds equally wingless,
but much larger, inhabited the islands of New Zealand. It is
an interesting fact, too, that on certain storm-swept islands
there exist moths, beetles, and flies without wings; and it is
held by naturalists that this condition has come about mainly
through natural selection combined with disuse.

Through the blessed power of responsive variations varia-
bility being a response to changed conditions of life these
insects have become adapted to their dangerous environment ;
for the ones which used their wings the most ran the greatest
danger they were more often blown out to sea and drowned ;
and nature (which cannot select until individual differences
occur) picked out and accumulated the variations which tended
more and more towards shortness of wing, until in the course
of time the wings disappeared and an insect remained which
could not fly. And certainly this was the insect most fitted to
survive on these windy islands.

But, as we know, very much greater changes than mere

628 DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION. [Feb.,

loss of wings have taken place in animal life during the long
geologic ages. All naturalists accept the evidence * that
the mammalia have developed from aquatic ancestors. As
more and more land appeared above the primeval sea, and the
more amphibious certain of these aquatic ancestors became,
the more did some favorable variation in the original swim-
bladder of a fish in response to a changing environment
become through transitional gradations more and more fitted
by natural selection to discharge the functions of a lung, and
it thus took a new departure in its evolutionary history.

And now, while the land surface is increasing, let us
imagine ourselves living in the early part of the Eocene
epoch, which is the first division of the Tertiary age. We do
not find any more gigantic reptiles, but the earth is not yet
quite hard and dry and the conditions are still rather fitted
for slow-moving, somewhat sluggish animals ; and among the
primitive mammals for this is the dawn of the mammal age
we discover the Phenacodus primaevus, whose fossil remains
were unearthed by Professor Cope. This little animal, which
is to be seen in the American Museum of Natural History, is
believed by naturalists to be the highly generalized type from
which have developed the hoofed mammalia ; and one of its
branches is the horse family. Nor must we rise very much
higher in the strata before we come to Eohippus, the far-off
ancestor of the modern horse. And for the evidence, accepted
by naturalists, that Equus has developed from the little eohip-
pus sixteen inches high we refer the reader to the progres-
sive modifications of the feet and teeth in the fossil pedigree
of the horse family, of which more than thirty transition forms
have been found, all standing in linear series in time and in
structure.

As the land surface slowly dried (and this drying up was,
doubtless, an important extrinsic factor acting on eohippus)
the little creature gradually became adapted, through favora-
ble responsive variations selected by nature, to changed con-
ditions of life. And we cannot too often repeat that varia-
tions are the groundwork for natural selection to act on ; and
we say again that we believe Almighty God willed in the be-
ginning that slight differences should appear in the offspring
of the same parents in response to outward changes. And
there must have been great changes in the conditions of ani-
mal life during the two million years which we may allow for

* The most striking evidence is afforded by embryology.

1900.] DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION. 629

the Tertiary period. As thus explained there is surely noth-
ing in the hypothesis of natural selection that a Catholic may
not accept, and, as Bishop Hedley tells us in the Dublin Re-
view for October, 1898, theologians are already beginning to
look upon Darwinism with a more favorable eye.

There are critics, however, who maintain that since the ap-
pearance of organic life there has not been time for the pri-
meval forms of animals and plants to develop mainly through
natural selection into what they are at the present day, and
Darwin himself acknowledged that the time-limit was a weak
point in his theory. Eminent physicists, we know, have
reckoned that the consolidation of our earth took place less
than forty million years ago a time too brief for evolution
mainly through natural selection. In answer to this it has
been said that development may have been more rapid at one
period of the world's history than at another. Moreover, Sir
William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), who was the first to
speak with authority on the time-limit, frankly admits* that
all his reckonings of- underground heat are founded on the
"very sure assumption that the material of our present solid
earth all round its surface was at one time a white-hot liquid."
Here, as we perceive, the essential factor in his calculations
rests on an assumption, and we beg the reader to read the
able address of J. C. Chamberlin in response to Lord Kelvin. \
In this address the professor of geology at the University of
Chicago challenges the certitude of Lord Kelvin's assumption
of a white-hot liquid earth, and he does so on the basis of
physical laws and physical antecedents. He tells us that geolo-
gists are not yet agreed that all the oldest rocks are even
igneous. He assumes with Lord Kelvin that our globe was
formed by the falling together of meteorites, but he does not
join hands with him in inferring a white-hot liquid state as a
result of this falling together. He maintains that everything
would depend on the rate at which the meteorites met simul-
taneously, heat resulting from gravitation and checked motion.
A highly rapid simultaneous infall must be shown before we
assume a white-hot liquid earth as a result ; and he offers
the alternative hypothesis of a slow-grown earth, formed by
meteorites gathering together at great intervals, from which a
low surface temperature may be predicated. Professor Cham-
berlin likewise discusses the question of the sun's age as

* Lord Kelvin's address on the age of the earth as an abode fitted for life. Science ,
May 12-19, 1899. * -[Science, June 3o-July 7, 1899.

630 DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION. [Feb.,

affecting the habitable age of the earth, and he concludes that
the age of the earth, as an abode fitted for life, may be
greater than has been supposed. And here we may add that
at the last meeting of the British Association the distinguished
geologist, Sir Archibald Geikie, delivered an address in which,
with marked moderation, he also discussed the same problem
of the habitable age of our earth, and he contended that he
saw no arguments, on the geological side, " why they (the
geologists) should not be at liberty to enlarge it (the time-limit)
as far as they may find needful for the evolution of organized
existence on the globe."

But while we have endeavored to show in this article that
the hypothesis of natural selection, when correctly understood,
has in it nothing which a Catholic may not accept, we admit
that one must be something of a naturalist in order to grasp
its full meaning.

For example, a recent number of an excellent Catholic
magazine* contains an article entitled u Erreur de la lutte pour
la vie" (Error of the struggle for life), in which the writer
after saying that the fundamental principle of the progressive
development of animals and plants is in nowise opposed to
Catholic dogma gravely informs us that in the vegetable
kingdom there can be no struggle for life properly speaking,
for struggle implies energy of will, a certain knowledge of the
enemy to be conquered, etc. And we gather from the whole
gist of the article that the writer imagines that the word
struggle, as used by naturalists, signifies a regular pitched
battle, a tearing of flesh and a shedding of blood.f Now, here
is what Darwin says, on page 50 of the Origin of Species : " I
use this term (struggle for existence) in a large and meta-
phorical sense including dependence of one being on another,
including (which is more important) not only the life of the
individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine ani-
mals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with
each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the
edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought,
though more properly it should be said to be dependent on
the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand
seeds, of which only one on an average comes to maturity, may

* Revue du Monde Catholique, October i, 1899.

f . . . il n'existe pas, a proprement parler, de lutte pour la vie dans le monde vege-
tal. Qui dit lutte, suppose une certaine ener^ie de volonte, une certaine connaissance de
1'adversaice d vaincre ou auquel il faut au moins resister ..."

i goo.] DIVINE ACTION IN NATURAL SELECTION. 631

be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and
other kinds which already clothe the ground. The mistletoe
is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only
in a far-fetched sense be said to struggle with these trees, for,
if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it lan-
guishes and dies. But several seedling mistletoes growing to-
gether on the same branch may be truly said to struggle with
each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its
existence depends on them ; and it may metaphorically be
said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in tempting
the birds to devour and thus to disseminate its seeds. In
these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for
convenience' sake the general term of struggle for existence."
To conclude our remarks on natural selection, we 'assert
that it is still held by very many naturalists not only as one
of the factors, but as the main factor in organic evolution.
At the meeting of the British Association held at Toronto, in
1897, Professor Foster, in his review of the progress of physio-
logical science, told how Darwin's pregnant ideas had swayed
physiology as well as biology, and Professor Marshall Ward
president of the botanical section declared that the latest
studies, both of living and fossil plants, were " yielding at every
turn new building stones and explanatory charts of the edifice
of evolution " by the process of natural selection. And Brother
Azarias, one of the most distinguished members of the Brothers
of the Christian Schools, says in his Philosophy of Literature,
pp. 180-181 : " Darwin is the Newton of natural history. He
has revolutionized the whole study of nature. He has united
in intimate bonds the present with the remotest past. Read
in the light of the doctrine of Natural Selection, this world's
story, with the story of all things upon it, reads like a fairy
tale. Darwin has explained the laws governing the Variation
of the Species ; he has shown how potent a factor environ-
ment is in modifying transmitted organs and transmitted traits;
he has brought out clearly the great law of the animal and
the vegetable kingdoms of the power of the rapid multiplica-
tion in a geometrical progression, the consequent struggle for
existence, and the survival of the fittest. These are elementary
truths underlying all our studies in nature. We cannot ignore
them if we would."

CATCH THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE FORBIDDING CASTLE.'

TIME-HONORED LANCASTER."

BY REV. H. POPE.

HAT memories the name conjures up! "Time-
honored Lancaster" in Shakspere's mouth, it is
still more so nowadays. As we approach it
from the south and catch the first glimpse of
the stern, forbidding castle, with St. Mary's
tower rising hard by, a host of conflicting emotions rise.
" John of Gaunt ! " perhaps is our first exclamation, and we
seem to see the spectre of the mighty duke and earl, owner
of fair counties, lord of many fiefs, even petty king for a
time, brooding over the old gateway now decked with his
statue. But, perhaps, as we gaze a gentler figure glides into
our dream sainted Edmund Arrowsmith, Lancaster's true glory
as well as her shame.

A strange history is that of this ancient town. Given by
the Conqueror to Roger of Poitou, it, together with the baron-
etcy of Hinckley and the earldom of Derby, fell to Edmund
Crouchback, son of Henry III. His son was the famous
Henry, Earl of Derby, who was said to have taken fifty-six
cities in the French war, and whose daily expenditure
amounted to ;ioo, a good round ;i,ooo of our money. His

1900.] " TIME-HONORED LANCASTER:' 633

daughter married John of Gaunt, who was the fourth son of
Edward III. To him the town owed much ; he constructed
the castle-moat, the drawbridge and the gateway tower, as
well as provided for the better laying out of the town.

Three testaments of his are extant. They are quaint as
well as original, as the following example will show :

" I, John of Gaunt,
Do give and do grant
To Roger Burgoyne
And the heir of his loyne,
All Sutton and Potten
Until the world's rotten."

The castle is, of course, the main attraction for visitors.
Admission is by ticket and well repays a visit, though a great
deal of it is modern. In recent years excavations have been
carried on with the result that the round tower, the only sur-
vivor of fire, is proved conclusively to have been used as a
mill by the Romans, and the very socket in which the big mill-
stone turned has been found. This room now serves as a
museum, and is hung with a gruesome collection of manacles,
leg-irons, and other agreeable relics of our tender-hearted
ancestors. The chains used to fasten a gang of prisoners to-
gether so that they might work in rows are particularly in-
teresting, while the weight of some of the leg-irons is appall-
ing. A dungeon in the thickness of the wall has been recently
brought to light, and confirms all that one has ever heard
of the horrors of such places. Neither light nor air could
penetrate to the unhappy inmates, who, moreover, were
chained to the floor. The door of this prison is still shown ;
it fell to pieces when touched, but must have been of pro-
digious strength. Here we are shown a collection of instru-
ments made in secret by the prisoners in order to facilitate
their escape ; it has a pathetic interest, for these weak, puny
tools compare but ill with those massive walls.

One of 'the last rooms shown has a gruesome history. It
is known as the drop-room, and it was here that condemned
prisoners were pinioned. They were taken to the chapel for
a few minutes' prayer, and then passed across a plank which
is still preserved onto the gallows. Sometimes several were
hung together, and the clumsy arrangements in vogue led to
the most brutal bungling. Under the cannon outside the castle

634 " TIME-HONORED LANCASTER" L Feb ->

they were taken from Sebastopol lie the bodies of nine
men, \vho were all hung together for minor offences which
would nowadays merit little more than six months' hard
labor!

The old castle has served sundry purposes. It has been by
turns debtor's prison some droll pictures on the walls of
Hadrian's tower depict the occupations of its insolvent inmates
then penitentiary for females, then a military, and finally
a civil prison. Royalty has lodged here. King John, Henry
IV., Edward IV., James I., and Charles II. have all passed
through its gates; while on the outside wall of Hadrian's
tower we may read the initials of Queen Elizabeth, who
ordered the old keep to be repaired in view of the Spanish
invasion.

Many a harrowing scene has been witnessed between these
walls, and many a cruel sentence executed. For us, however,
the chief interest centres in the English martyrs, sixteen of
whom met their death at Lancaster. We need only mention
such well-known names as James Bell, Robert Nutter, Edward
Barlow, John Woodcock, Edward Thwing who wrote : ' From
Lancaster Castle, . . . my prison and my Paradise, this
last of May, 1600" and, most glorious of all, Edmund Arrow-
smith. They came of a staunch stock, these Lancashire saints,
as is shown by a story told of Nicholas Gerard, the maternal
grandfather of Edmund Arrowsmith. He was dragged to the
parish church and put opposite the minister, to be edified and
" converted " by the latter's eloquence. But the sturdy recu-
sant sang the Psalms in Latin so loud as to drown the min-
ister's voice, and so had to be carried out again ! The bru-
tality of Edmund Arrowsmith's trial surpasses belief. He was
not heard in his own defence, and when Judge Yelverton told
him he was to die on the scaffold, he answered: "And you,
my lord, must die too!" The infuriated judge knew not
what to answer, but on his return home, while sitting at
dinner, he received a severe blow on the head from an invisi-
ble hand ; he thought his servant had done it, but just then
he received another, and, retiring to his room, he died that
night. Even the blood-loving race of those stern days revolted
at the atrocities accompanying Arrowsmith's execution, but in
the midst of his torments his prayer was ever: "O bone
Jesu!" He died on August 28, 1628.

It is refreshing to hear the guide who shows visitors round
refer to- these heroic men with considerable feeling. He calls

TIME-HONORED LANCASTER"

635

them " the English martyrs," even to the crowd of holiday-
makers who go round the tower in groups of fifty. Over the
gateway stands the rusty remnant of a spike on which Blessed
Edmund's head was fixed, according to tradition. It is said
that as the judges were leaving their iniquitous tribunal they
looked up at the bleeding head aloft, and complaining that it
was not sufficiently conspicuous, caused it to be placed on a
higher pole so that all around might gaze upon it.

As we look through the lists of the English martyrs we
find sixteen
others who,
though not ex-
ecuted at Lan-
caster, were yet
natives of the
town, among
them Abbot
P a s 1 e w of
Whalley, and
Fathers C o t-
tam, Haydock.

BROKEN-BACK BRIDGE.

Gerard, and
Southworth.

As we look at
the town from a
distance an even
more conspicuous
object than the
castle is the tower
of St. Mary's
parish church,
which adjoins the
grim old prison.

Like the tower and keep, this venerable church has passed through
many vicissitudes. In 1094 it was a priory church belonging to
sees in Normandy, and from that time onwards it has had a
checkered history. In Puritan times fierce sermons were preached
here to still fiercer men in mail, the rattling of whose swords
on the paved floor was their means of expressing approval.

THE RIVER LUNE.

636 " TIME-HONORED LANCASTER:' [Feb.,

The church presents the somewhat curious feature of a nave
and chancel of equal length. The stalls, or what remain of
them, are very elaborately carved, and date from the fourteenth
century. By a piece of " restoration " bungling some of the
stalls have been made to face down the church !

This church used to be a recognized place of sanctuary,
sharing this privilege with Manchester till the thirty-eighth
year of Henry VIII., when the latter place ceased to be "a
centre for sinners."

As we wander through the church-yard, with its flat
tombstones, we come across one bearing the truly Christian
epitaph: " Vixi ut moriturus," which we may render: " I
lived as one mindful of death." If we lean on the wall to the
north-west we get a delightful view of the River Lune, while
from the top of the keep on a clear day the view is very ex-
tensive. The rounded summit of Ingleboro, in Yorkshire, pre-
sents a striking appearance to the east, while all around is a
succession of gray, blue, and purple wooded heights ; to the
west and south-west we see the Bay of Morecambe, its waters
sparkling and dancing in the sun. As our eyes follow the
Lune we come first to Skerton Bridge and then to the aque-
duct carrying the canal running to Preston. This is a noble
piece of work, finished in 1797 at a cost of ^78,000. In front
of us, as we turn to the south-east, rises the steeple of St.
Peter's Catholic church. This is one of the sights of Lan-
caster. It was erected in 1859 a ^ a cost of ; 15,000. Its
spire rises to a height of 240 feet, and the church is capable
of holding 1,000. The 'altars are rich, as also are the traceried
windows, one of which represents the martyrs of England.

In the town itself nearly all is modern, though the old
meeting-house of the Quakers is still standing near the Storey
Institute. The Friends formed a strong body in Lancaster,
and George Fox was himself imprisoned in the castle in 1664.
Little or no trace remains of the old religious houses which
used to be here. The Franciscans and Benedictines had
churches here, as also the Dominicans, whose church stood
on the site now occupied by the Wesleyan chapel, in Sulyard
Street.

The town also possessed a hospital founded by King John,
and endowed for the maintenance of a master, chaplain, and
nine poor people, three of whom were to be lepers; this last
clause throws a strange light upon the sanitary conditions of
those times, while the whole foundation bespeaks a religious

1 900.]

" TIME-HONORED LANCASTER."

63;

tone in King John which other
events in his life would have
made us suppose wanting.

When we have seen the castle
and its keep and the old priory
church, we cannot do better than
try and get a distant view of
the whole place. If we start
from St. Peter's Church and
take the towing-path along the
canal, we shall get a series of
most interesting views of the
town. As we turn northward we
make a half-circle with the canal.
The massive castle rises on the
hill before us, while the town
nestles at its feet in the valley
of the Lune. The river winds
in its shallow

though broad
bed, and we
realize the mili-
tary sagacity of
our ancestors
when they
chose this spot
for a castle.
Many a fight
has this plain
witnessed, yet
strange to say
the Wars of the

Roses left the seat of the " Red Rose " untouched, and it was
during the later civil wars that the great sieges of the castle
took place. The huge boulder stones yet collected on the
summit of the keep were placed there as missiles for defence
during those stormy days.

The canal along which we are walking is picturesque. It
used to be the recognized means of conveyance between Lan-
caster and Preston, and we read of the judges of assize com-
ing this way. The old canal " packets " are yet to be seen
drawn up in a shed. They began running in 1833. There are
some delightful spots on the canal, and " Broken-back " Bridge

ST. PETER'S CHURCH AND INTERIOR.

638

TIME-HONORED LANCASTER:'

[Feb.,

is even lovelier than in the accompanying illustration. The
firs and larches stand in solemn, silent rows along the bank,
while lower down near the water's edge willow-herb and agri-
mony grow in rank profusion, imaging their pink and purple
flowers in the still water. The next bridge, known as " Deep-
cutting Bridge," is not so beautiful, but is striking. The still-
ness in the heat of a summer's day is remarkable, and the
water looks like glass. Further to our left stretches what
remains of Lancaster Moor. Here is a spot known as "Weep-
ing Point,'* for from here the weary prisoners marching up
from the south caught the first sight of their gloomy dungeon.
Here, too, we can stand and admire the truly palatial County
Lunatic Asylum, which, first started in 1816, has been added
to and embellished till, in 1882, it reached its present magnifi-
cent proportions. It has room for a thousand inmates. On
the other side lies the Ripley Hospital, founded by Julia Rip-
ley for orphans from Lancaster and Liverpool.

But before we bid adieu to the historic old town we must

not omit what is
now its greatest
relic. We mean
the "Townley Al-
tar." Its history,
as given by Father
Abbott, in whose
possession it is, is
briefly as follows :

THE RIPLEY HOSPITAL.

John Townley was
one of the best
known of the glori-
ous " Recusants "
of Elizabeth's
days. He was so
harried by the
sheriff's o fft c e rs
that he dared not
set up an altar

THE LUNATIC ASYLUM.

in his own house, so had one"'erected

the house of one of his tenants, a certain Mr. Burgess. This

TIME-HONORED LANCASTER.'

639

"THE TOWNLEY ALTAR."*

altar was made so as to look like an ordinary cupboard, and
was thus able to escape the notice of the priest-hunters. Be-
fore giving an account of its vicissitudes a word or two con-
cerning John Townley himself will not be amiss. He was one
of those Catholic laymen of whom England can boast that
they were Catholics to the backbone as well as Englishmen to
the backbone. The mere record of the prisons whose walls he
hallowed by his presence suffices to show how staunch he was
in the service of God and his church. He was confined at
Chester, in the Marshalsea; at York, in the Block House
Westminster; at Manchester, at Broughton in Oxfordshire, and
at Ely twice ! Such was his record, and surely he could say
with St. Paul : " In prisons . . . frequently, in stripes above
measure, in deaths often." He was finally released when
seventy-three years old, but was bound over to appear at
stated times.

* The Old Altar, made in 1560, in the time of the cruel Penal Laws of Queen Elizabeth
against Catholics; at which the Blessed Martyrs, Edmund Campion, S.J., in April, 1581, and
Rev. Edmd. Arrowsmith, in 1621-2, and also Rev. John Woodcock, O.F.S., on August 15,
1644, said his last Mass at Woodend, near Leyland, in Lancashire, immediately before his
apprehension and committal to Lancaster Castle, where he was put to a cruel death with the
Rev. Edwd. Bamber and Rev. Thomas Whitaker, August 7, 1646.

640

TIME-HONORED LANCASTER:'

[Feb.,

The altar was later transferred to Denham Hall, where
Father Campion offered up the Holy Sacrifice upon it. From
there it went to Woodend Farm, and was used by Father
Arrowsmith in 1622. After many changes and vicissitudes it
at length rests in Dale Street, Lancaster, with the Rev. Father
Abbott, to whom it has come through the Burgess family. It is
enriched with many relics, but in the eyes of English Catholics
it needs no relics to enhance its glory.

As we leave the " time-honored " town, in the evening, we
turn to take one last lingering look. The sun is sinking into
the sea to the west of the castle. His long, slanting rays
glimmer through the stained glass of St. Mary's Church, even
as they did when it was a Catholic church ; but the sun lights
not up the light of the Ancient Faith there ; he meets there
no red glow of the sanctuary lamp, bearing witness with its
puny, flickering flame to its great Creator, even as the sun
does with his quickening beams. But the rays slant on, up
across the sleeping town, onto the hill where the spire points
heavenward, where St. Peter's image stands, where the " An-
gelus " bell is tolling, where the red lamp is gleaming, telling
of the Sacred Presence exiled still from the old fane by the
castle but no longer exiled from the town, telling of heartfelt
prayers ever rising in the words of one of England's martyrs :
"Jesus! convert England.

Jesus ! have mercy on this country ! "

a prayer which we can all, be we Protestant or Catholic, wel-
come and repeat.

ST. MARY'S CHURCH.

1900.] P&KE GENETTES. 641

PERE GENETTES:

A REGENERATOR OF THE FAITH IN FRANCE.
BY MIRIAM COLES HARRIS.

fOME one says, there are two paratonnerres in
Paris to divert the wrath of Almighty God from
blasphemous, sacrilegious France lightning-rods
put up by Good Paris to save Wicked Paris, so
to speak. One is the Church of Notre Dame
des Victoires, the other., is that of the Sacr Coeur on Mont-
martre. The first, in point of time, came Notre Dame des
Victoires.

In 1832 faith was perhaps at its lowest ebb in France.
Nothing can be imagined much worse than the state of public
feeling regarding religion in Paris, and nothing much more
debased than the state of public morals. Good works of all
kinds were brought to a stop, orphanages were broken up, and
the helpless children scattered through the sinful city. Churches
were closed and priests were in hiding or sent into exile. The
time had not the august terror of the Revolution ; it was "the
day after," arid, flat.

In the spring of this year a horrible outbreak of cholera
occurred ; this call was too potent to be disregarded by a
good priest, who, despite the danger, hurried from his exile
to the neglected souls passing unshriven in the pest-smitten city.
This priest was Charles E16onore Dufriche des Genettes.
He was born in 1778 at Alenon and his youth had been
passed in the turbulent scenes of the Revolution. He came of
a distinguished family, but the philosophic illusions of the
period had tainted them more or less. One was a Girondist,
and the father of Charles himself had cherished secretly a
deep interest in " le re'veil de la libertt" This interest was
sharply pruned when it landed him in prison, for, shocked by
the enormities of the Revolution, he had tendered his resigna-
tion as president of the Tribunal of Dreux, and had been
promptly shut up as an enemy of the patrie. His property
was confiscated, his family reduced to starvation. Young
Charles, the future priest, then a fiery, fearless boy of sixteen,
scoured the environs for food for the imprisoned father and
VOL. LXX. 41

642 PERE GENETTES. [Feb.,

the starving household, and they, as well as many other families
of cpnsequence, lived for months on the charity of the peasants.
It was after the fall of Robespierre ; the prisons were still
crammed ; those in Dreux contained more than one hundred
and fifty heads of families. The distress was extreme ; every-
thing had been done to effect the release of these gentlemen,
but in vain. Charles, who had always had a strong aversion to
the popular cause, as well perhaps as a strong conviction of
his own youthful wisdom, determined to take upon himself
the liberation of his father and his fellow-townsmen. One day,
taking advantage of the absence of his mother, he repaired
boldly to the Club, and made an appeal to the Sovereign Peo-
ple. He reproached them with their long subjection, coun-
selled them to rise and to throw open the prisons. Secretly
this was what they had long been wanting to do. There was
something in the youth of the orator, his fearlessness, and
even his crude college rhetoric, that touched the heart of the
new Sovereign, strongly moved as it had been by the recent
events of Thermidor. They applauded him and sur le champ
appointed a commission of twenty citizens to go and release
the prisoners. They met with some resistance from the authori-
ties, but the menace of the mob was too much for them and
the prisons were emptied.

The boy was emboldened by this success. He became an
ardent politician. Having opened the prisons, he knew no
reason why he should not open the churches. After several
months of preparation for this mission, he gained so strong an
influence over the good women of the neighborhood, whom he
had harangued at their spinning-wheels, that one fine day he
assembled more than three hundred of them in the market-
place, and headed a deputation to the hall of the Commune
to demand the keys of the churches. The officials were most
awkwardly placed. They would have liked to throw the young
orator and his acolytes out of the window ; but the market,
place was full of people, the lad's eloquence was inflaming,
and they had no one at hand to help them. They were
obliged to give up the keys. In an incredibly short time the
churches were opened and cleaned, the priests reappeared as
by magic, and the Mass was offered publicly. For three months
the worship of the town went on as before the Revolution.
At the end of that time some troops and commissioners were
sent to put a stop to " the scandal," and the churches of
Dreux .were locked up again and left to the moles and the bats.

1900.] PERE GENETTES. 643

The fiery zeal of the sixteen-year-old boy caused anxiety to
his parents, and partly from a desire to get him away, and
partly from necessity, they removed to a small property in
Lower Normandy, the only remnant of their former wealth.
Here for three years they lived, and Charles found exercise
for his energy in succoring the priests who were hiding in the
woods. He knew all their retreats, and he brought to them
those who needed their ministrations, and he smuggled them
into the sick and dying at night. These Elijahs whom he
fed repaid him by teaching him theology, and preparing him
for the ministry to which he had always aspired. Till he was
twenty he was obliged to do what he could for the support of
the impoverished household, but as soon as times were better,
he demanded of his father permission to prepare for the priest-
hood. This was grudgingly accorded.

From the time of his ordination we find him an honored
and successful priest. He had charge of several parishes,
where he wrought wonders by his ability and zeal. One,
where his life was in daily danger from turbulent workmen, and
where at first he had to be escorted to and from the church
by gendarmes; another, where a fearful pestilence raged and
where he nearly lost his life by his devotion ; another, in
calmer times when he was, still young, made curt of one of
the most important parishes in Paris, and where even royalty
itself applauded and aided the great works of charity which
he set on foot. But he was very weary of the charge of a
parish and longed above all things for the religious life, to
which he had always felt himself called. The Jesuits had
crept out of their hiding places by this time in Paris, and to
them M. des Genettes repaired and asked admission. It must
have been a temptation to them, crippled as they then were.
Here was a priest of tried zeal and power ready to their hand.
The superior was not ignorant of his value. He requested a
few hours to deliberate and ask counsel of Heaven. They say,
" On devienne cuisimer, mais on nait rotisseur" Evidently M.
des Genettes was not born a Jesuit, for the superior returned
an unfavorable answer. The hard-worked curt turned on his
heel feeling, perhaps, that Heaven had been harsh to him. And
for many years he continued to be cure malgrt lui.

At last came the troubles of 1830; his parish was broken
up and he went into exile, from whence, as has been said, he
was recalled by the cholera in Paris. After that had sub-
sided, it remained for him to submit again to the yoke of the

644 PERE GENETTES. [Feb.,

inevitable parish, as he was now fifty-four and too old to be
admitted into any religious community.

From what has been detailed of his life one can see that
he was above all things a man of action, of practical aims, of
robust determination, but full of glowing faith and of a large
chanty. Certainly no man was ever further from being a
visionary, and yet the rest of his life was, in the providence of
God, to be spent in one of the most extraordinary works of faith
that the nineteenth century has seen.

The archbishop appointed him in 1832 curt of Notre Dame
des Victoires, a parish containing forty thousand souls, lying
in the worst part of the city, and practically a wreck. The
church had been built in 1629, but the Revolution and the
many savage assaults of anarchy succeeding had apparently
triumphed, and it had been "left for dead." The parish
seemed to have no existence as a parish; of the bonnes ceuvres,
whatever they had been, there was no longer any trace ; the
assistance at High Mass would sometimes consist of three or
four old women, children were not brought to baptism, for the
dying no succor was asked, and for the dead no rites of
sepulture. The church was dingy and out of repair. It had
served as Bourse for some time ; often it had been shut for
months together. " Disons tout, quoiqu'il nous en coute,"
writes M. des Genettes, "il tait devenu un lieu de prostitution,
et nous avous t< oblig de recourir a la force publique pour
en chasser ceux qui le profanaient."

To this horrible corpse the zealous priest was chained for
four and a half years. Absolutely no progress seemed made.
The Normandy woods, where he had fed the starving priests
as a boy ; the parish of Monsort, where he had conquered the
turbulent workmen ; the Faubourg St. Germain, where he had
reared marvellous works of charity which he had lived to see
overthrown and scattered to the winds, had all been bitter ex-
periences ; but there had been sweet mingled with the bitter.
They had not been fruitless, but this work, this was worse
than fruitless ; he felt it was drying up his own zeal, paralyzing
his powers and rendering him useless.

One Saturday morning it was the 3d of December, 1836
he began to say the 9 o'clock Mass at the altar of the Blessed
Virgin ; three or four old women were assisting. The air is
cold and the light dim in Paris at that hour in the month of
December. The thought of the failure of his work was always
present with him, but that chill morning it weighed upon him

i goo.] PERE GENETTES. 645

like ice. From the first verse of the psalm " Judica me "
(Judge me, O Lord) he could think of nothing but the sterility
of his work, the futility of remaining longer where he was.
He repeated perfunctorily the holy words of the liturgy ; his
whole mind was taken up with the thought of how he should
break away from the hateful yoke. " fudica me ! I have done
nothing in these four years ; my ministry is void. I should
give it up." He tried to fix his thoughts on the holy Sacrifice
which he was about to offer ; he was frightened at his state of
distraction. He repeated the Sanctus ; the bell tingled, the
Canon of the Mass was reached. He stopped appalled. " My
God," he said to himself, " how can I offer the divine Sacri-
fice ? In what state am I ? Is my mind composed enough to
consecrate ? My God, deliver me, deliver me from this dis-
traction !" The sweat stood out on his forehead. Perhaps the
old women did not notice that he paused ; they could not
know the fight that was going on. In that moment's pause he
heard, not with his ears but within, as with his mind, distinctly
and solemnly, these words : " Consecrate your parish to the
Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary." After that he suddenly
became calm and regained command of himself. He proceeded
with the Mass in peace and fervor, losing himself in the holy
mystery, and even forgetting the struggle which had just
given him so much distress.

After the Mass and his action de graces the good priest,
always exact and severe with himself in the smallest matter
that concerned his holy calling, examined himself as usual in
regard to the celebration just over. He recalled with shame
the distraction with which it had begun, but with the justice
which characterized his mind, even in dealing with himself, he
decided that he had not sinned. He had not consented with
his mind to the thoughts that tormented him. Then he began
to think of the words which up to then he had forgotten, and
as he recalled them, "I was," he said, ''struck with a sort of
terror." He refused to believe in the possibility of such a
communication ; he felt his memory had played him a trick.
If there was a role for which he felt a contempt, it was that
of a visionary. Impatiently for he was not a very patient
man he said to himself : " It is an illusion ; I had a long
distraction at Mass. I have not sinned. I will not give it
another thought." And with the sensation of putting away a
disagreeable but importunate matter, he turned his mind to
other things. He was in the sacristy on his knees before his

646 PERE GENETTES. [Feb.,

prie-dieu. Feeling the affair to be ended, he half arose. At
this moment, his hands still on the prie-dieu> he heard dis-
tinctly, in the same manner, the words again repeated. He
fell down again on his knees, confounded. What did this
mean? Was he the sort of man to have illusions? Was it a
thought that had come in the train of other thoughts which
he had harbored ? No, for it was a thought foreign to his
bent; his predilection had never been to honor excessively
the Blessed Virgin. A few years before he had heard a ser-
mon on the holy heart of Mary, and while acknowledging the
eloquence of the preacher, had not spared to condemn it as
useless and inopportune. The condition of faith in France at
that epoch was such that the Rev. Pere de Ravignan has left
it on record that he felt it an act of courage to pronounce
the name of Jesus Christ in a discourse ; what must it have
seemed to such a man of common sense as M. des Genettes
to believe that it was his duty, that it was wise, publicly to
consecrate his parish to the Heart of Mary?

But the words rang in his ears ; his memory and his intelli-
gence joined forces with his conscience. He could not deny
it to himself; it was not a delusion; though he should be
called a visionary if it ever came to be known, he had heard
the words, a command had been given to him. What did it
mean? What was a man required to do under such circum-
stances? He walked^ about the sacristy. Time seems long
when one is waging such a battle. He had decided, during
that miserable distraction at Mass, to write to the archbishop
that morning asking to be replaced ; but this this seemed to
change the face of things. Well, no doubt, it was his duty
to wait a little longer; he would try. This stagnant pool of
sin that he called his parish, this blood-stained city, this blas-
pheming France, this world lying in wickedness what could
he do that he had not done ? He sat down at his desk and
drew some paper towards him, it is possible a little roughly,
for he was not a suave man. The conversion of sinners ; yes,
praying seemed all that any one could do now. A confra
ternity to pray for the conversion of sinners, a confraternity
named " of the holy and immaculate Heart of Mary." The
words slid from his pen, the aim, the scope, the rules of the
work seemed to spring from his brain ready-made.

"If it ever comes to anything," he ' said to himself, a little
grimly, " I shall not be a founder but a tool."

In a few days he mustered up courage to take the rapidly

1 900.] PERE GENETTES. 647

written paper to the archbishop for his sanction. The arch-
bishop did not refuse it. The poor parish could not be any
deader than it was, maybe he thought ; at least it might en-
courage the priest to make this last effort. It was well to try
anything in such a desperate case.

On the following Sunday, the nth December, at the prone
of High Mass, he announced in a few words the plan he had
in mind. As usual, only a handful of people were present;
the grotesque absurdity of proposing on such a foundation to
build a work of ardent faith brought a blush to his face. If
there had been any way out of it for his dogged conscience,
he would have crumpled the paper in his hand and gone on
to the other stereotyped notices of fetes to which nobody came
and of collections to which nobody contributed. But he
stoutly read out the object of the confraternity and the order of
its meetings, and announced that that evening, at seven o'clock,
the first would take place. His faith and courage were at zero.

It was impossible for him not to dwell on the evening's
venture into which he had gone in such cold blood and with
such reluctance ; all the afternoon he found himself speculat-
ing about the result, and no doubt praying, though not per-
mitting himself to hope.

That night between five and six hundred people assembled
in the deserted church ; five or six hundred, on their knees
before the altar in an abandon of devotion what a sight for
the disheartened servant of God ! How and why they came
is Heaven's secret. There were no earthly means used to
bring them but the little paper which the shamefaced priest
forced himself to read that morning from the pulpit to a
dozen lukewarm hearers.

That was sixty-three years ago. What* has the Church of
Notre Dame des Victoires been since that hour of mystery,
and what is now the little confraternity which M. des Genettes
felt himself bidden to found?

The church is now the centre of the spiritual life of Paris;
in a sense the hope of pious France and dear to all the
Catholic world. The shabby little Place des Petits Peres
is always marked by a straggling crowd going in and out of
the dingy doors of the church ; carriages stand before it with
liveried servants in attendance, and battered fiacres wait for
their devout fares within. You enter through the usual crowd
of mendicants. The church is dim at the entrance, and you
can scarcely see whether you are passing gentle or simple, but

648 PERE GENETTES. [Feb.,

as you make your way towards the altar of the Blessed Virgin
you see, in the soft splendor of countless candles, a silent, kneeling
throng. There is not an hour from daylight up to nine or ten
at night when a crowd is not kneeling in that spot where the
poor priest had so often prayed avec rage that Heaven might

" The stubborn knees with holy trembling smite."

He surely has smitten them there as never elsewhere, if
one may believe the records on the little marble tablets a few
inches in size with which the walls are encrusted up to the
very arches. There is no more place, every crevice is covered.
Thousands of tiny gold hearts hung high up among the rafters
contain the thanksgivings of these later years. Swords, de-
corations, and jewels have covered every available inch lower
down, long ago. Beautiful flowers are always lying beside the
altar, daily renewed, and hundreds of candles are offered every
day. The first time I went there I thought it was a great f$te
and wondered for what ceremony the people were waiting ;
but it was only an ordinary day, a " blue Monday " I think,
and they were not waiting for anything but help from Heaven.
After that I went many times and at all hours, " to surprise
Notre Dame des Victoires with a deserted altar and an empty
church," as an ardent young Catholic said scornfully. But I
never have been able so to surprise her. It is always the
same ; always in the soft light of the myriad votive candles
kneels a silent crowd of men and women ; always some are
coming in and some are going out of the old, ungainly doors
children in their parents' arms, workmen in their blouses,
ladies in their furs and velvets, priests and students in their
cassocks ; here a gentleman on his knees, with his hat and
stick deposited beside him on the pavement ; there a thought-
ful, bearded man with a roll of MS. under his arm, pressing up
to kneel for a moment at the altar rail before he goes away.
There is never any look of fanaticism on those faces. It is
the most apparently sincere as well as the most silent devo-
tion I have ever seen.

Every young priest aspires to say his first Mass at Notre
Dame des Victoires. The old year ends and the new year
begins there. Popes and kings have sent their offerings to the
humble spot ; great men have loved it and asked that after
death they might be brought there

" While all the congregation sang
A Christian psalm for them.

igoo.] PERE GENETTES. 649

The little confraternity has spread over the whole Catholic
world, "as the waters cover the sea." Before the death of M.
des Genettes, in 1860, there were, scattered over the world,
twenty million associates. In 1880 there were twenty-five
million ; in Paris alone there were 1,016,819 names inscribed
on the register. In that year, on ordinary days, about 8,000
persons entered the church daily ; on Sundays and fete days
more than 20,000. The numbers have been constantly augment-
ing since, though no record has been kept, I think.

M. des Genettes lived nearly thirty years "to see of the
travail of his soul and be satisfied." Torrents of grace and
marvels of conversion followed the stout-hearted venture that
was not so much one of faith as of obedience. His con-
fessional was besieged day and night ; he was over-paid for all
the discouragements of his long, hard life by a mighty tide of
favors that obliterated all the harshness of his nature. The
ardent love of souls which he had felt from his boyhood was
for all those thirty years, so to speak, returned. His spiritual
children counted by thousands. The cure malgre lui had all
the Catholic world for his parish. He did not sigh any longer
for the religious life.

" 'Tis still

The way of God with His elect,
Their hopes exactly to fulfil
By ways and means they least expect."

His confessional, his dear confessional, was his cloister, the
quest of souls his rule, and the beloved altar where the mes-
sage had come to him was the open door of heaven. His
preaching was of phenomenal simplicity. The woods of Nor-
mandy had been his seminary and the exiled priests had been
his teachers; his rough and active service since had not left
him much time for cultivating graceful rhetoric. But no elo-
quence has ever called forth more tears, no words of man have
ever penetrated deeper into souls. "The conversion of sin-
ners," that was his one longing. " Delectare in Domino et
dabit tibi petitiones cordis tui " (" Delight thou in the Lord
and He shall give thee thy heart's desire "). The Lord gave
him at last his heart's desire.

The many schools of philosophy at that day rife in Paris
caused him small concern ; he opposed to them nothing save
the simplicity and energy of his faith, but no one ever made
more headway against infidelity. Hordes of young men, se-

650

PERE GENETTES.

[Feb.,

duced by the sophistries of the day, sought him out and laid
open their hearts, full of a mixture of noble aspirations and
pernicious phantoms. M. des Genettes, seeing the noble aspira-
tions and ignoring the mischievous philosophy, trusted to the
sacraments whose power he knew. " Confess yourself," he
would simply say ; " confess yourself every week. Begin to-day/*

Very few resisted, and hundreds of beguiled dreamers were
brought back to Christian faith by this elementary counsel.
These young converts of Notre Dame des Victoires ranged
themselves around her altar in a solemn phalanx, and in the
heart of the archiconfrerie formed themselves into fraternities
having each a particular aim of labor and prayer, concurring
though always with the general end, the conversion of sinners.
Doctors, painters, men of letters, each had their separate guild.
From them went out many recruits to the religious orders;
men who had begun by Utopian dreams of liberty and pro-
gress ended by binding themselves for life with the triple
cord of obedience, chastity, and poverty.

When the earthly end of his apostolate of prayer ap-
proached and he could no longer celebrate his Mass, M. des
Genettes was carried daily to the foot of his beloved altar,
and there prayed as ever for the world that would not pray
for itself. There he lies buried now, and the stone that records
his name is trodden every day by hundreds of penitents who
think they owe more mercies than they can count to that one
act of unecstatic, straightforward, and stubborn faith on the
3d of December, 1836.

1900.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 651

A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF PIUS IX.

BY MRS. ALEXANDER.
I.

does it mean, " The end of life?"
So spake a beautiful fair woman leaning
from the balcony of a luxurious villa facing
the sea. But her husband gave no answer to
this strange question.
They were spending their summer on the Adriatic coast at
the antiquated little bathing place of Sinigaglia, where they
still hold for some days, annually, the ancient fair, consisting
of booths bordering both sides of the centre street and stretch-
ing down to the sea a quaint mixture of past and present
times !

In the far past this celebrated fair was made a channel for
commercial dealings with many parts in Western Europe, and
carried on a kind of regular trade. Both Greece and Venice
yearly contributed their goods, and made the fair a market-
place for selling wares of all kinds, exchanging their goods
with the local tradesmen. But nowadays this has all changed.
It is but a semblance or figure of that glorious time. There
are the same booths, the same extent of area, the same en-
veloping expanse of white canvas awning running down the
principal street of the town ; but little or no trade is carried
on, and the buyers consist merely of some chance passengers
visiting Sinigaglia for the baths, or on holy pilgrimage to
Loreto and Assisi. These booths, all daintily set up with
miscellaneous wares, present a gay and bright appearance. But
it seems strange, commercial prosperity having passed away,
that still every summer petty shopmen come from afar with
their wooden cases and set up their stalls, thereby keeping up
the semblance of this old historical fair.

It is five o'clock. The sun is still high in the heavens ; the
sea calm, beautiful, and glassy, gently smiling with the caprice
of lights and shades. The little town is now all animation ;
throngs of passengers pass along the street, loitering on to the
grand bathing establishment ; some stopping to stare at the
bright stalls, turning over all the cheap and curious odds and

652 A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. [Feb.,

ends collected at the fair. Amongst these idlers there passes
our handsome, stately woman from the villa, robed in dainty
fabrics for a summer's wear. She is leaning on the arm of
her husband, a tall, delicate-looking man.

Amidst that crowd of season visitors they stand out unique
and separate, invested with an indefinable distinction. Neither
of them is young, to judge from appearance, for General De
Courcy was gray, and years had stamped deep lines upon his
face. A man of sixty, you would say. The woman walking
by his side was the lovely Lady Cyril Grahame, possessing all
the attractions of womanhood combined with a child's bewitch-
ing grace of smile and manner. But with all her childish
witcheries she was a woman who had found life very bitter,
and had lived upon a hope that life would change for her;
would change the bitter into sweet, for it could not be that,
given such strong capabilities for enjoyment, the great God
would deny to her the realization of an earthly happiness.
But long years went by and held her chained in wedded life
to one she could neither love nor hate. And still the years
ran past, till one day a great love came into her life a love
which meant to her (with her passionate love of the good and
true) a life-long separation, a death in life. And so in the
full bloom of life and beauty Lady Cyril Grahame and Gene-
ral De Courcy parted. The years dragged on, bringing age
and sorrow in their train, till at length Lady Cyril became a
widow. Then General De Courcy, who had never wed or
loved another, came on the scene once more and they were
married. We meet them now in Sinigaglia, mingling with the
merry throng of visitors assembled for sea-bathing and flirta-
tion. They had taken a beautiful villa belonging to Conte and

Contessa B (relatives of the late Pope), who had shown

them much kindness and hospitality.

We will follow them as they pass among the throng of
passengers on their way to the sea-beach.

" You do not answer me, Algernon," she said. " I asked
you in the balcony a very solemn question. What does it
mean to you and me, the end of lifef"

She took his arm and waited for a reply. He paused to
answer, and then both stood still.

" Yes, you are right; it is a solemn question, the end of
life, to every individual. Should it not be the fruition and
completion of all his highest aims and aspirations? End should
be but another word for completion. With us is not the " end

1900.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 653

of life " the realization of a happiness which before lived but
in our dreams! Dearest, what more can I say?"

She did not answer. Life had been so long and dreary in
those past days ; and now she felt and knew, though strong
in health, that after fifty years of life there could but remain
a few more years to live. The inevitable Death must come,
and though their happiness was complete in itself, this knowl-
edge of the approaching " end " was like a Damocles' sword
suspended over every joy and happiness of life. To her it was
a happiness tinged with the remembrance of a painful past,
and the sad recurring thought that Death was fast marching
upon their steps. So in reserve and silence she walked beside
him, whilst he chatted on of many things and discussed their
future plans. At last they reached the bathing place, a raised
platform thrown out into the sea, making a charming rendez-
vous, with its shady, stretched-out canvas awning. And here
it was the people met and talked, flirted, ate ices, and watched
the bathers.

The place was very full, and the general found it difficult
to secure chairs, so they leaned over the wooden paling and
watched the sea with its ebb and flow, and constant motion.

There is a certain isolation in all great personal happiness
an isolation which seems to shut one out from the rest of
the world ; and this feeling was now strong upon them.

Very lovely looked the sea at Sinigaglia ! Its broad ex-
panse took on the variegated tints of a reflected sun, making
all things sparkle with the rainbow's rays, and the little fishing-
boats with their painted sails, dotted here and there, like
huge winged birds, gave an air of pageantry to the parting
scene. But a few minutes and how swiftly the sea grew
dark before their eyes, and shadows stole along the land.
The sailing vessels, with their colored sails, veer round, like
hovering birds, for harbor; and now, to suit the fading scene,
those huge, bright sails look black in silhouette against the
setting sun.

II.

The next morning Lady Cyril de Courcy, unattended, took
her morning walk. She longed to know about the people all
around her. Further and further she walked away from the sea,
passing through dirty passages and slimy, slippery ways ; through
dusty roads and half-cultured lands ; passing unwashed chil-
dren who mingled in light-hearted play with pigs and fowls.

654 A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. [Feb.,

She was walking on, thinking of the misery of a savage
existence like to this around, when the extreme beauty of a
young girl, sitting outside one of the hovels, cleaning and
sieving a kind of yellow pea, struck her so forcibly that she
stopped to speak to her.

The girl rose to her feet, and with a natural grace took
her hand and raised it to her lips.

Her story was a sad one. Left an orphan with no one to
care for her save a crippled aunt, who was fearfully afflicted a
victim to that awful scourge the Lupus !

"Signora! ah signora ! " said the young girl, weeping be-
tween each word, " is not death best ? We suffer so, and each
day my aunt grows worse, but does not die. I cannot bear to
look at her."

She hid her face in an old torn rag, which once had boasted
the name of apron, and continued sobbing between each breath.

" All night long she cries and groans to be delivered, and
I too pray all day to the blessed Madonna to take her soon."

" Do not cry any more," said Lady Cyril, taking her hand.
" Let me see your aunt ; perhaps I may be able to send some
relief."

" How good the lady is * buona ! buona ! ' " cried the young
girl, pointing to the door behind. " I will go and tell her."
She left her yellow peas with the sieve on the stone outside,
and gently opened the door.

The room, or rather shed, was nearly dark ; there was an
attempt at a small window, but the opening was so choked up
with rags and stalks of vegetables that it hardly afforded any
light to the room. Lady Cyril followed her into the shed, try-
ing hard to conceal her emotion and to be strong.

A low bedstead and a bundle of rags of divers colors was
all she could distinguish on first entering the room ; but as her
eyes became accustomed to the light, she saw a shrunken
form and bandaged head. Over the lower part of the jaw
there was a cloth tightly bound, and the ashy hue of that part
of the face which was visible presented a most sickening and
horrible sight. But this bundle of rags, shrunken form, and
ashy-colored face (if face it could be called; was a woman of
about forty, suffering from that fearful malady the Lupus her
case was anciently called " Noli me tangere " a species of
malignant disease affecting the skin and cartilages of the nose.
It was generally considered incurable.

The poor creature spoke with extreme difficulty, and each

i QOO.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 655

word she uttered seemed to kill her ; her long, thin, skinny
arms were thrown above her head, and her eyes were so sunk
into their sockets that only by leaning over her and peering
beneath the lids could one discern them at all. Evidently the
sight of the poor creature was dimmed by pain and suffering,
for the entrance of this beautiful woman, now at her side, made
no impression on her. She only moaned and hid her face,
and through the tattered rags that served as bed-clothes one
could catch the words, " Madonna santa ! Madonna, Madonna,
purissima ! "

As these words slowly issued from the bedding the girl
fell upon her knees in a kind of frenzied grief, passionately
exclaiming, " Ora, ora, pro nobis ! "

The scene was truly harrowing, and Lady Cyril wept with
them in silent sympathy, oppressed with their extreme misery
and suffering ; for what could she do here in the presence of
such affliction, which only God could heal?

She felt overpowered by the great mystery of existence, and
she too knelt down by the side of the suffering woman and
prayed for help. Then rising, she turned to the young girl, her
eyes still full of tears, and giving her a few crumpled notes,
left the tainted atmosphere of the shed for the pure, sweet air
of heaven.

III.

The next morning the general and his wife received an

invitation from Contessa de B to visit the house of Pius IX.

They drove through the town, over the stony, uneven pavement,
and arrived in a few minutes at the palace of the late pope.

It is an ugly, flat, gloomy-looking building, with massive
portals, over which hung the armorial bearings with the papal
keys. It boasted of no architectural beauty, and its flat facade
was unbroken by either balcony or decoration.

They found both the conte and his wife waiting below to
receive them.

" This is very good of you," began Lady Cyril, descending
from the carriage. " My husband knew Pius IX. in '65, and
so he is doubly interested in anything relating to him."

" Indeed!" exclaimed the contessa, turning to the general.
" So you knew my uncle ? "

" Yes, I had the honor of exchanging a few words with
him when I was in Rome ; and I have never met any one
possessing a more pleasant and genial manner."

656 A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. [Feb.,

" My uncle was beloved by all who knew him," rejoined
the contessa enthusiastically ; " he had, as you say, the most
engaging manners ; he was by no means a politician, but he
was a large-hearted man. I was very young when he died ;
still, I can remember him quite well."

On the staircase leading up to the second "piano" the
general noticed a small picture of the Madonna.

" Ah ! that picture," said the contessa, " was sent to my
father, Luigi Mastai, by Pius IX., with the express wish that
it should be placed here, and, according to his desire, every
Saturday evening we burn a lamp before it till Sunday. My
uncle had a peculiar veneration for the Virgin, and placed his
family floor under her protection."

" I suppose it was his great love for her which induced
him to enforce the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, but
surely it was not altogether a popular movement."

" No, it caused a good deal of contention ; as also did the
dogma of the * Infallibility.' "

They now passed into the hall leading to the apartment
formerly occupied by the family of Pius IX. The walls are
covered with paintings on canvas, executed by an artist of
Sinigaglia, but they are of no great artistic value. This hall
leads into the dining-room, where in '59 the pope dined with
his family, and here is preserved the simple table service used
on that occasion.

Two reception-rooms follow, " panelled " in red damask,
and hung with a great many pictures, some of considerable
value. In one of these rooms the conte called their attention
to an album containing two hundred photographs and signa-
tures of celebrated men belonging to the United States.

It was a very handsome book, the cover inlaid with mother-
of-pearl, with the tiara and sacred keys worked in gold on one
side, and the following inscription written on the other :

To His HOLINESS
POPE PIUS THE IXTH.,

KING OF ROME,

THE PASTOR REV. FLARO

And his parishioners of

Buttermilk Falls,

Coldspring,
And West Point,

As a token of Everlasting Fidelity.
Presented September, 1867.

1900.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 657

Among the signatures the general noticed President John-
son, Governor Hamilton, General Grant, General Franklin,
Washington Irving, and others of note.

After examining this album very minutely, they then entered
the room in which Pius IX. was born on the I3th of May,
1792, his parents being Conte Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti and
the Contessa Solazzi.

This chamber, like the preceding ones, is also hung with
red damask, and is preserved in exactly the same condition as
when, in 1857, Pius IX. slept here for the last time. Even
the sheets used on that occasion have not been removed.

In a corner of this room is a glass cabinet containing sun-
dry relics, viz., his cradle, vestments, books, images, and even
a shirt he had worn.

A little passage leads into the small chapel, which is very
simple. Over the high altar is a picture of great value be-
longing to the time of the Renaissance. This little chapel'
has received many special privileges from several popes, and
contains a few relics. It is preserved as it was when Pius IX.
last officiated at the Mass.

As they slowly retraced their steps Lady Cyril remarked :
" This is intensely interesting, for I feel as if I had been
visiting the relics of some great saint."

"And indeed you are not wrong," said the conte, "for
Pius IX. will certainly be canonized some day ; already he is
much venerated, and prayers are constantly offered up to him ;
in fact, he has performed miracles both during his life-time
and after death."

Lady Cyril smiled ; she was decidedly incredulous, but the
contessa was in earnest.

" I now want to show you a manuscript which I know will
interest you, general," said the conte, drawing some papers from
an old cabinet. "This is a petition which Pius IX. sent to
Napoleon, asking to be exempted from military service on ac-
count of his bad health, as well as from paying the indemnity ;
across this paper, as you will see, Napoleon himself has written
these words: 'II soit exempte de ce payement.' " * They ex-
amined this manuscript with great attention, for it was truly
an interesting document connecting two great historical men
so different in character and career.

"But was he ill and therefore unable to enlist?" asked
Lady Cyril.

*This document is in the possession of the Conte Bellegarde de St. Lary.
VOL. LXX. 42

658 A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. [Feb.,

"Ah! that is a curious, I might say miraculous, fact in
connection with my uncle," answered the contessa enthusiasti-
cally ; " for up to the age of twenty-six he suffered from
epileptic fits, and therefore was incapacitated for work of a
military nature. But when he was twenty-seven he officiated
for the first time at High Mass ; from that hour he never suffered
again from that terrible malady."

l( That was indeed miraculous," observed the general. "I
think he must have possessed something of the nature of saints ;
in any case he was a remarkable character, and will always be
a figure in history as the pope who defined for the church two
dogmas of great importance, besides having lived through a
great crisis resulting in the unity of Italy."

" Yes," said the contessa, " what an awful time that must

have been ! I often picture to myself that eventful day when

Pius IX., during the breach of Porta Pia, knelt prajing with

-clasped hands for the church, wielding only the shield of

faith."

They now parted, as it was getting late. It was fearfully
hot. The little town had already put on a sleepy appear-
ance. The great round clock in the piazza was chiming the
" mezzo giorno " (mid-day). The windows and shutters were
all closed and no one was about.

IV.

On their return to their villa, Lady Cyril, feeling greatly
fatigued, retired to her sanctum. It was a sweet, wee boudoir,
with arras hangings and a low window giving just a peep of
the far sea ; and here she rested on her sofa, but there was
no rest in her mind. The torment of a great fear was ever
around her, and every day increasing ; the dread of death had
fallen on her a death which would separate her from all she
loved on earth. Death! What was death? what did it mean?
To her was it not a kind of annihilation of her being and
earthly surroundings? with a reverent trust that the great God
in his mercy would pardon and save her from perdition.
Why should fears like these assail her? Was she not strong in
health, and her life guarded and preserved with loving care ?
And yet a constant dread of ill, of death, haunted her; yea,
looking back, had followed her from early morn till dewy eve,
an unknown horror scaring her, even from the day she stood
before . the altar as a wife. But now, added to this, another

1900.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 659

stronger fear crept over her the fear of falling a victim to a
revolting malady like the poor woman in the hut ! Her thoughts
were maddening her with torturing suspicions, and with it a
horrible attraction drawing her back again to that shed in
spite of her dread. For the remembrance of that poor afflicted
creature haunted her. The sad and fearful life of the poor girl
followed her. The sound of their prayers rang in her ears and
kept her tossing in feverish unrest upon her couch. Could she
do nothing for them ? Had she not promised to return ?
With a sudden impulse she started up, vainly looking out upon
the sea to catch, if possible, some of its sweet repose; but no
rest, no quiet came to her, only the one recurring thought
that she must return and visit those poor afflicted ones at
once. Her watch, a lovely gem, lay on the table ; it was three
o'clock, the hottest time of the day. The sun was fierce in its
heat and glare, like a glowing furnace. There was no time to
lose ; so, hastily dressing, she fled silently out of the villa and
made her way through the hot streets till a stray carriage
passed. Quickly hailing it, she directed the driver to the lone-
ly shed.

On reaching the hovel she descended and, telling the
coachman to wait, stood outside the door. It was half closed
and she hesitated to knock for fear of disturbing the poor
creature in her sleep ; so she walked in quietly. As she entered
the figure rose slowly from under the bundle of rags, with her
long, skinny arms extended, and moaned a low sepulchral
groan, like the cry of those who die in agonizing pain. Her
movement had displaced the covering about her mouth and
chin ! It was a frightful sight a ghastly mutilation of the
human face. Lady Cyril shuddered and involuntarily hid her
face in her hands. She heard the wretched creature sigh and
mumble to herself, but so indistinctly that she could not make
sense of anything she said. A moment after she heard her
call:

" Maria, Maria, venite presto ! " (Maria, Maria, come quickly).
The poor creature now spoke from between the bed-clothes,
for she had thrown the sheet over her face and was chatter-
ing in a low voice again to herself. There was a chair by the
bedside, and Lady Cyril sat down, trying with soothing words
to comfort her. The young girl was nowhere to be seen, and
Lady Cyril inquired where she had gone and why she had
left her?

A groan came from under the rags, and from a few inarticu-

66o A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. [Feb.,

late words she gathered that the girl had gone for medicine
and would soon return. Then the sheet was half uplifted and
the poor woman shrieked " Madonna ! Madonna santissima !
The bandage has fallen from my face ; I have lived too long,
and my face is dying long before I die yes, piece by piece
and bit by bit ! The child must not see me thus uncovered,
dear lady ! For the love of Heaven give me my bandage ; it
has fallen on the ground."

Another shriek. "Quick, quick, dear lady, before she
comes ! " There was a groan and the poor woman fell back
among her rags. Lady Cyril found the bandage with some
difficulty, and leaning over her, whispered :

" Let me tie it on for you ; you are much too weak to
fasten it."

" No, no ! " she shrieked again in a frenzy. " The bandage,
quick ! You must not touch me ; do you not know that it is a
* malattia waligna ? '

The words echoed through the hovel, and Lady Cyril trem-
bled and grew pale. The weird spell of the horrible was on
her, and horror seemed to root her to the spot. She was
arranging the tattered bed-clothes, trying again to soothe her
like a child, when the door slowly opened and the girl entered,
and, on seeing the chair occupied by the lady who had visited
them before, fell upon her knees and kissed Lady Cyril's white
hand, saying :

" How good the lady is to come again ! May the Madonna
bless and protect her ! I did not leave her long, signora only
to fetch the medicine to make her sleep, for all night long she
tosses with the fever."

Then rising, and bending over the bed, she called : " Yia,
Via, povera Yia ! Look at the kind lady and the beautiful
flowers she has brought."

But the poor sufferer was exhausted and her eyes were now
fast closed ; there was no movement, and she lay like one dead
and past waking.

"What ails her?" said Lady Cyril with alarm.

"I don't know," answered the girl mournfully; "she is often
like this. I think she sometimes dies and comes to life again."

" But how do you manage to keep her from the inspection
of the authorities, for she ought to be in a hospital?"

"Ah, lady, we never see a doctor. Sometimes there is a
visi'j- made in these parts ; but I always say that my aunt has
fever a?*nd is in bed, so they let her alone ; and I am glad, for

i goo.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 66 1

I love her like a mother. She is the only creature left me on
this earth, for they are all all in paradise."

Lady Cyril very plainly saw that the girl knew nothing of
the danger to which she was exposed; but she could not tell
her, it seemed cruel to add one straw more to her affliction.

It was getting late and the confined atmosphere made her
feel both sick and faint, so she rose to leave, giving the girl
some money as well as her address ; for one moment she bent
over the poor, suffering woman with a prayer, and then left
them with an aching heart. The open air revived her, but the
words " malatda maligna" haunted and enveloped her like a
close-clinging shroud.

When she reached home she found her husband in close

conversation with Conte de B , who had called to ask if he

could do anything for them. It was a relief to step from such
abject misery into her luxurious home, fragrant with the scent

of roses. Conte de B was a fine, handsome-looking man, a

thorough courtier in both manner and bearing. His conversation
was full of that sparkle and vivacity which the Italians possess
to such perfection.

On the entrance of Lady Cyril they were much struck with
her fatigued appearance, and the conte said in soft, sympathe-
tic tones : " Madame, I fear you have overtired yourself ; you
should have visited the ' Palace ' earlier in the day, so as to
have escaped the great heat. But I trust you were interested
in our august relative. Believe me, Pius IX. was a man wor-
thy of your interest."

" I was intensely interested," replied Lady Cyril, " and I was
so struck with the resemblance of your wife to Pius IX. Surely
I am not the only one who has noticed this likeness?"

" No indeed," said the conte, " for the resemblance is ex-
traordinary, and it consists in the similarity of the smile. Pius
IX. had an angelic smile, and my wife must have inherited it
from him. But perhaps you may think me too enthusiastic?"

" You need not fear that," put in the general, " for my wife
is always enthusiastic about something, and perhaps it is best,
instead of having no exalted feeling about anything."

" Yes, truly," added Lady Cyril, laughing, " an angelic smile
is worthy of enthusiasm."

" Well, anyhow," said the conte, winking at the general as
he rose to leave, "it is, I suppose, permissible to be enthusias-
tic about one's wife. N'est-ce-pas ? " Then, bending over Lady
Cyril's hand, he bowed his retreat.

662 A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. [Feb.,

"Cyril," said the general, now drawing his chair nearer to
her, " tell me, where have you been all this afternoon ? You
look so ill and pale, my wife."

" I have been to see that poor woman I told you about,
Algernon. She has that fearful disease, Lupus. I wonder it
has not been discovered, but cases like this often escape public
notice. I ought to report it to the authorities ; the saddest
thing of all is that the young niece is perfectly ignorant
of her danger, and her extreme love for her aunt is most
touching."

The general shuddered when he heard the nature of the
complaint and turned white. He answered almost fiercely:

" You shall not go there again, my wife. I will immediately
inquire into this case and see that the woman has proper treat-
ment, but you must promise me that you will never go there
again. You have made me feel anxious, and you know, darling,
I must be considered sometimes."

This he said half playfully yet earnestly. But she was worn
out with the fatigue and heat of a long day, and she gave no
answer.

He leant over her fondly with a whispered " God bless
you !" darkened the room, and left her for awhile to saunter
down to the sea-beach for his evening walk.

The days went slowly by and drifted into August. It was
then the height of the season at Sinigaglia. The bathing es-
tablishment was in full swing, crowded with strangers who had
come merely for the baths, and who in early October would
be scattered to the four winds, perhaps never to meet again.
But amid this gay company General De Courcy and his wife
are no longer seen ; for Lady Cyril had fallen ill, and every
evening at seven o'clock their carriage, drawn by a pair of
beautiful horses, would be seen slowly emerging from the villa
with a reclining figure in it. The figure was thickly veiled, and
the carriage rolled quietly and statelily along as if bearing some
precious burden. It seemed to avoid all public thoroughfares,
generally stopping on the sea-beach least frequented. Lady
Cyril was seriously ill. Day after day the most renowned
doctors came and visited her. She saw no one, and no one
was allowed to pass the threshold of their villa.

. . . September came; and, as usual, one evening the

1900.] A ROMANCE IN THE LAND OF Pius IX. 663

carriage rolls on quietly down to the sea-coast and stops.
There are voices from within.

"Algernon, what will you do when I am gone? I shall die
to-night ! Oh ! that you had left me to my fate ; for (here
the voice faltered), for, dearest, you may also become like
this and and all all my fault ; but I did not know dar-
ling. I may not lay my head upon your breast or kiss you as
of old. I am divided from you before I die but you you
will follow soon. Yes yes "

There was a sound of receding sea, wave following wave
into the great abyss.

The voice went on :

" I know that 1 shall die to night. (A convulsed sob broke
through the words.) Algernon, my husband ! Loved so long,
so well. This is the end the end of life. Forgive me ! For-
give me! Come soon to me; for in that far-off land I shall
miss you if "

The roar of the waves and the splash and foam of the ap-
proaching sea filled up the missing words and sense.

They took her home, for she had fainted the carriage
moving like a hearse in solemn state. They carried her to
her sanctum near the bow-window facing the distant sea.
She is enveloped in a long, white, clinging veil. The fearful
malady had done its work, and the lovely lips had gone ! She
had prayed him never to uplift that veil ; and now she lay in
the deep swoon of death. She slightly moaned and stretched
out her hand. He clasped it in his own. There was a trem-
bling of the limbs, and death had come. It was the end of
life ! Reverently he crossed her hands upon her breast. The
room grew dark, the shades of night fell round. He never
moved or left her side, for his love would guard her to the
grave. The veiled figure in its silvery white lay like sculp-
tured marble on the couch, and through the solemn hours of
the night he watched and prayed like Rizpah o'er her babes.
But on the morrow, kneeling with clasped hands, as if in
prayer, they found him also dead.

WINDS THE RIVER LIKE A SILVER THREAD.'

THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL."

BY MARY F. NIXON.

|N the upper valley of the picturesque and charm-
ing Tyrolean Alps are many villages of a roman-
tic beauty and interest, and the journey from
Venice to Vienna is filled with lovely sights as
one passes through fertile fields and winds o'er
rugged mountains. But the height of beauty and charm is
reached when the capital looms up before us Innsbruck, called
by its lovers "the Flower of the Tyrol," the city of Hofer and
liberty, faithful ally of the Hapsburgs through centuries of
strife and conflict.

Through the middle of the town winds the river like a
silver thread, the white houses clustering lovingly upon its
banks ; the many church spires point aloft to the sapphire
sky, the fields beyond radiant in their summer livery of green
and gold ; the softly wooded hills to the south teem with fir
and hemlock trees, while above them, glistening and grand, the
enduring mountains of the Solstein and Hoettinger Alps, like
snowy .sentinels, guard the passes. Over the crags and peaks

i goo.] " THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL:' 665

spring the agile, graceful chamois, and the edelweiss' snowy
clusters are watched by the "phantom maidens" who, good
Tyroleans will tell you, protect the Alpine flower from all but
those brave enough to strive after and pure enough to touch
the golden-hearted, silvery bloom, growing to perfection only
in the ice and snow.

The town is quaintly charming, and in its streets one sees
everything of interest and variety.

Here is a typical stage peasant, velvet breeches and jacket,
muslin shirt, a jaunty hat with a feather such a costume as
he wore who sang the chorus of the " Tyroleans." This man
is the genuine article, more erect, fearless, alert than his operatic
prototype, for there is something in the free life of these
honest mountaineers which gives them a perfect freedom from
self-consciousness.

A squad of soldiers in gay uniforms passes on the way to
the barracks, and a young Uhlan officer struts like a game-
cock, conscious of his fine feathers.

A wood-carver fresh from his home in the mountains is
bringing in the wares he has spent all the long winter even-
ings in making ; every line of them, every curved leaf or
tendril, is the exponent of his mentality, for himself and the best
of himself has gone into his work and he is an artist in his way.

New Innsbruck has spacious streets, good pavements, hand-
some houses, a venerable university famous for learning in
more than one century, a national museum the Ferdinan-
deum containing treasures of art and sculpture, armor, coins,
and all things peculiar to the Tyrol. Everywhere are there
signs of thrift and progress, but the old town to the antiquarian
is fascinating with its crooked, narrow, spotless streets, its
Gothic arches, arcades, frescoes, escutcheons, banners, and
curious architectural devices.

Very old is Innsbruck, its people claiming kinship with the
days when the Romans built a road from Verona all the way
to Rhetia, as the Tyrol was then called. Of these times there
are few relics, but the mediaeval aspect of the place is so
marked that one feels as if one had suddenly had Aladdin's
wonderful carpet placed beneath one's feet and been trans-
planted to the " dayes of olde."

Passing down the Hofgasse one sees the " Two Giants,"
houses given by the Archduke Sigismund to the Court Giants,
and above them looms the quaint old city tower. Still further
shines in the morning sun the house of the " Goldene Dachl "

666 " THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL:' [Feb.,

(golden roof), noted in the fair city, for like many other things
there it has a " story to it."

Historians say that the first Maximilian built it in honor
of his marriage with Bianca Sforza, the Milanese, in 1500, but
an Innsbriickian smiles at facts and tells you a different story.

" Ah no, Fraulein," he will say, with a smile ; " it was
Prince Ferdinand of the Empty Purse who built it. He was
in love with a fair princess, and his rival had endeavored to
injure him by telling of his extravagance and calling him the
* Empty Purse.' So the prince built that palace and the roof
of the chamber which was to hold his bride he made of bronze.
But not content with that, he coated it with solid gold, cost-
ing thousands of florins. When he had finished he was indeed
of an empty purse, but he won the fair maiden, and as her
dowry was great he filled the purse from it. " A full head if
an empty purse, had he not, Fraulein ? " And to this day the
Golden Roof stands as a witness to the cleverness of the
prince, and also to the quaint and charming Gothic style of
architecture with which mediaeval Innsbruck was rife.

Strolling past the oldest inn of the town, the " Goldener
Adler," where Goethe, Heine, and scores of royalties have
been entertained, we see churches almost unnumbered and the
fine Catholic Casino, a specimen of rococo at its best.

In the gay and animated Maria-Theresien Strasse, entered
through the triumphal arch built in honor of the marriage of
the Archduke Leopold with a Spanish infanta, is the superb
column of St. Anne, of red marble and supporting a statue of
the Blessed Virgin, to whom Tyroleans are especially devoted.

The Rennplatz is a large square planted with superb chestnut-
trees which, blooming, fill the air with fragrance and shower
their white petals into a snowy carpet for our feet. Here the
old tournaments were held, and about the place still lurks the
spirit of mediaeval days. It is easy to picture the scenes of
valor and of pomp.

From those quaintly latticed dormer windows blue-eyed
maidens gazed down ; from out those narrow streets brave
knights rode forth on their richly caparisoned chargers to
joust in tourney and fray for their fair lady's fame ; on that
carved balcony of the famous Hofburg (the emperor's palace)
grand archduke or mighty emperor watched the combat and
awarded to the victor the well-won crown.

But it is in the Hofkirche of old Innsbruck that the inter-
est centres. Its time-stained walls have witnessed all the vary-

1900.]

" THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL"

667

ing scenes of peace and war, and there all the panoplies of
history live before us, from the days when Clovis was emperor
of the Franks to the conflicts of French and Venetians, and
the glorious deeds of Hofer in our own century. Here the
famous Queen Christina of Sweden abjured Protestantism, and
here are buried the mightiest of the Hapsburg race.

In the centre of the edifice stands the magnificent tomb of
Maximilian, the " Last of the Knights," so interesting in his
chivalry, his bravery, and most of all, since " all the world
loves a lover," in his pathetic and constant devotion to sweet,
fragile Mary of Burgundy, to whom he was married in 1477
that same Maximilian who figures so bravely in the charming
story, "The Dove in the Eagle's Nest."

The sarcophagus is carved upon the four sides in bas reliefs
by the famous Abel of Cologne, and is of Carrara marble.
The carvings are of scenes in the life of the emperor, and
reproduce with painstaking fidelity the costumes and armor of
the period, making them of priceless value to antiquarians.

Over the tomb hovers a subdued light from windows of

COLUMN OF ST. ANNE.

rare old stained glass, and it seems to fall like a caress upon
the last resting place of the great man. Between the massive
columns which support the roof stand life-size figures, twenty-
eight colossal statues carved in stone. These are the mighty

668

" THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL''

[Feb.,

warrior ancestors of Maximilian from Clovis to Albert II.
Each knight is clad in armor, each stone arm and curved
ringers held a funeral torch, and wonderful must have been the

TOMB OF EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN IN THE HOFKIRCHE.

scene when the great man was laid to rest amidst the silent
assembly of kings and knights, their torches flaming o'er the
awe and grandeur of the scene.

To the right from Maximilian's tomb there arises a marble
staircase, leading to the Silver Chapel, so called from the statue
of the Madonna in solid silver.

Here is the tomb of Prince Ferdinand and his consort,
Phillipine, about whom lingers a tale so lovely as a hundred
times to bear repeating.

She was but a burgher maiden, the gentle, saintly Phil-

1900.]

THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL."

669

FIGURE OF ARTHUR AT MAXIMILIAN'S TOMB.

lipine Welser,'dwelling in a smoke-stained gable house in quaint
old Augsburg ; and there the young prince saw her, and seeing,
loved her with a love so mighty that for her sweet sake he
gave up crown and the favor of his imperial father.

He married Phillipine, carefully concealing from her the
knowledge of his father's displeasure, and the stern old em-
peror refused to see him, disinherited him and heaped curses
upon his head. So the prince built a fair castle, which, with
lovely chapel, mighty court-yard and splendid hall, perched
upon the mountain-side near Wilten, was a fitting nest for his
bright bird so said the royal lover. Here they lived in happi-

670 " THE FLOWER O^THE- TYROL." [Feb.,

~ ' i?^?

ness and tranquillity for twelve^ long years, and Phillipine bore
him lusty sons and fair daughters.

Some say that at length she poisoned herself in grief when
she learned of the king's displeasure, others that her mother-
in-law caused her to be assassinated, but the old chronicles
tell a different tale :

" Saying naught to the prince her husband, the Ladye
Phillipine, with her four children, hied her to the mightye
emperor within the Hofburg and sought an audience with him.
Kneeling before him in all her beautye, she caused her children
to doe him much reverence, and she herself sayd :

"'Great emperor, of whose subjects I am the humblest and
would be the most dutiful, I am that burgher mayde that is the
true and lawful wife of thy son, my deare lord. To me he is
more deare than life itself. Yet for his sake, and the sake of
these his children and mine, I will return alone unto my
father's house if only thou, O Sire, wilt receive him again into
thy favor.' Then the emperor did look in great amaze at
his fair supplicator, and in truth there had never been seen in
all the court so beauteous a dame. Hers was a pure and
snow-white brow, full sweet and steadfast eyes in the which
true love did war with pain, curved crimson lips which tremb-
ling spoke so loyally and well. So was the stern heart of that
most just and puissant ruler moved within his breast, and in
his coartliness he rose and stepped him down from off his dais.

"' Rise thee, fair daughter/ sayd he, a-taking her white hand
in his with all that kingly grace which made him ever deare un-
to his subjects' hearts, ' rise ; be satisfied. Though but a bur-
gher maid, well fitted art thou for a queen, since in very truth
thou art a queen among women. Thy beauty and thy grace
methinks might have meetly won my son ; only goodness and
wit could have kept his love these twelve long years. '"

So they were reconciled, and, as the fairy tales say, " lived
happy ever after" in stately Castle Ambras above the lovely
valley of the Inns.

A sadder though more glorious story is that of Andreas
Hofer, whose tomb in the Hofkirche is cut out of solid marble
from his native land. The bas-relief carved thereon represents
the " Oath of the Banner," and has on either side the tombs
of Speckbacher and Haspinger, Hofer's brothers-in-arms. The
inscription is: "To her sons, fallen in fighting for her freedom,
from a grateful country."

Hofer, a patriot of the purest type, was born in the Passeyr

1900.]

6/1

PHILLIPINE WELSER.

FERDINAND.

Valley in 1765, and was the son of an innkeeper, brought up
to the simple, homely, honest life of the Tyrolean peasant.
Napoleon, who thought no more of presenting a country to an
ally than one would of giving sweets to a child, wrested the
Tyrol from Austria and gave it to Bavaria.

Devoted to the Hapsburgs, and always loyal to Austria, the
Tyroleans rose to a man, and Hofer vowed never to shave his
beard until they should be free from the yoke of Bavaria. This
gained for him from the Italians the nickname of General Barbone.

In appearance the hero was a typical Tyrolean ; athletic,
vigorous, broad-shouldered, well-knit, with black eyes, large
and brilliant, and an expression of commanding earnestness.
Secretly made commander-in-chief by the Archduke John,
Hofer gathered together a large force, accepting all who came
to him, saying, " We have no traitors in my country!"

The secret of the projected revolt was well kept, and until
April II, 1809, no one dreamed that a rising was imminent.
Then, " having all confessed themselves and communicated, the
Sandyland lord, with forty-five hundred men, attacked the
Bavarians and drove them to rout," so says the chronicler.
Next day the army captured Innsbruck and forced the Bava-
rian troops to capitulate ; by the end of April the Tyrol was
free, but then followed years of conflict.

Enslaved again, Hofer again freed it, aided always by his
two devoted friends, Speckbacher, called " The Fire-Devil," and
the Capuchin priest Haspinger.

672 " THE FLOWER OF THE TYROL:' [Feb.,

Alas ! for the hopes of the brave people, there was naught
but disappointment. Austria, the country for which they
fought, forgot them, and so forgot her honor. Forced by
Napoleon again to yield, she made no effort to keep the Tyrol,
and when Hofer saw her army leave Innsbruck he swore to
conquer or die !

He hid in the recesses of the mountains, sending messages
to his compatriots all over the land, signing them, "Andreas
Hofer, from where I am," and the replies were addressed :
" Andreas Hofer, wherever he is." His people rallied around
him. One victory after another was theirs, and with the cry,
" Our God and our country!" they fairly flung themselves up-
on the enemy, sweeping all before them.

A historian thus tells the story of the final battle: "At
five in the morning Haspinger celebrated the Mass upon the
battle-field before the assembled army. Then the priest be-
came captain, sprang into the saddle, drew his sword, and pre-
cipitated himself upon the enemy's right flank, while Speck-
bacher threw himself on the left. Andreas Hofer led the
attack in the centre and marched straight to Innsbriick."

In the battle-field he was transfigured ; the mild expression
changed to a terrible one. He looked grand on his panting
steed, his long beard floating in the wind, as he cried, " Onward !
For your country and your emperor! God protect the right!"

Again was the great general successful, entering the town
on the Feast of the Assumption.

" Do not shout, but pray," said Hofer, as he passed into
the church of the Franciscans, when the delighted people would
have given him a triumphal entry ; and to the nobles he said :
" By my beard, and by Saint George, the saviour of my coun-
try was God himself ! "

As military dictator he ruled ably, and thought only of the
good of the people and loyalty to the emperor, never of him-
self ; but he was betrayed to the French by a traitor and
taken to Mantua to be shot in 1810.

" Farewell, most despicable world!" he said upon the morn-
ing of his execution. " For a brave man death is of so small
account that in leaving you I have not one tear of regret ! "
He was buried in Italian soil, but fifteen years later his re-
mains were removed to Innsbruck. There he rests: a patriot,
a soldier, a hero, a Christian ; his name a by-word for loyalty
to those faithful peasants who throng the streets of quaint,
charming, delightful Innsbruck, the " Flower of the Tyrol."

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. 673

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL

ASPECT.

BY J. DAVID ENRIGHT, A.M., LL.B.
" Ubi jus, ibi est remedium"

ARRIAGE is an institution which purifies society,
whether we accept the dogma of the Roman
Catholic Church, which declares matrimony to
be a sacrament, and, as such, of divine institu-
tion, dissoluble by God alone, or as a civil con-
tract in which a man and woman agree to discharge towards
each other the duties incident to that relation. In either case
it is to intelligent beings, by the universality of its sacredness,
an institution which preserves the sanctity of the home and
the purity of society. Even the Barbarian of the most un-
couth environments sanctified the marriage by protecting it
from violation. Pagan Rome for five hundred years from its
foundation so respected this sacred relation that he who was
found guilty of its desecration paid the penalty of his crime
by the sacrifice of his life. From the reign of Romulus to
that of Spurius Carvilius Ruga it was considere'd a perma-
nent union, which was binding until its dissolution by the death
of one of the contracting parties. Thus Rome, unchristian as
it was during that period, furnishes a most worthy example to
the more enlightened Christian nations of to-day by its refusal
to stain the pages of its primeval history with the record of a
single divorce.

Naturally, with the degradation of the standard of Roman
morality in the declining days of the Roman Empire, disap-
peared the " stately and dignified Roman matron," and with
her vanished for a time the sanctity of the marriage vow.
During this latter period divorce was granted first for adultery,
but gradually more insignificant causes became sufficient ground
for dissolution, until the adoption of the Justinian Code, which
prescribed seventeen causes which, in the minds of the Roman
people, justified the dissolution of the marriage relation.

The salutary influence of Christianity, however, as it ele-
vated the customs and morals of the Roman people, gradually

VOL. LXX. 43

674 MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. [Feb.,

extirpated the tendency toward divorce, until Christianized
Rome adhered to the canons of the Melevitian Council, which
declared that matrimony was an institution of God, and as
such could not be dissolved by man. And so wherever the
word of Christianity has been accepted, whether among the
nations of the west or the tribes of the Orient, it has had a
wonderful influence in shaping the policy of government in the
regulation of this branch of domestic relations.

HISTORIC INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH.

In the countries of Europe where the ecclesiastical courts
were vested with jurisdiction over marital relations, and whose
decisions were final and conclusive, the permanency of the mar-
riage status was always sustained, even in the face of monar-
chical opposition, and hence for centuries, in those realms, an
absolute divorce for a cause after marriage was never decreed.
These courts were the tribunals of the Roman Catholic Church,
as well as of the state ; established for the purpose of adminis-
tering the ecclesiastical and canon law, presided over by the
clergy of that church, who were bound to accept as true the
dogmas of the Catholic Church, and to render decisions which
would be consistent with the declaration that marriage was a
sacrament. In the history of England are recorded many
divorces which were granted by the ecclesiastical courts, and
the commentators of that history, without even a superficial
examination 'of the ecclesiastical court reports, have concluded
that the church had violated or disregarded its own dogmas of
sacramental marriage, as promulgated by St. Augustine, since
the ecclesiastical courts, as quasi-agents of the church, had
dissolved the union which the church pronounced indissoluble.
But those who have misinterpreted the decrees of the courts
have failed, either through the promptings of a shallow mind
or through a supine ignorance of propositions accepted by
theologians of all creeds, to distinguish the divorce a vinculo
from the divorce ab initio and the divorce a mensa et thoro. A
careful review of the decisions and decrees of those courts will
readily reveal, to any one versed in the sciences of law or
theology, that the courts have intervened and decreed a disso-
lution only when, through canonical or legal disabilities, the
parties dissolved had never, in fact or law, entered the marriage
relation. Of course the power to grant the limited divorce, or
the divorce a mensa et thoro, was within the jurisdiction of the
ecclesiastical courts, and in truth that was the principal work

1900.] MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. 675

of those courts ; but the power to grant an absolute divorce,
as we know that present evil, was reserved to the general Par-
liament. And it is still the prerogative of that body to grant
absolute divorces, although by the English Divorce Act of
1857-58 the courts of England were vested with the same
power.

IN THE AMERICAN COURTS.

The colonies of America repudiated the right of the eccle-
siastical court to administer ecclesiastical, canon, civil, or com-
mon law, and hence those courts were never established in
this country, nor was their peculiar jurisdiction over marital
affairs ever wholly vested in any one court of the colonies;
and for this reason the courts of America may be said to
possess no common law jurisdiction over the subject of di-
vorce.

In the colony of New York the courts had no jurisdiction
over divorce until the enactment of the divorce regulations of
1787, which gave to the Chancery courts the power to enter-
tain petitions for the dissolution of marriage, and to issue de-
crees therein, when either party to the marriage was guilty of
the offence name^i in the statute. Prior to the passage of that
law, as was the custom in the other colonies, a wronged hus-
band or wife could receive redress by way of dissolution only
by a petition to the colonial governor or legislature. In the
year i8f3 the State legislature extended still further the
powers of the Chancery courts by authorizing them to grant
the divorce a mensa et thoro for cruel and inhuman treat-
ment.

The original colonies being free and independent of each
other, bound together in a defensive confederation, extended
to their several courts or legislative bodies the right to govern
the questions relating to marriage and divorce ; and upon en-
tering the perpetual union of the States, the component parts
of that union, as the successors of the colonies, reserved the
same rights in that respect that each had enjoyed as an inde-
pendent colony. The Constitution the organic law of the
United States while it does not specifically give to the States
the right to govern the domestic relations of their citizens,
does so by implication, since it does not delegate that power
to the general government. For this reason the right to regu-
late the marriage and divorce, since it is neither an express
power reserved to the general government, nor a power neces-

6/6 MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. [Feb.,

sary and proper to enforce the other powers which are so
delegated, still remains the right of the individual States.

While we may justly praise the ingenuity of the minds from
which was evolved the ideas engrafted into our Constitution,
and wonder at the magnanimous intellects that foresaw the
demands of future centuries, yet in our exultation we must
pause to regret that the same noble and almost inspired
minds could not have seen the danger and folly of vesting in
the several States the power of regulating the delicate ques-
tion of divorce. Some restriction, indeed, which would have
insured uniformity in our divorce laws, should have been
placed upon the States, and thus have saved the nation from
the baneful consequences made possible by such an omission.
The sacred trust of preserving the sanctity of the marriage
status, of all others which the organic law has imposed upon
the individual States, has been the most highly abused ; each
State, as if vieing with its sister State to desecrate the matri-
monial vow, enacting divorce laws by which the fickle husband
or wife may the more easily repudiate, with the sanction of
the law, the duties, obligations, and responsibilities of a holy
union. As a consequence the several divorce laws of America,
and the procedure under them, are in such*a confused and
chaotic state that marriage in this country seems to have a
place only in the category of legal fictions, and the sacrament,
institution, civil contract, or whatever you will, which was in-
tended to purify, is now an avenue to vice and corruption.

PRACTICES OF VARIOUS STATES.

The State of South Carolina alone has steadfastly refused
to abuse the jurisdiction over matrimonial matters vested in it
by the general government, and let it be said to the credit of
that commonwealth, that however great may have been the
faults of its impulsive legislators in the years gone by, it has
never permitted either its courts or its legislative body to
sully the pages of its history by the granting of divorce. This
is the one State where the Christian tendency has been to
eradicate ephemeral marriage unions, and to impress upon the
legislator the solemnity of the injunction, " Whom God has
joined, let no man put asunder."

The courts of New York State have never granted a divorce
a vinculo upon any ground other than adultery, since in this
State that is the statutory cause. A few other States in the
Union -have enacted substantially the same statute that regu-

i goo.] MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. 677

lates divorce in New York, and some of these States have
further followed New York in prohibiting, for any cause, the
legislative divorce. In the State of Connecticut, prior to the
year 1880, divorces were granted for the most trivial causes;
a case being found in the reports of that State in which, in
an exhaustive opinion upon the law and facts, the court at-
tempts to justify a divorce of husband and wife upon the
ground that the husband has violated the Sabbath by the
purchase of a bootjack ! The indolent and mild-mannered
citizens of the Everglade State believe ill-temper to be a suffi-
cient and justifiable cause for breaking the bonds of wedlock ;
but the Green Mountain legislators are inclined to differ some-
what from their brethren in Florida, and therefore go a step
beyond, making " intolerable severity " the proper cause, which
of course affords to the learned judges of the latter State an
opportunity to make extended and perhaps vacant distinctions
between severity which is tolerable and that which is intoler-
able. So addicted are the people of the State of California to
the extracts of its own fruits, that the legislators of that State
have made intemperance a statutory cause. The Kentucky
colonel, however, is not inclined to agree to the justice of the
law that makes him lose his wife because he has imbibed free-
ly on one or two occasions, and hence he has instructed the
legislators of his State to modify the California statute and to
divorce a married person when that individual is proven an
habitual drunkard.

We are indebted to the courts of some of our Western
States for having furnished to us, in their curious opinions in
divorce proceedings, entertaining reading for our idle hours.
It has pleased the judicial mind of one of our Western divorce
judges to decree, in solemn words, that the wife should be
freed from the cruel and inhuman consort who would refuse to
submit his nails to the care of a chiropodist. And another
judge, equilly solicitous for the rights of the people within his
jurisdiction, has held that the husband should be divorced from
the ferocious wife who, on the day after marriage, would bring
the heel of her shoe in violent contact with the eyes of her
better half. Let those who smoke the filthy weed fly far
from the Western State whose courts have decreed that a re-
fusal of the husband to refrain from this habit justifies a court
of equity in dissolving the marriage union. So loose and
farcical are the laws of the Dakotas and Oklahoma, that we
may presume that a divorce will be granted in either of those

678 MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. [Feb.,

places for any imaginary or fictitious cause, provided the pe-
titioner can produce the necessary wherewithal to satisfy the
fees of the obliging attorney.

RELATIONS OF VARIOUS STATE COURTS TO EACH OTHER.

Did not the several States of the Union go beyond their
territorial limits and, in contravention of the provisions of the
fundamental law, attempt to adjudge the status of individuals
over whom they have no jurisdiction, this conflict of laws,
except in its moral consequences, might be regarded simply as
the exposition of the diversity of judicial opinion. But, un-
fortunately, in some cases one State cannot without difficulty
grant a decree of divorce without disturbing the status of an
individual of another State.

The organic law of the United States provided that " full
faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public acts,
records, and judicial proceedings of every other State," and many
high legal authorities, not the least of which is the Supreme
Court of Rhode Island, have attempted to pervert the intent
of that clause so as to include within its scope those decrees
of divorce rendered by courts that, in the first instance, had
not obtained jurisdiction of the parties involved. But the
weight of authority, including the highest court of the United
States, holds, with reason and common sense, that that clause
of the Constitution, while it was calculated to affect a comity
of the States, does not compel the resident of New York,
Missouri, or any other State to recognize or respect the judi-
cial proceeding of any other State unless it is rendered by a
court having jurisdiction.

The Court of Appeals of New York State speaks with
much emphasis upon that point, holding that "while every
State may have the privilege of determining for itself upon
what grounds a divorce may be granted, of patties domiciled
within its jurisdictional limits, and while it may be permitted
to prescribe the legal procedure to that end, it cannot go be-
yond the limits of its jurisdiction and affect the status of a
party without service of process upon him within the territorial
limits of the State granting the divorce."

THE DIVORCES OF DIFFERENT STATES.

It is further a principle of justice, not however recognized
in all of our States, that no man shall be bound by a judg-
ment rendered against him, unless he be given an opportunity

1 900.] MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. 679

to be heard ; and any court, therefore, which grants a decree
of divorce without first having acquired jurisdiction of the
parties, issues a decree which beyond the limits of that State
is null, void, and of no virtue, whatever may be its effect ac-
cording to the laws of the commonwealth whence it was issued ;
and the constitutional provision as to the respect of judg-
ments has no application. Neither can the jurisdiction be
based upon the fact that the party instituting the divorce pro-
ceeding is domiciled within the limits of the State rendering
the judgment, but, on the contrary, the party proceeded against
must also be within the jurisdiction of the court, or must be
served with process within the territorial limits of the State
whose court grants the decree. These general propositions of
law, which embody the gist of the decisions of the courts of
New York and the decrees of the United States Supreme
Court, are but the re-enactment of the canons of 1603, which
declared that " no man could be cited out of his diocese."

Many of those, therefore, who seek foreign divorces, relying
upon the proposition of full faith and credit, etc., often return
to their native States freed from the obligations of marriage
in the State where the divorce is granted, but still encum-
bered with a consort in their own commonwealths ; and if one
of such individuals shall remarry in his own State he is guilty
of bigamy, and the offspring of such a subsequent union is ille-
gitimate. Especially is this true of those who leave their own
domiciles and fly to other States for the express purpose of
obtaining a divorce, and with no other object in mind ; for even
though such individuals remain long enough in those States to
obtain a residence therein, such a residence is not bona fide
and does not confer jurisdiction even over such a person. If,
however, a person shall acquire a domicile in a foreign State
and obtains a divorce in that State even without giving notice
to the defendant, and then enters a second marriage within
the State where the decree of divorce was granted, that mar-
riage being valid where it was solemnized is valid in every
other State, according to the principle of law universally ac-
cepted, that a contract valid where performed is valid every-
where, excepting, of course, an agreement contrary to public
policy or public morals. To illustrate: A. and B. are re-
spectively husband and wife residing in the State of New
York. A. goes to the State of Oregon, acquires a residence
there, and obtains a divorce, while B. remains in New York
State and is not served with a summons in the action, or has

68o MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. [Feb.,

not voluntarily submitted herself to the jurisdiction of the
Oregon courts. The courts of the State of New York are not
bound by the Constitution of the United States to recognize
the decree, because it was granted without jurisdiction. If,
therefore, A. returns to New York and marries in that State,
he is guilty of bigamy ; but if he marries in the State of Ore-
gon, where the courts claimed sufficient jurisdiction to divorce,
the marriage, according to the laws of that State, is valid, and
as such (it being regarded as a contract) the courts of New
York must recognize it. But what of the status of B. ? She
has remained continually under the jurisdiction of the laws of
New York State and is bound only by the regulations of that
State. New York does not recognize the Oregon divorce
granted to A., and hence B. remains the wife of A. ; and if
she marries again in New York, she too is guilty of bigamy.
To be free to marry she must await patiently the death of A.,
or go to Oregon or some other State which recognizers Ore-
gon's divorce, and there enter the contract of marriage. Hence
it is possible under our conflicting divorce laws for a man to
have two legally wedded wives in the State of New York
without ever having been legally divorced from either of them
according to the laws of that State.

PECULIAR COMPLICATIONS ARISING.

Many other peculiar situations arise by reason of this con-
flict of laws, and perhaps our readers may be indulgent if we
recite a few, with the assurance, however, that this legal lore
is given to them without the expectation of our usual fee.
Take the case of the same husband and wife. They are both
domiciled in the State of Louisiana, which recognizes the com-
mon law union of husband and wife. By the laws of that
State the wife's domicile is the same as that of the husband,
even though each resides in a separate State. A., the hus-
band, goes to the State of Massachusetts and obtains a divorce
in that State, while B. remains in Louisiana. The latter State
would recognize the divorce, although the Massachusetts court
never obtained jurisdiction over B.

Again, A. and B. were married in the State of New York,
but subsequently became residents of the State of Rhode
Island. A. returns to New York and obtains a divorce by the
service of summons upon B. by publication, as prescribed by
the New York statute. Such a divorce will be recognized by
the State of Rhode Island, for the courts of that State have

1900.] MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN THEIR LEGAL ASPECT. 68 1

held that a divorce granted by the courts of a State having
jurisdiction of the petitioning party is valid in all States. Yet
that same divorce would not be respected in the common-
wealth of Massachusetts.

We will suppose another case. A. and B. are domiciled
within the State of New York. A. institutes a divorce pro-
ceeding in that State against B., who is temporarily absent
from that State, and service of process is made by publica-
tion ; a divorce granted to A. under those circumstances is
valid and will be recognized in every State of the Union, for
the reason that both parties being residents of, and domiciled
in the State of New York, are subject to its regulations.

Doubtless, many individuals who immigrate to Western
States and obtain divorces, often return to their native States
and enter new alliances without incurring the penalty of the
law. But that fact neither legalizes the subsequent marriage
nor legitimizes the offspring. The children of such a marriage
must rely for a place in respectable society upon the charity
of the law, which presumes every one legitimate until the con-
trary is proven^.

Were the courts of any one State to prosecute all those
within its dominion who have become bigamists through con-
flicting divorce laws, little time could be given to the trial of
cases involving other crimes against person or property. So
numerous are bigamous marriages that the courts cannot keep
pace, and hence things have come to such a pass that the
courts must appeal for assistance to the legislative branch of
the general government.

Within the past ten years several attempts have been made
at Washington to bring order out of the chaos produced by
our divorce laws, but as yet those efforts have been unfruitful.
During the last session of Congress a resolution was offered in
the House of Representatives advising the amendment of the
Federal Constitution so as to place the regulation of divorce
within the power of Congress ; but, like many other resolutions
of more or less importance, it was pocketed in the pigeon-
hole of some committee desk. The chief objection to placing
in the power of Congress the regulation of divorce lies in this,
that such a change would require an amendment to the Con-
stitution of the United States, which to the ultra-conservative
class of American people is little less than crime. Of course
it is true that it had always been the policy of the United
States to preserve its Constitution intact except when it is con-

682 FORGIVEN. [Feb.,

clusively proven that the progression of time and the happen-
ing of new events demand that it be changed. The question
of State rights would also be the basic idea of many objec-
tions to such an amendment for the solution of the divorce
problem, because the individual States, while they adhere to
the idea of a perfect union of the States, are unwilling to re-
linquish to the centralized government any of the rights or
powers which they have continually and unreservedly possessed.
But whatever may be the objections, the time has come when
the legislators at Washington must meet and answer them, for
public policy and public morals demand that there be uniform-
ity at least in the divorce procedure, to the end that a
decree of divorce, like a contract of marriage, will be recog-
nized or repudiated alike in all our States.

Some have advanced as a solution of the divorce problem
that Congress alone be given the power to grant a divorce ;
but such would hardly be the proper remedy, for Congress
would then be assuming the judicial functions of our courts of
justice. Further, it has been observed that our legislative
bodies are less free from corruption than our courts, and
hence divorce, if placed within the gift of Congress, might be-
come a political spoil which could be distributed to repay the
services of political parasites. Whatever may be the remedy,
public policy demands it, even though it be necessary to ex-
periment in order to reach the one that is proper.

Ittp beart was bcai>p witb sadness,

iftp soul was burdened witb sin :
In seareb of a gleam of gladness

I wandered a cburcb witbin.
fls ouer its silent portal

I passed for a contrite praper,
Cbe loue of tbe great immortal

Accorded me welcome tbere :
for down from tbe sbadowed cbancel,

fllong tbe deserted aisle, -

Iftp sorrow and sin to cancel

spirit to reconcile ;

i goo.] FORGIVEN. 683

6'er even tup lips bad striven

Co murmur mp sours regret,
Resounded a Voiee: 4 'forgiven!

forgiven !-f orget ! forget ! "

I sank to mp knees in wonder,

find wept in adoring awe :
for heaven seemed rent asunder,

Cbo' onlp tbe angels saw.
Cbe sin of mp soul was lifted,

mp burden of sorrow fled ;
fls over tbe silence drifted

CDe tvords the unseen One said.
Cbep echoed in human bearing,

ike notes of a song divine :
fls tender as tvords endearing,

As strong as immortal tvine*
" flrise," said tbe Spirit, "sbriven

from evil's eternal debt
forgiven, soul, forgiven !

forgiven ! forget ! forget ! "

Voice of tbe bolp portal !

message of ove Divine !
Chine ecboes vibrate immortal

In manp a soul tvitb mine,
for sorroiv is life's tivin=brotber,

jUnd sin is tbe buman snare ;
Jlnd never a laugb sbail smotber

Cbe sob of Creation's praper*
from morning till nigbt it rises,

from nigbt till tbe datvn it rings,
In manp and varied guises,

On legion and divers wings.
Pet ever tbe Voice from heaven

Bids peace to sincere regret-
44 forgiven, souls, forgiven!

forgiven !-f orget ! forget ! "

MINNIE GILMORE.

684 fffE HUNT BALL. [Feb.,

THE HUNT BALL.

BY DOROTHY GRESHAM.

EBRUARY has come upon us before the last
ring of the Christmas rejoicings has died away.
Splashing showers, soft roads, crocus and snow-
drops in the lawns peeping roguishly through the
grass, a bright, fresh, awakening feeling in the
air tell unmistakably that beautiful Spring is stealing over the
mountains.

Invitations have been sent forth for the annual ball, dear
to the souls of all fox-hunting men, maids, and matrons, and
excitement and anticipation echo from one country house to
the other for miles around.

Kitty is jubilant, for all the Cruskeen and Dungar clans
gather for the fun, while I am on the tiptoe of expectation,
for it is my first real view of the County. We have been for
a long tramp. Kevin's sister and younger brother, three Net-
terville boys older than Kitty, with four or five cousins, have
spent the day among the heather on the mountains and have
only now returned for dinner. What walkers they are, and
oh ! how thankful I am that, after all Kitty's coaching, I am
now no mean, pedestrian. We have covered miles of stiff
climbing, chatting, teasing, and laughing along the road with
a joyousness of heart and lightness of foot that makes naught
of hills and hollows, proving the truth of old Will's ditty:

" Jog on, jog on the footpath way, and merrily bend the stile a ;
Your merry heart goes all the way, your sad tires in a mile a."

The hours are too short for all we have to accomplish be-
fore setting forth to the dance, and poor Nell has a lively
time gathering her people by eight o'clock. I am in full re-
galia and knocking at Nell's door for inspection when I come
on Kevin, who turns me round for a critical view, pronouncing
me at length " stunning."

He leads me in solemn state to Nell, and with a deep obei-
sance says loftily : " Democracy, my lady, versus Aristocracy.
Our American sister is a peeress in her own right by reason of

i goo.] THE HUNT BALL. 685

her matchless beauty and classic taste." I bend low to give
weight to this courtly speech, and rising slowly and with much
dignity refer the praises of the gallant Sir Knight to my fair
cousin, who is indeed magnificent in her diamonds and a mas-
terpiece of Worth's. Down the stairs we laughingly go, Kevin
and Nell a striking pair.

One by one the party gather in the drawing-room, the
younger ones full of mischief. Kevin stows us away in every
conceivable vehicle, and we finally get off for our long drive
to the county town as the best central point of rendezvous.
The fun begins from the moment we leave Dungar there is
an utter absence of stiffness even in gala attire; every one's
sole thought seems to be to get the most amusement he can
out of this affair. It comes but once a year.

It must be ten o'clock when we reach the Court-house,
the grand jury room being the ball-room. My only remem-
brance of the next ten minutes is a rush up stone stairways,
through winding corridors, the sound of distant music, the
opening of doors into a brilliantly lighted room all flowers,
plants, and evergreens, our reception, introductions broadcast,
warm greetings from old friends, pleasant welcomes from new,
and I am launched on an Irish ball-room, to revel with the
County. The lively old galop of " John Peel " with his hounds
in the morning crashes forth, and merry Fergus Netterville,
Kitty's brother, and I go off with a dash among the dancers.
I forget the long walk of the morning in the music, the joy-
ousness of my boyish companion, and I dance with the enjoy-
ment of our old days at home, when I was a small girl gyrating
with the boys. I think of mother and them all, and how they
would glory in this festive scene.

As we steer our course through the dancers Fergus keeps
up a running fire of good-natured, ridiculous remarks on every
one that keeps me laughing all the time, fairly taking my breath
away. We see Aunt Eva arriving in the doorway and charge
down on her. Kitty is beside her in her pure girlish loveliness.
The old familiar fox-hunting galop sets her eyes dancing, her
feet restless for the fray.

As I speak to Aunt Eva Kitty smiles approvingly, bids me
wait a moment, and Fergus and she are off the happiest, mer-
riest, handsomest pair on the floor.

Aunt Eva's eyes follow them lovingly but sadly, I think, to
my surprise. "Now they are happy," she says; "they would
think it bliss if les convenances said they might go on so to-

686 THE HUNT BALL. [Feb.,

gether for every dance on the programme "; adding, with a
far-off look, "where will they be this night twelve-month?"

I am about to ask her what she means when she is sur-
rounded by some matrons who have not yet seen her, many cava-
liers, and one or two red-coated warriors, who denounce her
for being so late ; evidently more nephews by adoption, for she
is Aunt Eva to every one except some newcomer whom they
bring to her, warning her not to lose her heart to the bashful
stranger, for her old friends have the first right. She is at
once the centre of an admiring group, and has a way of mak-
ing them all feel as if each were the favored one as the ball
of conversation is lightly tossed from one to the other.

I look down the long, pleasant room, and on the dancers
who are waltzing to the strains of the " Mysotis "; the scene
is so different to what I have been accustomed to all my life.
In New York and elsewhere the people have such a conven-
tional en evidence sort of air, as if ball-going, was the proper
thing to do, but that dress and fashion were the principal
thought. Here, while beauty and costume equal if not sur-
pass that I had seen abroad, the one idea of old and young
seems whole-souled, honest, refined, genuine amusement.

As I gaze ponderingly, the .music dies away and a cornet
solo softly takes up the refrain, the dancers breaking forth
into song as they waltz. Rising and falling the chorus rings
out : " Oh, love, will you never," etc. There is something so
homelike, as of a large family gathering, in it all that even I
am joining in the melody before I realize it. The whole band
crashes in as the chorus ceases, to be taken up later on when
the refrain is again introduced at the end of the waltz.

It is the same with " Dream Faces," " Ehren on the Rhine,"
" Going to Market," and the rest. Dance after dance I go
through with every known or freshly-known acquaintance, from
Uncle Desmond and Kevin, who are in their glory, downward.
Squire and warrior, all sorts and conditions of men, but with
the same light-hearted, delightful spirit running all through.

My spirits are at their highest point, and from old experi-
ence I ought to take warning and restrain myself ; but when
did one lesson ever teach me aught, but prelude another ? I
see old Mrs. Bayley, who always amuses me, and I sweep
down on her. She lives eight miles from Dungar, and I never
see as much of her as I should desire. Her language is pon-
derously Macaulayish ; she would faint, I know, were she to
lapse into that slipshod English that passes muster " nowadays,"

1900.] THE HUNT BALL. 687

she says, " as slang." She has never been known to use a
simple word where a trisyllabic or more could not be em-
ployed some way or another.

Kevin fairly dances when they meet, for the loftier she
rises the more he descends, and her horror consequently on
the degradation of modern university men is appalling.

Only last week, driving past Shanbally, we saw Mrs.
Bayley calling on her congenial friend, Mrs. Debsborough, and
Kevin chucklingly declared that " now there would be great
English for the next two hours." She receives me now with
" This is a night big with the fate of Dolly and Dungar," and
forthwith launches into her usual rounded periods. I respond
in her own style to-night, and she seems to think I have lost
my normal, dense, dull unresponsiveness. We are charmed
with each other, to judge by our laughter. In the midst of
our Athenian flow of classics Nell comes hurriedly towards us
to say that Kevin has met some officers over from the garri-
son old college friends who are going to Dungar for the
night, and will I drive back with Aunt Eva, as the carriages
are all packed? adding: " I cannot find her anywhere, and we
are leaving soon, so you had better seek her at once."

I promise, but before she has disappeared have forgotten
all about it. My tongue wags away full of nonsense until
suddenly I realize the place is fast thinning, and looking down
the room for uncle or Aunt Eva, see they are nowhere visible.
I draw Mrs. Bayley 's attention to the fact, and we rise to find
them. Through the corridors, now crowded with home-going
parties, in the dressing-room, everywhere, we hunt for Aunt
Eva, but without avail. Those we ask have all declared she
has not left, she was seen a moment before ; we follow the
chase to the exact spot where the last person saw her, but
not there, not there, is our success everywhere. It is very
late, or rather early, for the new day is now more than an
infant, and I begin to get anxious. Mrs. Bayley assures me
all will be satisfactory ; that she will send a message by
one of her men to Con, who is in the town or round the
Court-house, that I am going on with her, and that he is to
call for me on their way home. I am rather dubious about
this plan, but there seems nothing else to do so I do it.

My spirits rise as we drive away perfectly satisfied tl^at I
am on the road home, and the Cruskeen carriage will catch up
to us before we have driven a few miles. We reach Scarteen
in the soft gray of the spring morning, and not yet have Con's

688 THE HUNT BALL. [Feb.,

horses overtaken us. I carry a new-conceived resolution into
execution ; namely, that as I have given Mrs. Bayley more
than, enough trouble already, I propose staying with Nancy
Carthy at the lodge, and so save her waiting up any longer for
me ; besides, I will be ready to jump in the moment Aunt Eva
drives to the gates.

Mrs. Bayley reluctantly consents, and knocks on the window
to arouse drowsy Pat on the box. He hears at last as she
calls, "Alight, Pat; alight." He fumbles all over his pockets,
as if searching for something ; after a moment, failing to find
what he wants, he answers from his perch, bending down :
" Begor, ma'am, I haven't one ! " in a disappointed tone.

Mrs. Bayley is wrathful, while I turn my head aside to hide
my face as she exclaims, "Alight, Pat ; alight. 'I do not want a
match," with scorn. " Open the carriage door." Pat is on the
ground handing me out in a second with a humble apology
but I am convinced he knows well enough, but having .par-
taken more than was good for him in town, is off his guard,
and the native joking spirit comes to the surface. I leave
Mrs. Bayley with much gratitude for her great kindness of
heart, and she drives up the avenue with a parting, " We'll
meet at Philippi."

I find old Nancy asleep over the fire, waiting up to lock
the gates, and she receives me with amazement and rapture.
My strange costume frightens the dear old soul, and she puts
me in her best chair beside the fire, praising God all the time
for having me out this blessed night. I send Nancy to bed,
and wait and wait until the sun comes on golden bars through
the cottage windows, and then, and then only, I ;know I am
indeed " the girl they left behind them." I solve problem
after problem to find out what is best for me to do to get home,
and then I decide.

" Nancy, will you give me the donkey. I must get back
to Dungar before breakfast ; they will be very anxious when
they find Mrs. Desmond has not brought me. I would walk
but for my dress and slippers."

She looks at me as if she were still dreaming, or she thinks
that my sleepless night had affected my brain : my strange
costume, white face, tumbled hair, a woe-begone object alto-
gether ; and to think of me starting forth in such gear on a
donkey car seems to the old woman pure insanity.

I carry my point, however. Nancy ties her Sunday shawl
round -me, a white scarf hides my tousled locks, and I step

1900.] THE HUNT BALL. 689

into Nancy's little gig, take the rope reins, arm myself with a
blackthorn, and set forward on my mad drive. It is charm-
ing, the jog-trot of the small steed is amusing, the "wild
freshness of morning " exhilarating, the jiggle joggle I try to
think exciting, and like the Queen, when she had her first
drive on Larry Doolan's outsider, "I like the joulting of this
Irish jaunting-car." For a mile or more we get along well,
rather slowly, to be sure, but then peacefully ; but when I turn
off a new road unknown to my charge, then comes the tug of
war. The donkey sniffs the air cautiously, slackens speed,
shows disapproval, puts down his head and comes to a stand-
still. I coax, entreat, command, in vain ; unfurl the black-
thorn, belabor him, but the beast is adamant. I groan and see
I must dismount if I intend ever to leave this spot. This is a
contingency I have not expected ; my lace gown and white
slippers are not exactly the walking garments one would chose
for a February morning ; however, there is nothing else to do.
My shoes embedded in the mud, my train tucked under
my arm, the reins in one hand, the stick in the other,
I run along beside the animal, raining blows on his back at
every step. As long as I keep up this little dance things
go well, but when I think I have done my duty and
step into the chariot with a satisfied air, the scene changes.
With bent head, and hurt, weary air the injured beast re-
sumes his first position stolid, stupid inertia ; while I, though
all my small stock of patience has vanished with the morn-
ing mists, am too exhausted to resume my first attitude
wild activity so philosophically resign myself. Hour after
hour we crawl homewards, step by step, and I am too sleepy,
worn, and hungry to care.

We have been on the road since six this morning, and the
Angelus rings across the woods when I steal in the back avenue
of Dungar. Slowly and woefully I wend my way, and as misfor-
tune would have it, there on the steps are Aunt Eva, Kevin,
and Kitty in animated conversation. Are they looking for
me ? I speculate. They see me and rush forward, wondering,
shocked, horrified. Explanations follow. Aunt Eva never got
the message till this morning. Con heard it through some of
the men, and she came over at once to see how I had got
home.

I am cross, seeing they are all dying to laugh at the specta-
cle I present. Nell comes hurrying to carry me off to a bath,
breakfast, and bed. She is the only one who has politeness

VOJ-. LXX. 44

690 A WYOMING SUNDOWN. [Feb.,

enough not to smile at my costume. Kevin professes
profound anxiety and hastens my exit. I know why. He
wants to roar, and thinks he can never get me away fast
enough. As Nell leads me to my room I catch a peep from
a landing on the trio below. Kevin and Aunt Eva's eyes
meet and they can stand it no longer. They laugh in a
smothered, shamefaced manner; but Kitty throws all con-
sideration and delicacy to the winds. Her head is buried in
her handkerchief in uncontrolled paroxysms, while I, poor, be-
draggled, injured Cinderella, vow vengeance on somebody when
well, when I awake.

A WYOMING SUNDOWN.

BY ARTHUR WHEELOCK UPSON.

OW it is twilight, and a yellow fire
Streaks through the narrow aisles of singing

pines.

Low the old sexton Night lets down his blinds,
Leaving me in his sanctuary choir
To hear my own heart inwardly aspire,

Chanting with all the trees the same sweet lines
While overhead one bent cloud dimly shines
Like an archangel pleading my desire.
Sunset across the level woodland floor,

And sunset in the forest of my soul ;
A softer light I had not known before

Now radiates from my beclouded goal,
And like a tranquil glory through the door
Of the dun future seems to rise and roll.

1900.] THE GLORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. 691.

THE GLORY OF THE HUMAN BODY.

BY REV. HENRY E. O'KEEFFE, C.S.P.
i

T is morally wholesome to believe that this our
H fleshly body in some mysterious measure shall go
with us even after death. Although in life it is
H the humiliating part of our nature, nevertheless
the spirit does not possess the perfection of its
nature until it is one with the body. The equilibrium existing
between these two realities was once disturbed and somehow in
the beginning. Since then the battle has been fiercely waging.
The end of all rational asceticism is to re-establish the harmony.
He Who came from on high clothed in the lowliness of flesh,
had for His purpose not only atonement for the law violated,
but likewise the restoration of peace between body and soul.

All our struggle is within the walls of the flesh. Even the
subtlest of the higher temptations can be remotely traced to
some latent and unbidden impulse of the flesh. The most
delicately shaded moods of the imagination and the heart
the most refined efforts of the will, have their beginnings in
the flesh. Yet in the vast scheme of the Incarnation the body
is not disgraced or dishonored. Although lower in degree of
being than* the spirit, it has relatively to its own purpose its
own perfection. We have been redeemed through the flesh, the
instrument of our weakness ; the very poison changed, as it
were, into an antidote.

The blessed sigh for their bodies. It is a thought among
the holy that souls do not lapse into the being of God until
they have received their supreme perfection from their union
with the body.

In the plan of spiritual regeneration all things work to-
gether unto good. There were religions of old, as there are
erring thinkers now, who through shame hide the corpse under
heaps of flowers and consign it to forgetfulness. Not so with
the integral plan of Christianity ; even the shameful body does
not suffer oblivion :

" Since, from the graced decorum of the hair
E 'en to the tingling, sweet

692 THE GLORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. [Feb.,

Soles of the simple earth-confiding feet,

And from the inmost heart

Outwards unto the thin

Silk curtains of the skin,

Every least part

Astonished hears

And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres."

He Who was hanged nakedly for our shame in the sight of
men has saved us from shame. Although physically and or-
ganically perfect, yet because of this subtle perfection was He
more susceptible to the keen edges of emaciation and shame.
"There is no beauty in Him, nor comeliness: and we have seen
Him, and there was no sightliness that we should be desirous
of Him."

Compared to that sense of shame, the chemical reaction of
the thirst in His mouth, or the gushing of iron and water from
His broken Heart, were as nothing. If it were pre-eminently
proper that His body should not taste the unwholesome savor of
the tomb, so was it meet that she of whose cloistered womb
He was the fruit should fall asleep and miss the corruption
and undignified dissolution of the body. Indeed, the wonder-
ment would be the more vivid if it were not so.

With us who bear in our bodies the vestiges of moral mis-
fortune it behooves us to slip into the cold arms of the earth
for a brief season, if only to undergo penitence through the
foul stench of unshriven imperfections.

The dogma of the resurrection is less distressing than that
this body should not attain the fruit of conquest after so
dreadful a conflict with the soul, or that it should be denied
the licit satisfaction of its mighty and indescribable longings.

Medical science opens and peers into every bone, muscle,
artery, and joint, but the marvel of the human body begins
only where the point of the dissecting-knife ends.

From the numberless troops of the unclean as well from
the narrow puritan comes the cry of "Shame!" But the
cry is fanatical or a cruel memory of lost chastity. To touch
the ark and part the veil one must have clean hands. The
sensation of moral horror in us is the evidence of the mystery
of the Fall in the beginning of history, and the traditional
relic of it which we carry in our bodies to this very day.

Within this tenement of flesh and blood are hidden treasures

1 9oa] THE GLORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. 693

so costly that the powers and principalities of good and evil
are ever contending for mastery over them.

Within the body's sacred temple is lodged the Holy Spirit
seated as upon a throne to diffuse blessings, but the Babel of
contradicting passions smothers His Voice and provokes tumult.
Man's body stands between the creation and the Creator. It
is the crown of the material, and the last expression of the
spiritual creation. With its crest sublime it touches the dome
of the sky and plants its naked foot upon a clod of earth. If
it bears within it the marks of former processes of life, it itself
is a permanent type and a final consummation. It creates the
mystery of space and defies the mystery of time.

Within its boundless reservations there glow the camp-fires
by night and wages the din of battle by day.

Within its field of infinitude there is area enough for gayety
and despair, tragedy and wit, pathos and delight, hope and
fear, life and death. It gathers all nature, art, music, and poe-
try, within the sanctuary of its sensible emotions.

The objective reality of external things would be dull and
unresponsive were it not for the body which receives sense-
impressions as the foundation of our ideas.

The learned discuss many intricate questions concerning the
relative value of these two realities spirit and matter.

Much subtle thought is provoked from a study of the in-
timacy between soul and body, of their natures, qualities, and
perfection.

The philosophic conviction is that body and soul enter
into the essence of each other. Body and soul do not acquire
the respective perfection of their natures until they are joined
together.

Whatever there is of sense-perception in the soul has come
through the avenue of the body. Only an act of special inter-
vention can bestow the gifts of the body on the soul when the
soul is separated from it. This may possibly be the method
by which the angelic nature can co-operate with the physical
and material universe. However this may be, the body remains
for us the battle-field of life's probation. Nor is it as it was
with some ancient scholars and superstitious believers, a prison
incarcerating the celestial aspirations of the spirit, or the sole
principle of evil. This feeling of depression, which arises either
from an insufficient study of Holy Writ or from a morbid
sensitiveness of the havoc which lust is playing in the world,

694 THE GLORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. [Feb.,

is not a normal state the chariot is one and the steeds are of
equal swiftness, but the charioteer is not sufficiently skilful.
Heresy is but a partial truth, and they who taught that the
body was essentially bad and the soul essentially good were
giving to the world a most disastrous doctrine. The saints in
their innocence speak of their bodies as of everlasting com-
panions. " I know that my Redeemer liveth ; in my flesh I
shall see God."

Supernal human delight is reserved for those who have not
profaned the tabernacle of the body from that early time
when the baptismal dew falls upon the white forehead to the
last hour when the chrism anoints the dying senses of touch,
taste, smell, and sight. They who have not abused so inti-
mate a consort as the body can know the ethereal bliss evoked
from inviolable affection. Once the soul has been directed
towards its proper object, then the body is not an enemy but
avails supernaturally ; for the very infirmity and mortality of
the flesh is a condition of merit for the spirit. Through the
Flesh and Blood of Christ we are made partakers of the shining
forth of His glorified and ascended Body. Somehow it shall
yet come that this celestial light shall pierce through the
sluggish senses of our bodies : " Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the
crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways plain.
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

Saint Theresa once told about her vision of Christ's trans-
figured Body. Whatever value may be attached to the vision,
her description is weak, for she pictures His Hand as being
like unto limpid glass. Yet how could human speech express
the surpassing excellence and splendor of that radiant Form ?
There may have been some providential reason why the prophets
but vaguely trace the divine mission and dignity of the body.
The text concerning the bodily translation of Enoch and Elias
would seem to bear a strict interpretation. From the meagre
record of the mystery of the Fall in the book of Genesis we
gather that that momentous temptation was not a gross yield-
ing to carnal appetite, but rather an intellectual revolt. Man
must have deliberately disturbed the state of concord which
balanced spirit and flesh. So " the Word was made flesh"
that man might restore, through grace and self-development,
his flesh to a state of healthy relationship with his spirit : " I
will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh."

i goo.] THE GLORY OF THE HUMAN BODY. 695

According to the Mind of Christ, the Christian moralist
seeks to create the synthesis between the two antithetical ele-
ments soul and matter. The Church, which is the mystical
Body of Christ in living history, has for its end the extension
of the economy of the Incarnation the protracted redemption
of the flesh. In the sacramental system the flesh the vulnerable
element of our composition is appealed to through the senses,
beginning with the Sacrament of Christ's Flesh to the rudest
symbol and most inadequate metaphor. " He hath made the
deaf to hear and the dumb to speak."

As in the material world so in the divine scheme, nothing
is lost. The instrument of our confusion is captured by its
own devices. Every caprice of the sentient body is supernatur-
ally gratified.

Through the Incarnation all things are bent to its service ;
every visible rite and ceremony; every dogma which is the
defined expression of unexplored truth ; every text of Scrip-
ture interpreted by authority ; all speech and action, reason
and imagination, sentiment and thought, are all transformed
into implements of salvation to rectify the illusions of the
senses of the body.

But not alone in the nobler arts sculpture, drama, paint-
ing, and song, is the body appealed to ; but inanimate, material
nature is sanctified to its uses, and so for the most part the
matter of the sacraments and sacramentals is bread, wine,
water, oil, salt, wool, cotton, and wax. Moreover, Christian
ethics even enters into the sciences of economics and politics,
with the indirect purpose of consecrating them to the salva-
tion of man's body from fire, plague, hunger, thirst, cruelty,
and injustice.

Since, then, we are beholden to the body, let us look to it
that we reverence it in decent fashion. It is for us believers
the temple of the Holy Spirit; of immensely more historic in-
terest than the temple of Jerusalem. Guard the walls of the
city and the temple will be secure. Exercise custody, and do
not permit the exterior senses to wander at will. Close all
the city gates by night, so that the wayward traveller with his
camel cannot pass through the eye of the needle.

The defilement of the human body might be more tragic
in its consequences than the spilling of a prophet's blood in
the portico of the temple. The body has its laws, preroga-
tives, capacities ; and it is serious to thwart or destroy them.

696 ST. AGNES, THE ROMAN VIRGIN AND MARTYR. [Feb.,

Else nature will turn the throb of health to a nervous tremor
and the crimson glow of youthful beauty to the hectic pallor
of disease.

Then, from a moral consideration, how horrible to think
that in some manner we take with us in death bodily habits
contracted in life ; it would seem of momentous importance,
therefore, to lay on the lash, and whip disordered inclination
into subservience to the sweeter instinct of the soul.

ST. AGNES, THE ROMAN VIRGIN AND MARTYR.

E. Missali Belvacensi. Rhotomagi,
A. D. 1514*

Agnetis sollemnio
Jubilat cum gaudio
Castitatis Filio

Mundus amor ;
Cordis in altario
Agnam agno socio
Immolet devotio

Verus clamor.

Jesum rorem lilium
Sponsum vult et socium,
Et Prasfecti filium

Dedignatur.
Preces, minas, munium
Spernit et supplicium ;
Sustinendo spolium

Non nudatur.

Crines arte deica
Tegtt toga caslica
Cella fit^vivifica

Impurorum.
Impudicus moritur ;
Per pudicam redditur;
Christ! fidem loquitur

Vi Justorum.

From the Beauvais Missal. Rouen,
A. D. 1514.

Pure love hastes its debt to pay
On Saint Agnes' Festal day .
To God's chaste Son ; truly gay,

It shouts loudly.

On our heart's shrine when we pray,
Let devotion true-voiced slay
For her comrade Lamb, and lay

Agnes, proudly.

Jesus Dew and Lily White
Is her Spouse and ally bright ;
For Him, Prefect's son tho' knight

She despises.

Threats and prayers in vain invite ;
Gifts e'en capture not her sight ;
When stripped she with keen delight

Clothed arises.

Lo ! by art divine, her hair
Vests her in the cellar where
All was filthy, once ; its air

Grows life-giving.
Dies he who would touch her dare ;
Lives he at the pure child's prayer;
Christ's Faith powerful here and there

Spreads he, living.

* From Analecta Liturgica, by W. H. James Weale, vol. i. p. 303. Prosa 199. The
lines " Ina vernant " to " complementum " are in the Beauvais Missal and seem to be an in-
terpolation..

1900.] 57'. AGNES, THE ROMAN VIRGIN AND MARTYR. 697

Ignibus exponitur,
Oral, nee comburitur,
Gladio percutitur

Impiorum.

Sic Agna confungitur
Agno pro quo caeditur ;
Regia eripitur

Vi morborum.

O Flos pudicitias,
Speculum munditiae,
Amoris, constantiae

Fulcimentum.
Hostia munditise,
Victima Justitiae,
Dulcoris et gratias

Condimentum.

Ina vernant nuptiae
Agni fruens specie
Propago laetitiag

O plena dulcedine;
Agni rubens sanguine

Pellas a certamine
Nocumentum.

Agni pollens agmine,
In mortis examine
Sis cum Matre Virgine

Intamentum.
O Felix agnicula
Agnes prece sedula,
Nostra fac piacula

Expiari ;

Due ad agni pabula
Pastorissa parvula,

Oves Agno copula
Agno coeli copula

Salutari. Amen.

Flung amidst the fiery flame
Prayers its power of burning tame ;
Her as prey the wicked claim ;

By sword slaying.
To the Lamb the Lamb thus came
For whom bore she death of shame;
From disease a Royal Dame

Is snatched, praying.

Oh, thou Flower of modesty !
Mirror dazzling clean to see !
Of our love and constancy

Great sustainer.
Host from filthiness quite free !
Justice-victim made to be ;
Seasoning most sweet to me

And grace-gainer.

Truly are thy nuptials blest,

In the meek Lamb's sight, at rest ;

Offspring, yea of joyful breast

Consummation.
Full of winsomeness the best
Tinged with Lamb's blood, ruddy

guest !
Evils drive from each oppressed

Battling nation.

Strength thou dost in fight possess,
Near the Lamb ; in death's distress
With the Mother-Maid, come ; yes,

Come, protect us.
Little Lamb all happiness,
Prayerful Agnes! we express
Hope that God will, soothed, confess,

Not reject us.

Lead us, little Shepherdess !

To the Lamb's fold Him to bless ;

To the Lamb unite the sheep,

To Heaven's Lamb whose fondness

deep
Doth elect us. Amen.

REV. T. S., C.SS.R.

THE life of a poet has a peculiar relation to his
works. How much of the man himself goes out
into a poem in ordinary cases it is not for us to
judge. Poets' feelings take " all colors like the hands
of dyers," sang one of the greatest of English
poets, expressing in the verse his estimate of their character
by a vigorous word that rhymes with " dyers," but in the case
of Dante * the whole soul of the man, his passions and convic-
tions, burn in every line of the Divine Comedy ; so that while
it tells the awful sights he saw in his journey, it as surely re-
veals himself in the intensity of his nature. Whatever had
been scarred upon him in the fortunes of his life finds ex-
pression, not as an isolated bitterness like the scorn of Byron,
not as a whining self-pity like the pathos of Milton, but as the
pronouncement of a universal law, lifting the thought to the
ideal and sublime, the ideal and the sad. He stands alone in
his greatness and his sorrow, the incarnation of the strength
and majesty of Latin genius.

Whatever he had desired he failed to obtain. The hopes
which are as of the soft spring of early manhood were
blighted ; the rewards of ambition, which may compensate for
disappointed affection, passed like phantoms from his hand.
The proudest of mankind, he had to eat the bread which is
most bitter to the taste, to climb that stairs which is the hard-
est path, f This experience could not have been without its
effect upon his spirits, and yet in the whole range of song can
anything be found like his sovereign, inviolable justice ? We
have been accustomed to hear of the calm equity of Shakspere
the only judicial habit which can be at all compared with
the inflexible impartiality of the Florentine. A little reflection
can account for Shakspere's quality. The movements and the

* The Life and Works of Dante Alighieri. By the Rev. J. F. Hogan, D.D. London
and New York : Longmans, Green & Co.

t " Tu proverai si come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui e come e duro calle

Lo scen^ere e '1 salir per 1' altrui scale."

i goo.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 699

men it was exercised upon were practically as remote from his
time as exciting influences as though they belonged to a distant
period. The close of the reign of Henry VII. witnessed the separ-
ation of the age of the iron barons from the time of the " new
men," a separation as complete in its political effects as the
abyss which divides post-Revolution France from the old
regime. It is not at all likely that Elizabeth, descended from
the House of York through her grandmother, would have ap-
proved an indiscriminate assault on the princes and adherents
of that house. The most indefeasible claim of title asserted by
the House of York was in accordance with her own high pre-
tensions ; she represented the claims of the rival factions.
Shakspere lost nothing by his impartiality.

The crimes and the follies immortalized by Dante, the cor-
ruptions in places where a devout Catholic would fain not
see them, met with the award that a stern and melancholy
temper, raised above hope and fear, found was their due. No
one ever felt more strongly the claim of gratitude. Service to
him could not be effaced by those caprices and insolences with
which the great so often make patronage an intolerable bur-
den. We remember the haughtiness of Dante when made to
experience something of the kind, now and again, from Can'
Grande. Regardless of consequences, the poor wanderer would
turn on the great man that scowl which has made men think
he could have sat for a picture of Satan, drop a few words,
chill him to the soul with his contempt, and chase, as by
the spell of some potent spirit, the mockery from the eyes and
lips of every courtier in the crowded halls. Yet for all that,
how finely he wrote of " that most noble and most gracious lord "
when far away, when only the memory of his munificence re-
mained, when all faults, all pettinesses, were forgotten !

The incident of the unhappy Francesca has served as a
text for criticism on this part of the character of Dante. We
refer the reader to Dr. Hogan's natural explanation. In fact,
no one except a small poet of the sensuous school, a flaccid
critic imbued with the aesthetics of Greek mythology, would
have supposed that Dante could have found her anywhere on
his journey save in the unhappy place in which he met her.
What we have suggested above, the close union between
Dante's intellectual and moral character, is the source of the
judgment on the one who sinned so deeply, and whose sin was
not the less a sin because her father was a friend to the poet
when the world was dark to him indeed. And yet there is

;oo TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

blended with the sentence an indulgence so poetical in the
humanity of its conception, her eternal association with her
guilty lover, that we think it must have proceeded from his
strong sense of the father's kindness to himself. This is not
quite the way Dr. Hogan analyzes the episode. He looks
more to its bearings on Francesca's family than its regard to
the poet himself. But though these are elements to be taken
into account, and very important ones, they hardly reach the
absolute justice that recognizes what may extenuate the guilt
and qualify the punishment. Now, it would seem there was
something sweet and gentle in this creature whose life is made
immortal by lines more beautiful than any ever sung; some-
thing that showed she was the daughter of a race the purity
of whose blood manifested itself in noble and generous im-
pulses ; and that; though she had dishonored the name of her
house and deeply stained her soul, she was to meet, both on
her own account and for the sake of those from whom she
sprang, a punishment that marked her out from those cold, hard,
fierce, vicious ones whose sins have little to palliate them.

As an introduction to students of Dante Dr. Hogan 's work
will be of excellent service. He prefixes a life of the poet ;
this, having regard to his limits, is, we think, remarkably well
done. There then comes a critical resume of the Divine Comedy
which we suppose is the result of his labors for the students
he lectured to in Maynooth. This is illustrated by notes selected
on the principle of affording information and assistance rather
than of displaying ingenuity and acquaintance with commenta-
tors. This reminds us of the fact that there is an admirable
chapter on the commentators of Dante, very short but very
lucid, and not telling the reader merely what every one knows,
but placing before him the succession of the men who have
done anything for the poet from the beginning of the cen-
tury in which he lived down to a year or two ago.

For the rest, we said something on a former occasion con-
cerning one or two of the minor works of Dante, we said a
word about his orthodoxy ; we content ourselves here with
sending our readers to the work itself for these matters, and
we have no hesitation in saying, with regard to it as well as to
all that concerns this man, who is the embodiment of mediaeval
strength and enthusiasm, that they will be gratified.

Mrs. Oliphant's autobiography* is a human document rather

* Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Oliphant. Edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill. New
York : Dodd, Mead & Co.

i goo.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 701

than a literary reminiscence. It tells, indeed, the life-story of
a woman whom we should antecedently imagine to be an out-
standing figure in the history of nineteenth century letters;
one whose literary career extended through half a century, and
whose published works reached the astounding number of some
hundred and twenty-five. In the history of such a life we
should certainly look for important additions to our knowledge
of many writers living and dead, and should not unreasonably
expect to find in it suggestions, at least, regarding past and
present publishing methods, the struggles, prospects, and re-
wards of authorship as modified by fifty years, with perhaps
some hints on the different manifestations of public taste
within the same period, the development of the spirit and
manner of criticism, and many other similar side-questions.
But there is little of all this. There is but a fragment of liter-
ary memorabilia; a single meeting with Carlyle, a call or two
on the Tennysons, and a glimpse of Father Prout are about all.
And as for such other digressions as we just now mentioned,
there is hardly anything of them. Still this is a fascinating
autobiography, from the deep, appealing human interest which
it displays from beginning to end. It is the history of an
heroic woman of simple manners, winsome disposition, candid
spirit, and glorious courage.

Mrs. Oliphant was left a widow, young and poor, with three
children to support and educate. We may say, in one word,
this book of hers is the record of how she met these responsi*
bilities, and how she sustained the sorrows that came fast and
crushing over her later life. Her daughter died in Italy at an
early age ; her two sons grew up to a manhood rich with
promise, and they too, just as they were about to reward her
for so many and such sweetly-borne sacrifices for their sake,
passed untimely away. With a pathetic patience she faced her
loneliness, and with fingers that must long ago have become
weary, and a heart bereft of human comfort for evermore, she
took up her pen again and wrought almost to the end. It is
an ennobling narrative, modestly and gracefully told. If, some
time, there should be written a book on the "Sanctities of
Literature," the spirit and the character exhibited in this auto-
biography should fill a chapter very near the first.

The Sunken Bell* is a play by Gerhart Hauptmann, trans-
lated by Charles Henry Meltzer. The translation is in verse,

* The Sunken ^//(Die versunkene Glocke). New York : Doubleday & McClure.

702 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

and does not profess to be literal, while at the same time it
aims at preserving the spirit of the original. It is called by
the author a " fairy play," and if it interpreted the contact of
fairy personages with mankind we should say it would appear
aimless indeed when compared with the influence exercised
on human life by the fairy beings of " A Midsummer Night's
Dream," or by the action of the preternatural characters in
" Manfred." But it is suggested there is a problem of human
destiny underlying the words and doings of the non-human
characters: that these are allegorical expressions of the aspira-
tions and disappointments, the defeats and successes, which
constitute the struggle of mankind.

Even looked at in this way the work is without purpose ;
for it is based not on the reality of struggle, but a fanciful
conception of the elements and aims of struggle. The conflict
is a real and a sad thing, perhaps, at least it seems sad to
us, seeing so much of the cost which is the price of progress,
and not looking to the final issue. Whether we regard the
individual or the race, struggle is the condition of life and its
discipline. Conscientious effort is a triumph even though hearts
are broken by it ; suffering is advancement, because the realiza-
tion of duty.

We are not aided by a character such as Heinrich, the bell-
founder, who forms for himself a* false ideal of the truth and
justice which should be the goal towards which humanity is work-
ing. His ideal is the realization of a merely sesthetical pleasure
which cannot be "a supreme bliss," much less a "supreme
truth." The love of the beautiful is part of the capacity for
happiness ; beautiful things are an ingredient of happiness, but
neither the capacity for loving them nor the beautiful things
themselves have anything more than a relation to truth and
justice. There are pagan cults mingled with Christian sugges-
tions in the conception of Heinrich as thinker and enthusiast ;
the creed is formed from some vague sense of the beauty and
sweetness of the Lord's character wrought into the modern
notions concerning the meaning of the lives of Apollo, Osiris,
Balder, and so on ; the creed is a sort of sun-myth evolved by
Hauptmann from the theories shaped by writers on compara-
tive mythology, who aim at reducing all religion into a myth.

There is a charm in the work, however, which no one can
lose sight of the sympathy of the poet with nature. Of
course, there is the unnecessary and therefore vicious deification
of such wonderful loveliness, which is so characteristic of our

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 703

time. David was as keenly sensible of that beauty as Haupt-
mann, but he saw in it the manifestation of its Creator. The
elfs and sprites make a gallery of perfect portraits, but there
is an absence of related action which leaves them without
dramatic value. There is, indeed, reality in the moods and
actions of these beings of the air and earth and water, but it
is the reality of strong perception instead of the reality of life
affected by other life, its interests and needs.

Mr. Meltzer has done his part of the work well. The verse
is musical as an old ballad, and the language echoes of the
old wells. It is English pure and undefiled, refreshing as the
mountain air to one poisoned in a city atmosphere. As Hein-
rich, exhausted, looks at the landscape where we find him with
the sprite Rautendelein, who is the embodiment, perhaps, of
nature, he says in a dreaming way to her :

"How beautiful it seems! The rustling boughs
Have such a strange full sound. The darkling arms
Of the great firs move so mysteriously.
How solemnly their heads sway to and fro !
The very soul of fairy fantasy

Sighs through the wood. It murmurs low and then,
Still gently whisp'ring, stirs the tiny leaves.
Now it goes singing through the green wood-grass."

And the fancy as we interpret the next thought that the
white landscape points its finger at him in the movement of
all the scene approaching to where he lay weak and dazed
from his fall from the cliff, is of the very stuff that dreams
are made of.

The wood-sprite's account of how he broke the wheel of
the dray on which the " bell " was being brought up the cliff
has much of the animation of Puck's tales of his own doings.
The bell rolled over the side of the cliff down, down, until it
was lost in the lake. This is the incident on which the pur-
pose of the play turns. The allegory is, to be sure, far-fetched
the creation of a chime by the union and proportions of all
metals instrumental to the production of harmonious, thought-
expressing sound; a chime grander than all that had been
ever made the soul of bell, that ever could again be made its
soul, telling the story of man's life in all its unutterable pain,
then its growing freedom from pain, so slowly lessening as age
passed after age away until lost in the fulness of a joy with-
out alloy of pain. The bell to which this music was wedded

704 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

was to be placed on the high temple of a cliff above all other
cliffs in face of the sun, the god that lightens and creates,
that animates and sets free and calls the world to worship, in
thankfulness for the surcease of its pain. The envious wood-
sprite, who is the spirit-substance of all earthly lusts, has
foiled the glorious effort when it was very close upon accom-
plishment.

Rautendelein, it would appear, fills a double rdle she is the
curious spirit of nature, made up of elements from the woods
and mountains, the pleasant fields and the breezes that scatter
health and sweetness on their paths ; so, on one side of her
ministry, she spurs Heinrich to the labor and the triumph
which are only possible when the high ideal conceived within
shall have taken form from the heart of nature. She is, there-
fore, the inspirer of enthusiasm and the right hand that leads
it onward and upward ; but on the other side she draws him in
a guilty passion from his wife, from the claims of the duties
of husband and father, from the practice of the sweet humani-
ties that lie around the path of every man who is faithful to
the true law given him for his guidance.

We must confess looking at the movements of the beings
of the air, the hill, and the water, we experienced considerable
pleasure ; we were interested by the vicar, the school-master,
and the barber, though they only represented what the poet
looked upon as dead creeds, soulless conventions that is, the
creeds and moralities of the world of men but our pleasure
from and interest in Heinrich were not produced by the con-
ception ; so far from that, they were due only to the translator's
admirable versification and his evident sympathy with his
author.

The substance of this little work* appeared in a different
form before this issue. The first chapter came out originally
in the Dublin Review. It is concerned rather with the broader
aspect of the question that is to say, its bearing on the poli-
tical and social controversies of the present time, and the in-
fluence for good which the thought of the sufferings and hero-
ism of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers ought to have
on men of Irish blood to-day, than with details of the cruelty
on the one hand, and the courage with which it was met on
the other. Such details we have in the succeeding chapters in
an anecdotal form, which imparts to them a vividness like that

* The Catholics of Ireland under the Penal Laws in the Eighteenth Century, By his Emi-
nence'Cardinal Moran. London : Catholic Truth Society.

1 900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 705

of viva voce narration when the raconteur possesses sympathy
and skill. These were published a few years ago as a series of
papers in the Australasian Catholic Record ; so that practically
the matter before us is a reprint. We do not think in all the
good work accomplished by the Catholic Truth Society it has
performed a greater service to religion and the deep human
interests depending upon it than in getting his eminence to
prepare these papers for publication.

We ask for this little book a large circulation. It is very
interesting and very valuable. Of the truth of the statements
made there can be no question ; they are taken for the most
part from official documents. It is not the same as what we
have on the other side that is to say, the Huguenot side, the
English Protestant side, the American Puritan side, the anti-
Catholic side generally, charges for the most part with very
little foundation, or at the best resting on hearsay evidence
in the first instance, when not upon after-thought correlation.

Though the archives of the Carmelite Order are by no
means intact, yet they have served to supply many particulars
of interest about the period considered in the present volume.*
Quite absorbing, indeed, is the account given of the adven-
tures, trials, and successes of the Carmelites during the stirring
years of the foundation of the English mission. Our historical
recollections are made personal and vivid when we think of
these elder brethren of our own laboring amid such deadly
perils for the conversion of heretics and the spiritual comfort
of the faithful. Flight, imprisonment, exile, and death were
common events in their times; for the finger of God then, as
always, indicated the path of blood and suffering as the sure
road to success.

Not the least interesting account is that by Father Bede of
the translation of St. Teresa's works, and the attack upon that
saint by a Protestant divine, not improbably the famous Still
ingfleet.

The narratives are full of edification, varied and replete
with interest. The story of Father Bede, covering the period
of the Restoration, hints at an aspect of English life quite un-
known to the chroniclers of the coarse and wicked society
commonly taken as representative of that day. And finally
comes the pathetic account of Father Francis Brewster, the

*Carmel in England. By Father Zimmerman, O.C.D. A History of the English Mis
sion of the Discalced Carmelites. London : Burns & Gates ; New York, Cincinnati, Chi-
cago : Benziger Brothers.

VOL. LXX. 45

706 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

last Carmelite of the old English mission, who died in 1849,
leaving behind his record of the community, " No superior, no
inferior, being the last man." But it was quite a different
England then from the one in whose conversion his brethren
had worn away energy and life. And not the least among
the influences conducing to that blessed change must be num-
bered the heroic labors of the men whose adventurous careers
this volume briefly records.

The final volume of Father Guggenberger's work* comes
to hand well recommended by the preceding numbers, and
dealing with our own century it loses nothing of the interest
they possessed. It is of the same general plan, contains maps
and references in similar generous abundance, is complete, ac-
curate, and wonderfully thorough in detail. In fact this last
quality falls not far short of becoming a defect ; for confusion
is almost invited by excessive minuteness in certain parts at
the expense of others. But let us say of the whole work that
it is something we have felt the want of more than once, and
we can but rejoice that the first (to our knowledge) Catholic
writer to attempt this sort of general history has made so
striking a success. A great desideratum in history is accurate
and impartial treatment of secular events closely concerned
with religious interests the relations of state and ecclesiastical
authorities in certain critical negotiations, for example. This
need is well met by Father Guggenberger's history so far as
it goes, of course it being rather in the nature of a compen-
dium than a complete and exhaustive account of the history
of eighteen centuries.

I. TISSOT'S LIFE OF CHRIST.f

What Mr. Tissot says in closing his introduction to the
Life of Christ : " If some other in his turn wishes to study
and elucidate it yet further, let him make haste ; for the data
still existing, the documents of past centuries still surviving,
will, doubtless, ere long, in these days of the invasion of the
engineer and the railway, disappear before the irresistible im-
pulse of the aggressive modern spirit," is a criterion of the
value of Mr. Tissot's own monumental work, and an indica-

* General History of the Christian Era. Vol. III. By A. Guggenberger, S.J. St.
Louis, Mo.: B. Herder.

^The Life of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Three hundred and sixty-five Compositions
from the Four Gospels, with Notes and Explanatory Drawings. By James J. Tissot. Notes
translated- by Mrs. Arthur Bell (N. d'Anvers). New York : The McClure-Tissot Co.

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 707

tion of its worth. to future generations. He might have added,
in enumerating some of the devastating engines in the march
of science, the higher criticism of the day. His work bears a
peculiar relation to this element so destructive of the spirit of
religion, and makes one reflect that a watchful Providence had
no small share in the commission of this wonderful artist to
depict on canvas in the mode he did the scenes of our Lord's
life from birth to ascension. The tendency of this modern
spirit of the world in regard to religious things has acted so
like a solvent on the solid realities of the faith of centuries
that one could easily imagine a not very distant time when
the terrific facts of the passion, death, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ would, under the microscopic analysis of higher
criticism, be affirmed to be a certain sort of phantasmagoria
existing but in the minds of the so-called witnesses or chroni-
clers during a subjective state of soul, or under the influence
of hypnotic suggestion. '* Let us cut him off from the land of
the living, that his name may be no more remembered ! " (Jer.
xi. 19.) It sounds absurd to say this to simple believers,
but the evidence of our senses as to what is already affirmed
by these oracles of higher criticism make such a supposition
very plausible.

There is a certain other class among professed Chris-
tians, too, who would not be at all sorry in their hearts
if the hyper-critics could encompass this new stroke of argu-
ment. They are the fastidious and ease-loving ones who have
come to think there is something unbecoming Christian de-
cency in making real and vivid the harrowing scenes of the
passion. True-hearted and loyal lovers of Jesus Christ, while
feeling the most profound sense of dejection and sorrow at
beholding this realistic delineation of those dreadful and heart-
rending scenes, cannot but rejoice and be truly grateful, out of
their love for Christ crucified, that at last a hand has been
reverently daring enough, and exquisitely gifted enough, and
honest and intelligent enough, to spare not a single truthful
detail in conveying to canvas the reality, as far as may be, of
the history of our Lord's earthly life. A false and weak
shame and an over-delicate sensitiveness to human suffering
might make one turn away shrinkingly from these pictures,
which so cruelly burn the reality of Christ's torments into
one's very soul ; and yet how salutary, almost for the sake of
a mere human advantage, is such an experience to the aesthetic
and over-cultured intellectual life of our age, not to speak of

7o8 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

its glorious spiritual profit, humbly and eagerly sought for by
Christian saint or sinner. "God forbid that I should glory
save in the cross of Jesus Christ," cried out the honest-hearted
Apostle. In a true Christian spirit we can glory, then, in this
wonderful manifestation of Christ's love for man as por-
trayed here.

No slight addition to the value of these reproductions of
Tissot's great pictures are the notes or comments accompany-
ing each picture, written by himself and translated into clear,
good English. In these notes he explains many a minute detail
of the picture which might otherwise be overlooked, or perhaps
criticised, from its unusualness. No slightest point has been
neglected in these explanations. His comment on the picture
of Christ being given the drink when He said " I thirst " is a
good example of this conscientious thoughtfulness in searching
out the most obscure meaning in the words of the Evangelist.
" Now," says St. John, " there was set a vessel full of vinegar,
and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop,
and put it to his mouth." ' This vinegar, or acidulated drink,
was called posca by the Romans. Sometimes it was merely
wine which had turned sour. . . . Some man standing by
then, moved to compassion by the touching complaint of Jesus,
ran and soaked a sponge in this vinegar and offered it to him
to drink. The sponge thus used had no doubt been brought
with them by the executioners to wipe off the blood with
which they were covered during the crucifixion. The man put
this sponge, saturated with vinegar, upon a branch of hyssop.
It is St. John, who was an eye-witness of all that occurred,
who mentions what kind of branch was used ; the other Evan-
gelists merely say a reed. Now, the stem of the hyssop, though
it resembles a reed in general appearance, is really not nearly
so strong. The very thickest that could possibly be found
would not be able to bear the weight of a sponge full of
liquid. On the other hand, the stem in question forms a per-
fect tube, in every way suitable for sucking up liquid or for
ejecting it. In our engraving, therefore, we have represented
the sponge alluded to in the Gospel narrative as having been
placed, not at the top, but at the lower end of the stem of
hyssop, in such a manner that the liquid with which it was
saturated could be made to ascend the hollow tube by the
pressing of the sponge, whilst Jesus sucked the vinegar through
the upper opening. Any other plan than that here suggested,
however small and round the sponge may have been, could

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 709

have achieved nothing but the smearing of the face of the
Sufferer, which, under pretence of soothing his sufferings, would
really only have added to them, for his body was everywhere
covered with wounds. The cheeks, the nose, and the lips of
the Sufferer must have been grazed in his many falls. Now,
it was no doubt a compassionate man who ran to give the
divine Master a drink when he cried ' I thirst,' and we feel
that we are justified in supposing him to have acted in the
manner represented in our engraving."

Indeed, these pictures would lose half their value if merely
scanned as pictures without the illuminating text accompany-
ing them. The text alone without the illustrations would form a
marvellous series of word paintings, and would afford the best
sort of a book of meditations on the life and sufferings of our
Lord. Often what at a cursory glance may appear grotesque
or fanciful in Mr. Tissot's illustrations becomes invested with
a singular interest and charm when his explanation of it is read.
Moreover not a single authority for his statements, both in
pictures or writing, has been ignored by him. He has, in-
deed, shown a marvellously open and unprejudiced mind in
his researches, and at the same time there is a graceful humil-
ity in the proffering of his personal opinion on questionable
points that disposes the reader to yield to his judgment where
he otherwise might challenge it. It might be interesting to
quote here the ample list of references he consulted in his
investigations of the actual history of the time of our Lord,
but it ought to be unnecessary, as they who know of this
magnificent and worthy work of Mr. Tissot should not rest
satisfied until they have seen it for themselves. The numerous
and, unfortunately, often peurile and sentimental histories or
meditations on the passion which abound among the religiously
inclined could be well exchanged in bulk for this superb edi-
tion of four books, flawless in their style of binding, printing,
and, above all, of illustrating, and an actual material gain be
the result, not to speak of the lasting spiritual one which would
come from a fervent and humble perusal of their contents.

2. LECKY'S MAP OF LIFE.*

Mr. Lecky intends to present a philosophy of life made up
from the discharge of public duties and from the observance

* The Map of Life. By William Edward Hartpole Lecky. New York and London :
Longmans, Green & Co.

7io TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

of certain mental and physical rules which would contribute
to health and contentment. We are greatly disappointed in
the book. It has been at all times our opinion that he was
not a profound or an original thinker, but we judged that he
looked at social phenomena with a calm and penetrating eye,
that he could estimate them with a sufficiently exact appre-
ciation upon the whole, and state his conclusions with temper
and candor. It would be impossible to find a book more
superficial and unfair than this one. One would find in the
flimsiest of French memoirs sounder views of the influence on
habits of thought, on the formation of character. Lilly and
Pepys and Boswell, whom it would be hard in all literature
to match in coxcombry and prejudice, offer instances of per-
ception of the effect of circumstances on men and the
power of men in laying hold of circumstances far above any-
thing in this book which has not been taken from some other
writer.

The type of character Mr. Lecky has in his mind is in
reality that presented by the English country gentleman. It
is a good type upon the whole, but we are very sure that
he has united with it a type in some respects higher, but in
some less judicious, and in all respects more intense the gentle-
man of Ireland. It has been well said that a well-bred Irish
gentleman is the most perfect specimen of human nature ; but
unless his mind has been enlarged by travel, he is as narrow
as if he belonged to the seventeenth century. When Gardiner^
the first Lord Mountjoy, returned from the Grand Tour, he
told his countrymen they were the least liberal aristocracy in
Europe, and this at a time when the greatest orators who spoke
the English language, the greatest lawyers that ever appeared
in any country, were amongst them. Has the Irish gentleman
advanced one step from the time of Gardiner? The narrow
judgments and intense prejudices of this gifted, and in many
respects so charming a type of character, are in this book
superimposed upon the English gentleman of to-day, who is
a fair-minded, conscientious man anxious to perform rightly
the social or quasi-public duties belonging to him as a magistrate
and landlord, a churchman and a patriot, but the combination
is inartistic.

The fact is, Mr. Lecky is an Irish Tory; and an Irish Tory
has not one principle or tradition in common with the English
Tory. The traditions of the latter go back to efforts on be-
half of public liberty, and when all that was valuable in the

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOK^. 711

aim of those efforts was secured or promised, to services
and sacrifices for the sovereign against the unjust aggressions
of the people. The Irish Tory is the descendant of a rebel
and a seventeenth century communist. His ancestor was one
of the fierce sectaries to whom the blood of kings was a
sweet savor and the lands of others the possession of the
Chanaanites. He has preserved the sentiments of his ancestors
with a fidelity he refused to the state-church to which he pre-
tended to have conformed. He was instrumental in bringing in
the Whig king, like the great Revolution houses of England,
the Russells and the Cavendishes, the Ashleighs and the rest
of that ill-omened tribe who in the name of liberty established
a tyranny over the people sterner than that of France under
Louis XIV., and in the name of justice fixed almost the whole
burden of taxation on labor and the capital that employed it.

He was always true to his principles, by which he under-
stood that his loyalty to himself was absolute, while his loyalty
to the throne was limited by the condition of the king's good
behavior. That is, the Irish Tory was loyal as long as he was
allowed to exercise unrestrained power over the property and
persons of the majority of his countrymen. His devotion to
the state-church of his country was limited in like manner.
As long as he had the power to despoil it the institution
should be maintained as a bulwark against popery ; when he
had no longer power to despoil it, he claimed whatever was
left for his poor relations or dependents ; when its resources
grew with the increased wealth of the country, he filled its
incumbencies with his younger sons without regard to their
morals or religious opinions ; when at length the imperial
Parliament proceeded to disestablish it and secularize its pro-
perty, he threatened to rise in rebellion.

At the same time he is, and has been, a thorough gentle-
man in all those things which make man gracious and engag-
ing : a good if not an exact scholar, a wit, a matchless host, a
munificent patron of art and letters.* It was only when the
quasi-public duties of the magistracy, the obligations of his
position as landlord, the claims of political life came upon him,
that one found an intense bigot, a master with the conscience
of a highwayman, a cynic with the public spirit and the con-
tempt for native opinion of a Catiline. In the incongruous

* Hardly any assistance has been granted by the English government to these depart-
ments of civilized life, and such grudging help as it has given was atoned for by some spolia-
tion in another direction.

712 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

blending of this figure with that of an English squire Mr.
Lecky has produced a type which enables him to misrepresent
social morals and draw political inferences which no well-
informed Englishman would permit himself to repeat.

The fact is, he does not seem to possess the most rudimen-
tary knowledge of the history of party government in Eng.
land ; and yet we can hardly doubt but that he is excep-
tionally well acquainted with its origin and growth. His His-
tory of England in the Eighteenth Century, despite some mis-
leading points of view from which he regards events in the
highest degree momentous in the legal and political evolution
of England, manifests a remarkable spirit of observation and
much judicious inference, on the whole. We should be sorry
to think the work before us was written for a party purpose,
but how can we avoid the conclusion when we see a man mis-
take political and social movements in one book, the true
origin of which he presented in another ?

The formation of party in England is not a thing of yester-
day ; in one way or another it existed in every stage of the
constitutional history of the country. It was known by differ-
ent names from those at present ; but the leading principles
which divided the parties affected interests and expressed
sentiments very much as they do to-day. There was the court
party, and there was the country party, under the Plantagenets
and Tudors; and the country party in the Civil War corre-
sponded to the old country party of the Plantagenets and
Tudors. The gentlemen who constituted it fought for the
king, but it was when he had done everything that he could
have done, and when the town party which succeeded to the
court party of the Plantagenets and Tudors would not have
left him one vestige of right, one particle of authority. The
court party of the first two kings of the House of Hanover
was composed of revolutionists kept around the throne by the
spoils of office and the most scandalous exercise of patronage
ever heard of in any country. These Whigs not only lived
upon the taxes of the people, but at the Revolution they had
by an infamous contrivance obtained a commutation of the
services which were the condition of the tenure of their
estates and had thrown the whole burden on the rest of the
people on every man who ate bread in the sweat of his face.
They were to all intents and purpose as exempt from taxes
as the privileged classes in France. Now, these regal rebels,
these revolutionary despots, these robbers, under the pretence

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 713

of justice to the poor, were men whose political principles are
fair, liberal, and enlightened, in comparison to those of their
natural allies the Irish Tories; and saying that Mr. Lecky is
an Irish Tory of Irish Tories, we can safely leave his book to
the judgment of our readers.

3. SAINT LOUIS.*

The new life of St. Louis one of the series already favor-
ably mentioned in this magazine has many intrinsic merits of
plan and of spirit to recommend it to intelligent Catholic
readers. It is not, the author himself tells us, " a history of
Saint Louis that is, a chronological and methodical account of
the actions of his life and the events of his reign," but it is
rather a study of his character and holiness as manifested in
the different phases of his private and public life. In a series
of thirteen essays, seven of which view him merely in his social
relations and achievements, while the others take account of him
as a king and soldier, we are given a complete pen-portrait
of this middle-age monarch whose inflexible fidelity to justice
and heartfelt love of peace may well shame many political
leaders of our day.

Nowhere in the book can one detect any attempt to exag-
gerate his virtues or to hide his faults. Indeed one's first im-
pression is very likely to be that the author has not brought
out his hero's holiness quite clearly or fully enough. In
trying to avoid the pious folly of those who make the saints
seem far out of human reach and their perfection appear some-
thing over and above and distinct from the conscientious ful-
filment of God's holy will, it would appear he was guilty of
going to the other extreme by making the king's holiness a
mere detail in the picture. This unfavorable judgment springs
mainly, and perhaps altogether, from a firmly-rooted but false
conception of sanctity. We have grown so used to linking
the word saint with ecstasies, visions, bitter self-scourgings,
expressly sought humiliations, gifts of tears, and all those other
wonderful manifestations of solid virtue which are so frequently
found in the lives of the best-known servants of God, that
we have inadvertently come to look upon them as the essen-
tial elements of holiness, and naturally think that if they are

* Saint Louis. By Marius Sepet. With a preface by George Tyrrell, S.J. London
Duckworth & Co. ; New York : Benziger Brothers.

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb.,

not dwelt on at length the biographies of saintly men are
either incomplete or unfaithful. Happily M. Sepet has had a
far more accurate knowledge of what really constitutes holi-
ness, and has acted in accordance with that knowledge all
through his work. At first we thought less kindly of the book,
but long and careful reflection thoroughly convinced us that
the writer had faced and accomplished his task in the proper
frame of mind.

The internal excellence of the life of St. Louis is not the
only reason why we earnestly hope that it will be widely and
thoughtfully read by our Catholic people. The book is also
extremely opportune. It teaches clearly and forcibly two great
truths that are sadly neglected in these days truths that would
work a magnificent reformation if we Catholics only let them
get the grip God meant them to have on our minds.

First of all, it gives us satisfaction to know that holiness is
compatible with every legitimate occupation, and that it does
not impede in any way the fulfilment of those duties that are
attached to one's special vocation. " True devotion," says St.
Francis de Sales, " does no injury to any vocation or employ-
ment, but, on the contrary, adorns and beautifies it." Whoever
thinks otherwise does not know what devotion or holiness is. In
his own mind he has substituted its accidental expressions, its
extraordinary manifestations, for its real substance. He has put
long fastings and watchings and bloody whippings of self in place
of that whole-souled effort to correspond with God's will which
alone makes men holy. Few among the lawful occupations of
men are of themselves more hostile to perseverance in the
way of virtue than is the kingly state, particularly when it is
of a despotic character. There is, then, encouragement for all
people in the fact that this great king was also a great saint.

The second great truth which the life of this monarch
teaches us is, that fidelity to the principles of the Gospel can-
not satisfactorily explain either the political decadence of
Catholic countries, or the intellectual and social backwardness
of individual members of the church. The power of France
is not now on the wane because her later rulers and people
have been more just or more bent on piety than were her
rulers and people in the days of her greatest glory and strength.
Energy in accomplishing one's worldly duties and energy in
the service of God are not foes ; they go very peaceably hand-
in-hand. St. Louis served God earnestly, and yet he did
not fa.il to strengthen his kingdom ; he waged no war unjustly,

1 900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 715

but he waged just wars with all his might ; he did not inter-
fere with his people's rights, but he was active and determined
in defending his own. These two lessons are of inestimable
value to all us Catholics, and since a fuller knowledge of
Saint Louis' character and deeds cannot fail to impress them
more and more deeply on our minds, it is earnestly to be
hoped that this thoroughly admirable life of him will find
many careful readers.

4. TO-MORROW IN CUBA.*

Mr. Pepper has given us a remarkably comprehensive and
at the same time accurate volume on the past history and
present condition and future prospects of Cuba. It deals with
the affairs of the island from an unusually varied point of
view. The first half of the book is given over to tracing dur-
ing the last half century the struggles of the people for
autonomy, for self-government, and finally for independence ;
and it is done with an accuracy that is born of careful study,
and wide reading, and close observation. Mr. Pepper has evi-
dently had very favorable opportunities of meeting and talk-
ing with many of the principal actors in the scenes he de-
scribes, and his information appears to be first hand.

The chapter on the religious conditions of the people in
some respects overstates what is really the case, but at the
same time it lays bare a deplorable state of affairs that is
both a warning and a sorrow.

It is outrageous that Spain should have been permitted to
prostitute the highest and holiest relations of a people to its
own nefarious purposes. While the union of church and state
is theoretically the highest and best relationship, yet oftener
than not with a state that has lost its Christian character the
union becomes degraded into a sort of concubinage, in which
the church the weaker vessel is merely used to pander to
the lusts of the state for dominion. One cannot consider the
deplorable condition of Cuba and the Cubans and not wish
that the Spanish power had been banished from the island
a century ago.

To-Morrow in Cuba is a valuable hand-book of Cuban affairs.
It possesses so much truth and states it so impartially that
we hope very soon to make it a text for an extended article
on educational and religious conditions on the island.

* To-Morrow in Cuba. By Charles M. Pepper. New York : Harper and Brothers.

THE school system of New York is undergoing
a process of remoulding. An effort is being made
to unify the Department of Public Instruction
and the Regents. It has been suggested that some very emi-
nent educationist be selected for the dignified position of
Chancellor. The wise suggestions of the Governor are assum-
ing definite shape in a proposed Education Bill, and unless
some hack politician blocks the wheels for the sake of the
patronage, we may expect in the early future a well-rounded,
harmonious system.

There is no reason why this systenr should not include the
schools of volunteer educational societies as well as the regular
public schools. The children in the former schools are just as
much children of the State as those in the latter, and the
principle of including them has been admitted from time im-
memorial by the Regents. The principle of classification
should be one of merit, rigidly and impartially enforced. When
the principle of merit is firmly established, it will co-ordinate
and harmonize the whole system. Equal rights to all classes.

It is time for the nations of the world to call a halt in this
dreadful drama of war. The Boers have won a right, by their
stubborn resistance as well as by their good fighting, to be
parleyed with. If other nations insist, particularly if the
United States formulates a proposition to arbitrate, prolonged
warfare with all its horrid evils may be put an end to.

The missionary movement towards non-Catholics which as-
sumed a definite shape a few years ago is now bearing fruit.
We are able to trace the record of 1,144 converts during the
last three months of the last year. While these have been
actually recorded, name and address, they stand for a much
larger class whose admission to the church has not been made
public. This comparatively small number is but the vanguard
of a great throng that is looking to the Church of God for
salvation.

1900.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 717

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

THE History of Education is now required in all normal schools and colleges
for teachers, though the books selected are often filled with many inaccura-
cies, especially in dealing with Catholic countries. Dr. Levi Seeley, professor
of pedagogy in the New Jersey State Normal School, has evidently realized the
difficulty of presenting a correct account of the work done for education in past
ages. In his recent book, published by the American Book Company, he has
given an extensive bibliography, in which he recognizes the Educational Essays
of Brother Azarias published by D. H. McBride as deserving a place. It is
to be regretted that he did not exclude such works as Painter's History of Edu-
cation, Quick's Educational Reformers, and Draper's Intellectual Development
of Europe. The verdict of honest thinkers has shown these writers to be blinded
by bigotry, unreliable in their statement of facts, and unjust to the early Christian
teachers, who, wearing the religious garb, laid the foundations of great univer-
sities and taught the rudiments of knowledge to the barbarian tribes of Europe.
Teachers will find in Dr. Seeley's work, condensed into a very brief space, a
clear account of the methods and principles of teaching of all nations, and all
the chief educators from the earliest times to the present, together with a
description of the school systems of Germany, France, England, and the United
States. An excellent index places all the contents of the work at the disposal
of the student, and the references to larger and fuller works, together with the
bibliography, form a guide for those who wish to pursue their studies further.
The author seems to have had personal experience of teaching, and so to have
been able to seize upon the distinctive points in the various systems, and thus to
go to the heart of the matter at once. There is an evident desire to be fair to
those systems and methods which prevailed when the Catholic Church held the
control of education ; and, when we consider the stand-point of the author as a
Protestant and the difficulty involved in the attempt to compress within brief
limits the salient features of vast and complicated systems, a large degree
of success has been attained. To Scholasticism four pages are devoted.
Several of the statements made in this account we cannot accept, nor
does Dr. Seeley seem to have himself always formed a definite judgment.
Was Erigena or St. Anselm the founder of Scholasticism ? In no sense can we
look upon Abelard as a representative Scholastic ; nor do we think that justice
is done to St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Doctor of the Schools, by mentioning
him along with Scotus and Occam as a great Schoolman.

Scholasticism was so far from dissenting from the teachings of St. Augus-
tine and the ascetics that, after welding them into one whole with the philoso-
phy of Aristotle, so far as that philosophy was true, it passed those teachings on
to our own times ; and it is in and through Scholasticism that St. Augustine's
influence and power over the modern church have been wielded. And if the
scholastic method sought to base education on reason instead of authority, as
Dr. Seeley thinks, how will he account for the condemnation by Pius IX. of the
German theologians who ventured to criticise that method ?

We cannot, therefore, endorse and approve of all the judgments expressed
by the author, and might go on indefinitely in a criticism of various points. At
the same time a large measure of praise is accorded to Catholic work, and its ex-

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Feb.,

cellence and merits are more fully recognized than in various other works which
might be mentioned. This will be seen by those who refer to the chapters
on Monastic Education, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, the Crusades and their
influence as an educational movement. We commend to the advocates aad
defenders of the present school system of the United States the principles of
Pedagogy laid down by Luther as stated on p. 169. The first of these prin-
ciples is: parents are responsible for the education of their children; while
the third states that Religion is the foundation of all school education. Luther
recognized the right of the state to interfere, but only as an enforcer of these

principles.

* * *

Twelve words are affected by the recent change in spelling in the official
publications of the University at Chicago. These words are catalogue, peda-
gogue, demagogue, prologue, decalogue, although, though, thorough, thorough-
fare, through, throughout, and programme. They will appear in all university
publications according to the new arrangement as follows : Catalog, pedagog,
demagog, prolog, decalog, altho, tho, thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, and pro-
gram. These spellings are already in use in the publications of the National

Education Association.

* * ^ *

At the recent meeting of the Comparative Literature Society in Carnegie
Lyceum, New York City, the subject was the Persian epic, Firdausi's Shah
Namah, and the lecturer Professor A. V. W. Jackson, of Columbia University.
Mrs. Horace E. Deming introduced the speaker, who gave a scholarly exposi-
tion of the life and writings of the Persian poet, from his rise, in the latter part
of the tenth century, to his death in 1010. The lecture was well illustrated with
lantern slides. Many interesting reproductions of ancient Persian writings and
paintings were shown. The Comparative Literature Society is studying histori-
cally the development of literature in the leading civilizations of the world, and
took up in 1896 the mediaeval epic and drama, followed by The Dawn of Litera-
ture and The Comparative Study of Folk-lore.

The development of the early epic will be traced this season, the object be-
ing to determine, by a comparison of civilizations as distinct as Babylonia,
India, Finland, Iceland, and Mediaeval France, to what extent the human mind
has exhibited identical processes in its literary evolution.

The programme for the year includes the following lectures : The Anglo-
Saxon Epic, Beowulf, by Professor A. V. W. Jackson ; The Greek Epic, Homer,
by Professor Thomas Davidson; The Sanscrit Epic, by Professor Charles R.
Lanman, Harvard; The Irish Epic, by Professor F. N. Robinson, Harvard ; The
Mediaeval French Epic, by Professor Arthur R. Marsh ; The Babylonian Epic,
by Professor Morris Jastrow, University of Pennsylvania ; The Finnish Epic, the
Kalevala, by Professor G. L. Kittredge, Harvard, and The Mediaeval Germanic
Epic, by Professor Charles Sprague Smith, president of the society.

* * *

Advocates of a new copyright bill in England are hoping to secure copy-
right for the life-time of the author and for thirty years afterward. In France
the period of fifty years is added to that in which the author himself enjoys his
privileges. In Spain and Italy it is eighty years. The question as to how long
copyright should last has been put by the London Academy to a number of
English authors. From the replies quoted it is evident that Sir Walter Besant
canoot count on the support of all writers for the contention that copyright
should last for ever.

1900.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 719

Mr. Herbert Spencer: In 1877, when a commission on copyright was
sitting, I argued in favor of the duration now proposed the author's life and
thirty years after his death. Certainly I think fifty years after his death would
be better, since it would nearly always cover the possible life of his widow. The
question of perpetual copyright I have not considered.

Mr. Frederic Harrison : In my opinion, the proper period for the duration of
literary copyright should be seven years from registration.

Dr. F. J. Furnivall : I think copyright is quite long enough now, and that
authors ought to be grateful to the public for making their rights last so much
longer than those of patentees, who deserve just as much protection as authors.
It is only writers' conceit that makes them think themselves so valuable, and
nothing should be done to encourage their delusion.

Mr. G. Bernard Shaw : The proposal of perpetual copyright is a piece of
rapacious impudence. Would it benefit anybody if the heirs of John Bunyan
were now wallowing idly in royalties on 'I he Pilgrim's Progress instead of
working honestly for their living ?

Considering that an inventor who enriches the world is granted patent-
rights for fourteen years only, it is not clear why an author, who possibly de-
bauches it, should get from thirty to over one hundred years' copyright. The
present term is too long, except in a very few special cases, for which extension
should be granted on application to the courts. If the descendants of authors
want copyrights, they can earn them by writing books.

Mr. VV. L. Courtney : I do not think perpetual copyright is desirable, be-
cause a book, being a national possession, ought to be made accessible to the
nation. Nor can I think it feasible, because an author's descendants will be
either lost or drift into other families.

I think copyright should extend for two generations say sixty years,
roughly. And I feel that its duration in the hands of any single publisher
should be limited, say, to six or ten years.

Mr. Rider Haggard : I imagine that most people interested would be satis-
fied with " during the author's life-time and thirty years." This, in the vast
majority of cases, would mean a copyright of at least sixty years, and in many
cases of eighty or one hundred ; after that .

Mr. Edward Clodd: The books needing protection under copyright are
not so much those whose success is rapid, but those for which, after long years
of neglect and slow sale, a demand, with steady and often increasing sale, arises,
such as Meredith's works. Hence I would grant copyright for at least three
generations.

Mr. Alfred Nutt: That copyright should be perpetual is the counsel of
perfection; permanent possession of an artistic product is far more defensible
than permanent possession of land, of raw materials of manufacture, or of the
manufactured article. But it is a counsel of perfection which lies outside the
range of practical politics. At the very least, however, the term of copyright
should be extended so as to profit, should the right be a source of profit, the de-
scendants of the holder to the third generation. Many works only become
profitable from half a century to a century after the author's death, because then
only are they recognized as classics and benefit by a forced sale consequent
upon their introduction into the educational curriculum of the country; it is
scandalous that the writer should not be able to leave this chance of wealth to
his descendants, or should not be able to discount it during his life-time, which
he can only do if the purchaser of his right has the assurance of a lengthened
term during which to enjoy it. It now happens that almost the only writer who
can sell his copyright to advantage is the one who, from the stand-point of the
permanent interests of literature and humanity, deserves the least consideration
and protection the ephemeral novelist.

Mr. Anthony Hope: In reply to your questions, I think: That perpetual
copyright is not desirable. It would be compatible with the public interests
only under the most stringent safeguards, and would not be a good form of
hereditary property, as it would entail neither duties nor responsibility. That
the term proposed in the new bill is" satisfactory, and should, for the present at

720 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Feb., 1900.

least, be accepted by authors. In the great majority of cases it would give a

material increase on the present term, and it covers the time during which a

man's immediate descendants are naturally dependent on the results of his labors.

* * *

Is Cheap Literature Cheapening Literature ? was discussed not long ago by
Professor H. Thurston Peck, of Columbia University, editor of the Bookman, and S.
S. McClure, at the meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Mr. McClure spoke from the publisher's point of view. Professor Peck's views
were those of the literary man. Professor -Peck maintained that cheap literature
not only cheapened literature, but also the reading public and the literary worker.
In other times books were expensive ; people thought seriously about a book be-
fore they bought it. People who read were fewer in number, but they were
more discriminating. The man of many books was a rarity. The man of a few
books is a rarity to-day. The man of many books is a nuisance. Every one
writes nowadays. Pens, ink, and stationery are all that is required. Publishers
will take " flyers " as experiments. Stories are syndicated, published in cheap
magazines and in paper editions. Successful authors write at least three books a
year unless they are very lazy, and this because they all are bribed by the pub-
lishers' big prices. Writers cheapen literature by looking down at the pygmies
instead of up at the immortals, and as a result write a little worse each day.
Readers cheapen literature by reading Hall Caine instead of Trollope or Thack-
eray. Too much is read and too much is written. The popular superstition of
the day is that one must keep up with the new books. When a man despairs of
doing this he takes to book reviews, finally falls to literary notes, and after that
of course reads no literature at all. In the old days it was different. Literary
men didn't write because their books had a vogue. They treated their work
seriously. It was an art as well as a profession, and they put their heart and soul
into it. They were not grasping. Gibbon took twelve years to write the first
volume of his history, and twenty-four years to complete the series. Tennyson
made notes for The Idylls of the King as long ago as 1833. Three years at
least elapsed between the appearance of each of Thackeray's novels. What the
reading public wants and what the money-ridden authors need is a race of
vigorous critics, men of courage, audacity, wit, satire, and knowledge, who would
not give pallid appreciations of books but would scourge writers to a sense of re-
sponsibility by criticisms that would smash, blister, excoriate, and draw blood !

Mr. Taylor, president of the club, addressed a few remarks to the audience
when Professor Peck had finished his dissertation. Mr. Taylor said that the
club always liked to hear both sides of a question, and before those who were
inspired by Professor Peck went home to sell their libraries to the junk-shops the
speaker for the negative would present the other side of the case.

S. S. McClure, the well-known publisher, traced the history of cheap litera-
ture in this country, which began forty years ago, when English standard
fiction was sold for a dime a volume, to the time when the passage of the Inter-
national Copyright law brought about a standard American literature. Answer-
ing Professor Peck's appeal for a race of vigorous critics, Mr. McClure declared
that there was no use under heaven for the critic. The man who bought the
book was the real critic, and so discriminating was he that a publisher could not
sell a poor book. In saying this, Mr. McClure declared, he spoke from experi-
ence. As for the modern reader spending too much time in trying to keep
abreast of the multitudinous literature of the day, Mr. McClure said the people
of this country spent on the average only two cents a week on literature. Pro-
ceeding to controvert the first speaker's assertion that authors of this generation
gave way to the temptation of doing profitable rather than high-class work, Mr.
McClure referred to such men as George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and others, and asked if they
could be tempted. Cheap literature, he maintained, brought the standard and
classic works into every home, and was thereby the means of fostering the taste
for good literature rather than cheapening it.

Miss Isabel F. Hapgood spoke of the spoiling influence upon young minds
of cheap and trashy novels. In spite of the experience claimed by Mr. McClure,
there is a low-grade publisher abroad whose books and periodicals are offensive-
ly cheap and nasty. Would that they could be banished from the market !

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LXX.

MARCH, 1900.

No. 420.

t "A 1 i'ight by j 'antes J. Tissot.

/y Pet mission of McCinre-Titsot Co.

And when He drew n?ar, seeing the City, He wept over it.

(Luke .if.i. 41.)

FRIDAY HORNING JESUS IN PRISON.

Binding Jesus, they led Him away and delivered Him to Pilate.

(Mark xv i.)

M vo3(MX3ftv>1 IflASAM

Lc>t>v>-j'ght by James J. Tissot. By permission of McClure-Tissot Co.

And they put over His head His cause written : This is Jesus the King of the Jews.

( Mattliew xxvii. 37.)

And they came to the place which is called Golgotha, which is the place of Calvary.
And they give Him wine to drink mingled with gall. And when He had tasted, He
would not drink. (Matthew xxvii. 33 - 34 .)

By permission of McClure-Ttssot Co.

AGNUS DEI THE SCAPEGOAT.

And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats ; one lot for the
Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell,
and offer him for a sin-offering.

But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be
presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and
to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Then shall he kill the goat of the sin-offering, that is for the
people, and bring his blood within the veil, . . . and sprinkle it
upon the mercy seat, and before the mercy seat.

And he shall make an atonement for the holy place because of
the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their trans-
gressions in all their sins.

(Leviticus .rvi. 8, 9 10, 15-16.)

IQOO.] DR. MlVART Off CONJ2NUITY OF THE CHURCH. 725

DR. MIVART ON THE CONTINUITY OF THE

CHURCH.

BY REV. JAMES J. FOX, D.D. (Catholic University of America}.

WO articles appeared last month, one in the
Fortnightly and the other in the Nineteenth
Century, from the pen of Dr. St. George
Mivart, which have been received with deep
interest among men of all shades of thought,
and, it is not too much to say, have profoundly and painfully
shocked the feelings of all Catholics who have read them or
learned of their contents. Dr. Mivart has, in the past, done good
service to the Catholic cause. His co-religionists were proud
of the position which he occupies as a recognized authority on
biological science. They were grateful for the work which his
knowledge in that department enabled him to do for Catholic
philosophy. They are, consequently, all the more grieved to
find him proposing a theory in flat contradiction to the basic
principles of the Catholic Church. And sorrow gives place to
indignation as they observe that, to borrow the expression of
an English Protestant newspaper, The Guardian, Dr. Mivart in
treating of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith has
displayed a levity and a want of reverence totally alien from
the Christian temper.

The more important of the two articles the one in the
Nineteenth Century proposes to examine the question : Is there
any really true continuity among Roman Catholics ?

He states what he considers to be the answer': though
great modifications as to worship and ecclesiastical organiza-
tion, and many developments of doctrine, have taken place, yet
it is a notorious fact that no such sudden and considerable
changes have simultaneously occurred as would constitute a
breach of continuity. Yet, he proceeds, great modifications in
belief, which never have been embodied in dogmatic decrees,
have arisen ; and it is possible that, in the opinion of some,
these changes are great enough to constitute a breach of con-
tinuity.

In the course of his article Dr. Mivart states that he does
not wish it to be understood that he himself adopts all " the

726 DR. Mi v ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. [Mar.,

novel views " which he brings forward in his argument. And
in a subsequent letter to the London Tablet he protests against
that journal's charging him with putting forth his own opinions
under the cloak of anonymity. The more atrocious views,
which concern the mysteries of the Resurrection and the Con-
ception of our Lord, he certainly only mentions as being held by
some anonymous persons of his acquaintance ; and we cannot
fairly tax him with holding them himself. But whether he
holds them or does not hold them is of minor importance, in
face of the fact that he maintains a principle which if true
would justify Catholics in entertaining those or any other
opinions which their individual fancies might devise. The
proposition which his entire article is intended to prove is
that, (i) The continuity of the Church does not embrace a
continuity of doctrine her formal dogmatic teaching may so
vary that what has been held at one time to be divine truth,
may be abandoned (and in some cases has been abandoned)
for an opposite doctrine, provided this change takes place
gradually and silently. (2) Consequently external continuity of
relationship among the members is the only kind to which
Catholicity can lay claim. Furthermore he states that such
cardinal doctrines as the Resurrection of our Lord, His super-
natural Conception, and the Virginity of the Mother of God
are being given up by " good Catholics."

Dr. Mivart declares that he is no theologian, and that he
has no claim to be regarded as a representative of any portion
of the Catholic body. These two statements were entirely un-
necessary. His views as to what constitutes continuity in reli-
gious belief, his conception of what is meant by the Church,
of what dogma is, are in direct conflict with the meaning which
Catholics, whether theologians or not, attach and have attached
to these terms. The fundamental claim of the Catholic Church
is that she is the guardian of the divine truth which, through
the channel of supernatural revelation, has been imparted by
God to man. This is the fact which underlies and justifies her
existence. The claims which she advances to authority over
the minds of men, calling for their submission, are based on
the principle that to her have been given by Christ the doc-
trine of his religion, and the office of preaching it to the
nations. If she is so much concerned for the vindication of
her Apostlic origin, and of the Apostolic succession of her
Supreme Pontiffs, it is chiefly because these two facts are
proofs that her doctrine is not her own, but that of Him who

1933.] DR. M IV ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH.

sent her. Unity of external worship, unity of government,
must be based on unity of belief, without which they are but
a specious fabric resting upon no solid ground. St. Paul com-
prehensively indicates the various aspects of Christian unity,
and traces it to the centre of origin : one body, one spirit, one
hope of their calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.

Dr. Mivart, on the contrary, considers the Church, or
Catholicity, as he prefers to call it, a mere system of external
relationships existing among the members, who hold together
as best they can on a continually shifting basis of belief.
What has been held as divine truth may all be rejected in
favor of its contradictory. This assertion, it is needless to
remark, is a direct negation of the Church's claim to have in-
fallibility guaranteed to her by the promise of her Founder.
But it goes further than a denial of the Church's infallibility,
for it strikes at the existence of divine revelation. If it is
possible for the fundamental doctrines of Christianity- and Dr.
Mivart has directed his attack against each of them to be
gradually emptied of their content, and to be interpreted in a
contrary sense, which in its turn can stand firm only on con-
dition that it is approved by human reason, then divine super-
natural revelation is a delusion. It has communicated no
abiding truth to man. Faith is abolished, for we are to believe
only what we know by reason and may scientifically demon-
strate. If it is possible that for hundreds of years false views
have been held by all Christians as revealed truth, then the
Church or religion call it which you will founded by Christ,
if he ever did found a Church or a religion, has long since
disappeared from this earth. Christianity has, from the be-
ginning, appealed to miracles as the supreme, incontestable
witness to its divine origin ; and since the days of the Apostles
the miracle of miracles on which it relied for proof of its
Founder's divinity is the fact that on the third day after His
death He rose living from the tomb. Yet Dr. Mivart tells us
there are indications that Catholic doctrine is undergoing a
radical change on this dogma ; a " learned theologian," " as
scrupulous as he is pious," believes that if it were demon-
strated that Christ's body decayed and perished in the tomb,
the doctrine of the Resurrection would still remain true and in-
contestable. In other words, the Catholic Church may yet
come to admit that Strauss and Eikhorn have proved their
case, that the Gospel narrative is but a tissue of myth and
fable, and that Renan, not St. John or St. Luke, is the

[Mar.,

reliable authority for the life of Jesus. Dr. Mivart asserts,
towards the close of his extraordinary article, that his aim is to
strengthen Catholicity. If we give him credit for good-will,
we can do so only at the expense of his understanding. A
man who has written ably and logically on many abstruse
questions of philosophy must have completely lost his intellec-
tual perspective when he failed to perceive that such a theory
as this is the direct negation of what is most vital in Catholic-
ity. In the long warfare which, for ages, the Catholic Church
has waged against her opponents, pagan and heretic, from the
Gnosticism of the second century to the Agnosticism of the
nineteenth, one principle has been acknowledged by all parties
in the conflict : any argument that proves the Church for a
moment to have abandoned what she once proposed as Divine
Truth administers her death-blow. Prove that the Infallible
Church once has rested on error, and the long enduring fabric
falls to cureless ruin. Had Dr. Mivart but attended to a
passage in a writer whom he has quoted rather unfairly, he
never would have written the solemn paradox which , he has
entitled " The Continuity of Catholicism." " At every period
of her history," writes Dr. Hogan, " we find her (the Catholic
Church) still more solicitous to preserve the faith in its purity
than to propagate it among men. In the course of ages she
may have passed through phases of darkness, intellectual and
moral ; her champions may have at times lacked earnestness
and vigor in their fight against evil ; but never do we detect
in her the slightest trace of indifference or neglect when the
purity or integrity of her faith is assailed. The discordant
note of doctrinal error is the one thing to arouse her from
momentary torpor, and to intensify all her energies. Like the
enemy's trumpet or battle-cry for the sleeping warrior, it brings
her at once to her feet, makes her summon hastily her forces;
nor will she know peace until the foe has been irrevocably
defeated and crushed. The battle may go on for years or for
ages, she may reckon among her opponents those whom the
world most readily follows, or she may find herself one day
forsaken by her most trusted friends ; she may lose in the
protracted contest the treasures of earth and the favor of
kings; she may have to weep over the noblest and dearest of
her children slain for her cause it matters not. To her one
particle of divine truth is more than all human favors and
worldly goods, more than the brightest prospects held out to a
diminished creed. This is the one thing in which she knows

i goo.] DR. Mi v ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. 729

no compromise " (Clerical Studies, p. 145). The only continuity
which Catholicity requires, in Dr. Mivart's opinion, is an ex-
ternal continuity of members, held together by an adherence
to empty verbal formulae. If the impossible were to happen,
and the Church were once to lose her continuous unity of faith,
the history of religions, especially that of Protestantism, teaches
emphatically that external continuity would soon cease to ex-
ist. In Catholicity, with its mysteries above the grasp of
human reason ; with its principles of asceticism so opposed to
human passion, and its principle of authority, which galls the
pride of intellect ; with the immense number of peoples, who
have scarcely anything else in common, within its fold, the
process of disintegration would be more swift than that which
is now achieving its course in Protestantism. The law of decay
is that its rapidity is in proportion to the complexity of the
elements involved.

There runs through the articles in the Fortnightly and the
Nineteenth Century, as well as through many previous writings
of Dr. Mivart, a tone of acrimony arising from a sense of un-
fair treatment sustained by him at the hands of some subor-
dinate ecclesiastical authorities. Now, it is a trite principle of
psychology that the intellectual faculty may be very seriously
affected in its own sphere by the influence of the emotional
side of our being. But one would hardly have expected that
any sense of personal grievances, real or imaginary, should
have so far influenced the author of On Truth as to allow him
to fancy that were the unity of faith reduced to the character
which he imputes to it there would be any Catholicity or any
supernatural religion left standing.

The most potent influence in the genesis of Dr. Mivart's
perverted views he points out himself. He declares he is no
theologian and everybody who has the slightest tincture of
that science will, after reading the doctor's article, be willing
to confirm the doctor's statement. When, then, we bear in
mind the strong denunciations which, there and elsewhere, he
launches against theologians for presuming without scientific
knowledge to adjudicate upon questions of physical science,
we may well ask him why he, with confessedly no theological
training, presumes to handle with all the assurance of a master
some of the most intricate subjects in the whole range of
theology. He is no theologian, yet he professes to determine
what, in the past, has been held by Catholic faith concerning
the dogmas of the Incarnation and Redemption. He is no

730 DR. M iv ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. [Mar.,

theologian, yet he presumes to apply the Regula Fidei with as
much assurance as he would employ a carpenter's rule. If he
is no theologian, how can he define what has been exactly
the beliefs held as Catholic doctrine in ages gone by, and
what is held to-day? And if he does not know both what has
been taught as of faith formerly, and what is taught now, how
can he pronounce that there has been a change in Catholicism ?
A judgment implies a comparison ; a comparison cannot be
instituted till we know the nature of the objects compared.
Dr. Mivart's entire article, thesis, argument and conclusion,
stands an eloquent monument to the danger involved in
neglecting the wisdom of the old proverb, Ne sutor ultra
crepidam.

He must certainly have read carefully Cardinal Newman's
Development of Doctrine ; yet in it are lucidly stated the prin-
ciples which negative all the doctor's arguments. Even as a
biologist he might be expected to remember that essential
change is one thing, natural development another. In his
statements, as well as in the character of the instances which
he sets forth as illustrations of change in Catholic faith, Dr.
Mivart shows himself ignorant of what was Catholic faith in
the past and what it is to-day. His view of doctrinal con-
tinuity is that the Church is satisfied with preserving the
verbal formulae, and guarding against any violent disruption in
belief, while she is indifferent to even radical changes which
come about slowly and silently. The Catholic Church is irrevo-
cably committed to precisely the contrary position. All doc-
trines formally defined by her as part of the original deposit of
faith, must be retained in the same sense in which they have been
proposed by the Church. " If any one shall assert," says the
Council of the Vatican, " that to dogmas proposed by the Church
it may be possible, according to the progress of science, to give
a meaning different from that which the Church has understood,
let him be anathema " (Const, de Fide, cap. iv. can. 3). The
truth of such can never be abrogated or diminished. But the
definitions of the Church may not, and usually do not, undertake
to set forth such truth in all its details and with complete cir-
cumscription. They generally profess to bring out some aspect
of the truth dealt with which is required to condemn some
contrary error prevalent at the time. Again, the full force and
scope of the definition are usually far from determined. But
these declarations of the Church are never, as Dr. Mivart
would, have them to be, Pythonic utterances that may be taken

1900.] DR. Mi v ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. 731

in one sense to-day, and in an opposite one to-morrow. Sub-
sequently they may be amplified and enlarged, or more accur-
ately expressed to bring out more exactly their import, or
express explicitly a doctrine which lay within them from the
beginning. This development corresponds to that which may
take place in our natural knowledge. " There is no aspect
deep enough," writes Cardinal Newman, " to exhaust the con-
tents of a real idea ; no one term or proposition which will
serve to define it." If this be true of natural ideas, how much
more will it be found to exist in the case of supernatural
truths which transcend human reason ; yet, if they are to be
communicated to men at all, must be expressed in the inade-
quate terms of human language. The course of development
which takes place in natural dynamic ideas is beautifully
sketched by Newman ; and his outline, mutatis mutandis, is
applicable to the process of theological development of dog-
matic doctrine, and still more strictly to ethical teaching.
" There will be a time of confusion when conceptions and mis-
conceptions are in conflict. . . . New lights will be brought
to bear upon the original statements of the doctrines put for-
ward ; judgments and aspects will accumulate. After awhile
some definite teaching emerges ; and as time proceeds, one
view will be modified or expanded by another, and then com-
bined with a third ; till the idea to which these aspects belong
will be to each mind separately what at first it was to all to-
gether. It will be surveyed, too, in its relation to other doc-
trines or facts, to other natural laws or established customs,
to varying circumstances of time and place. ... It will be
interrogated and criticised by enemies, and defended by well-
wishers. The multitude of opinions formed concerning it in
these respects and many others will be collected, compared,
sorted, sifted, selected, rejected, gradually attached to it, sepa-
rated from it in the minds of individuals and of the com-
munity. . . . And this body of thought, thus laboriously
gained, will after all be little more than the proper representa-
tive of one idea, being in substance what that idea meant from
the first, its complete image as seen in a combination of diver-
sified aspects" (Development of Doctrine, ed. London, 1888, p.
37). In this passage Newman seems but to have expanded
and adapted to his subject what St. Vincent of Lerins says of
Christian doctrine : " Shall we say that religion is unprogres-
sive in the Church of God ? Far from it ; the opposite is the
fact. Faith is ever progressive, but for ever unchanging ; for

732 DR. MIVART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. [Mar.,

progress means development without loss of identity (Com-
monitor turn, cap. xxiii.)

Another fact which Dr. Mivart has completely ignored in
his selection of instances which he thinks prove the doctrines
of Catholicity to have undergone a substantial change is that
of the beliefs current among Catholics at various times. Many
have never been taught by the Church at all, either as of faith
or even proximate to faith. Again, by consulting Dr. Hogan
he might have set himself right, and saved himself from pro-
posing as solid arguments sophisms which do little credit to
his understanding. " In order to allay the fears which the very
name of change in connection with theology is calculated to
awaken in certain minds, it is only necessary to recall the fact
that theology comprises a great variety of elements of very
unequal value dogmas of faith, current doctrines, opinions
truly debated, theories, inferences, conjectures, proofs of all
degrees of cogency, from scientific demonstration down to in-
timations of the feeblest kind" (Op. cit. y p. 166). " Around the
solid kernel of revealed truth, fully ascertained, there has been
from the beginning, and in increasing measure, a floating mass
of doctrinal elements, some of which in the course of time
have clung to the centre, others have disappeared, while many
more of doubtful character still remain, equally liable to van-
ish, or to be incorporated, or to continue floating and unset-
tled to the end " (/#., p. 167). Religious knowledge, as it is
found in books and in the minds of most believers, is " a com-
pound, not only of defined dogmas and of commonly accepted
doctrines, but also of probable deductions, of opinions and
conjectures, which each one is free to adopt or dismiss as his
judgment may dictate" (/#., p. 113). Ignoring this obvious
fact, Dr. Mivart enumerates a number of instances in which
popular opinions, conjectures, unauthorized interpretations of
Scripture, deductions through the application of once prevalent
scientific views to the truths of faith, have disappeared ; and
he assumes that such instances warrant him in declaring that
the doctrine of the Catholic Church has substantially changed.

In the cases which Dr. Mivart cites in support of his posi-
tion he obstinately ignores the obvious difference which exists
in the various kinds of beliefs held by Catholics. It suits his
purpose to assume that the Church guarantees as true every
theological opinion, every popular belief, or even that of some
private individual. This is a patent absurdity. He shows that
popular, beliefs to which the Church never committed herself

1900.] DR. M iv ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. 733

have disappeared, or undergone modification, and he maintains
that, therefore, orthodox doctrine is not what it has been, and
dogma has been substantially changed. He assumes that if he
shows a subordinate Roman Congregation to have erred on a
matter of physical science, therefore the Seat of Infallibility
has fallen into error. Dr. Mivart's logic is not less defective
than his theology. We cannot conclude from the particular to
the general, from the non-essential to the essential. Change is
a generic term covering consistent development and essential
transformation ; but development and essential transformation
are not, as they ought to be to suit Dr. Mivart, convertible
terms.

The first instance, for example, with which he introduces
his " catalogue of changes " is " the wonderful transformation
of belief as to the structure and nature of the universe which
has taken place since St. Thomas wrote his Summa contra Gen-
tiles." When it was found that the sun does not move round
the earth, but the earth round the sun, and that the earth, in-
stead of being, as was formerly believed, the centre of the
universe, is a mere speck, Catholic doctrine received a severe
shock ; the old dogmas of the Incarnation and Redemption
became much more difficult of acceptance, and they have since
undergone a change to adapt them to the truths of science.
Now, by what process of reasoning can the substitution of the
heliocentric for the geocentric theory be shown to compromise
the doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption as they were
taught by the Church in and before the thirteenth century?
In the full light of modern astronomical science they are
taught by the Church in the same sense as she taught them
fifteen or eighteen hundred years ago. The meaning of the
words which express them in the profession of faith submitted
to Dr. Mivart a few days ago by Cardinal Vaughan is in per-
fect harmony with the declarations of the Councils of Chalce-
don and Constantinople. Physical science will never discover
aught either to demonstrate or refute the truth of mysteries
which transcend human reason. In earlier days, when men be-
lieved that the sun moved round the earth, they naturally
adapted their religious beliefs to their notions of the universe.
They placed religious truth in the setting (to borrow a happy
phrase from Dr. Mivart) which their views of nature provided
for it. But these scientific views, if we may call them such,
were only a setting. The advance of knowledge has shattered
this frame ; the divine central truth of Revelation, nowise de-

734 & Mi v ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. [Mar.,

pendent on it, remained indestructible and unchangeable. It
lends itself to the heliocentric theory just as much as, it did
to the geocentric. There is no well-ascertained truth of astrono-
my that is not quite as compatible as was the Ptolemaic theory
with the Church's doctrines of sin, redemption, and everlasting
punishment. Dr. Mivart seems to think that in the days of
St. Thomas the geocentric theory was held as an undoubted
fact. We should have thought Dr. Mivart knew his St. Thomas
better. That writer, in two different works, remarks that while
the astronomical theories of the time seemed to explain the
apparent motions of the heavens, they might subsequently be
proved untenable by the discovery of facts yet unknown to
men. (See Summa, la, q. 32, a. I, ad. 2m, and Comment, in
Libras Aristotel., De Ccelo et Mundo, lib. iii. lee. 17.) And long
before St. Thomas more than one of the Fathers recognized
the earth to be but a mere atom of the universe. It certainly
never occurred to these men that the Church's doctrines of the
Incarnation, Redemption, sin, everlasting punishment, were es-
sentially connected with the theory that the earth is the im-
movable centre of the universe. If these doctrines, as they are
taught in the Church now, have gradually changed to bring
them into harmony with the heliocentric theory, then, in order
to grasp them, a knowledge of that theory is indispensable.
Consequently it would be the duty of a missionary, or any re-
ligious instructor, to teach his neophytes the true nature of the
diurnal motion. Before teaching them that the Son of God
became man, and that He ascended into Heaven, he should
carefully warn them that the apparent motion of the sun Ground
an immovable earth is an illusion, for the fact is that the earth
revolves around its axis, and thereby produces the phenomenon
of day and night. Does Dr. Mivart believe that concerning
the Incarnation there is any essential difference between the
belief of the most advanced orthodox astronomer who, next
May, will observe the total eclipse of the sun, and that of
some staunch, unlettered Catholic old woman who never has
even suspected that the sure and firm-set earth is constantly
whirling round its axis? Yet, from Dr. Mivart's point of view,
there must be a profound difference in the faiths of two such
persons.

The Church has always taught, and still teaches, that sin is
an offence against the goodness and majesty of God, and, if of
a mortal character, is deserving of everlasting punishment.
This belief retains its full vigor in Catholic minds, even since

1900.] DR. Mi v ART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. 735

the publication of Happiness in Hell. No accumulation of scien-
tific knowledge concerning the nature of volcanoes will in any
way affect that doctrine. Masses of the faithful totally incapa-
ble of any philosophic reflection will surely represent God to
themselves through the medium of some mental picture. Others
of more cultivation recognize that no such representation can
bear even the faintest analogical resemblance to the nature of
the Infinite, Eternal God ; yet the belief of the illiterate
peasant and that of the trained theologian is essentially the
same.

Dr. Mivart alludes to the conviction, extensively prevalent
among the early Christians, that the world would soon be de-
stroyed. He says that this belief was de fide, " an article of
the Christian faith," and, therefore, its disappearance is an
instance of the vanishing of dogma. Dr. Mivart evidently sees
no distinction between dogmas of faith and popular beliefs.

As to the astonishing and shocking statements which Dr.
Mivart makes about Catholics who attend church to worship
the Madonna " as the only available representative of Venus";
concerning " good Catholics " who doubt the Resurrection, and
" learned theologians " who think they see a tendency towards
a modification of the orthodox belief in the Virginal Concep-
tion of our Lord, we have little to remark. The history of
religious and philosophic error warns us that we may not be-
forehand set any bounds to the extravagances of individual
human reason, when it presumes to set itself up as the supreme
judge of truth. The long list of heresies and propositions
condemned by the Church bear abundant witness to the fact
that " learned theologians " may fall into infidelity, and doctors
in Israel become castaways. But Catholics, learned and un-
learned, Protestant journals and secular newspapers, have
united in affirming that if there are any individuals holding
the views which Dr. Mivart refers to, the place of these per-
sons is without, not within, the fold of Catholicism. In a
letter recently published in the Times Dr. Mivart explains that
when he spoke of exceptional opinions held by good Catholics,
he did not mean to affirm that they were theologically blame-
less, but simply that they were persons who looked upon
themselves as Catholics, while leading " good " lives, in the
ordinary sense of the term. When he offered this explanation
Dr. Mivart must have forgotten that his avowed purpose in
citing these opinions was to prove that substantial change is
taking place in the belief of orthodox Catholics.

736 DR. MIVART ON CONTINUITY OF THE CHURCH. [Mar.,

The most conclusive refutation of Dr. Mivart's article is fur-
nished by himself, in the correspondence between him and
Cardinal Vaughan which has grown out of the publication of
the article. As the Ordinary of Dr. Mivart the cardinal sub-
mitted to the doctor a profession of faith which he called upon
him to sign. This the doctor refused to do. Upon what
grounds ? That the dogmas or orthodox belief of Catholicism
could change ? No ; but, on the contrary, because they are
unchanged and unchangeable on one point at which Dr. Mivart
takes offence that is, the inspiration of Scripture. He finds
that Pope Leo and the Vatican Council reiterate the declara-
tions of Trent and Florence, in the same sense and meaning.
He refuses to believe that the Bible is inspired, and recogniz-
ing that the Catholic Church is committed to this dogma, Dr.
Mivart declines to subscribe to the profession of Catholic
faith.

No more eloquent commentary on the falseness and shal-
lowness of Dr. Mivart's theory concerning Catholic continuity
could be desired or conceived. His action shows that " doctrine
is where it was, and usage, and precedent ; there may be
changes, but they are consolidations or adaptations ; all is un-
equivocal and determinate, with an identity which there is no
disputing. Indeed, it is one of the most popular charges against
the Church, at this very time, that she is ' incorrigible ' ; change
she cannot, if we listen to St. Athanasius or St. Leo ; change
she will not, if we believe the controversialist or the alarmist
of the present day " (Development of Doctrine, p. 444).

Dr. Mivart is the latest witness to the unchangeable nature
f Catholic doctrine.

THE STUDENTS ARE PREPARED FOR PUBLIC LIFE.

THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.

BY MAX MENDEL.

! N the threshold of the twentieth century thought-
ful minds will naturally take count of the chief
forces for good and evil which will operate
during the next hundred years. Thus, some con-
sideration of the world-renowned teaching order
founded by Jean Baptiste de La Salle, whose canonization will
be announced shortly, seems to be eminently in season at this
juncture.

In tracing the history of the Brothers of the Christian
Schools we are led back to the fourteenth century, a period
which many ill-informed non-Catholic writers love to depict as
VOL. LXX. 47

738 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

totally devoid of anything like organized effort for popular
education, as this much misused term is understood to-day.

Even as far back as the fourteenth century there were
the " Little Schools," devoted to the instruction of what to-
day are called " the masses " ; and while these establishments
flourished chiefly in France, where they had been founded
after the University of Paris received due legal recognition,
similar centres of primary instruction existed elsewhere. All
these benefited by the countenance and material aid of the
church, then, as now, the discerning patron of every movement
calculated to elevate the people to a .higher intellectual level.
Much of the benefit derivable from the " Little Schools "
never accrued, owing to the century of war commencing in
1350; but the intellectual evils resulting from this long period
of strife were largely remedied by the labors of the society of
teachers known as " maitres ecrivains," or writing masters,
established at Paris in 1570, whence it spread to many other
cities. In the schools of this admirable society the secular
subjects included writing, arithmetic, and a little Latin, the
pupils being supposed to aid the clergy in the various church
services. The maitres Ecrivains claimed many privileges and
had a practical monopoly of popular instruction.

These schools were in vigorous operation in the memorable
year of 1651, when Jean Baptiste de La Salle, illustrious
founder of the " Brothers of the Christian Schools," was born
at Reims.

De La Salle came of a distinguished family, his father
being an eminent advocate and king's counsel, a much more
honorable orifice then than subsequently, while both his parents
could trace a long line of famous pedigree. The future bene-
factor of his kind early showed all those beautiful and winning
traits of heart and intellect which have so often marked, as
" souls apart," the man whom God has destined for great ends.
So that it is not surprising to find Jean Baptiste de La Salle
the canon of Reims when but fifteen years old, though not
ordained priest until 1678.

The ardent piety and tender consideration for others which
had long marked the life of the young ecclesiastic, and which
had made him an ideal legal guardian for his brothers and
sisters, when death removed both father and mother, became,
if possible, more conspicuous once he was invested with the
dignity and grave responsibilities of the priesthood. So great
a reputation for virtue and zeal did he acquire that he soon

1900.] THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 739

A TYPICAL CLASS-ROOM.

found himself unconsciously heading a regenerative movement,
akin to what is called a mission to-day. His preaching drew
vast multitudes, and he was eagerly sought as a confessor.
Many conversions to a better life attended his priestly labors ;
and his , devotion, even then, to the education of youth caused
M. Roland, his spiritual director, to assign to him the charge of
a school founded by the Sisters of the Child Jesus for the in-
struction of poor girls. Under the fostering care of De La
Salle this school achieved marked success.

But perhaps more important results followed. It did not
require much reflection to see that a boys' school, on similar
lines, would produce equally good effects. Thus, when Mme.
de Maillefer, a relation of De La Salle's, and an energetic
patroness of education, commissioned M. Nyel of Rouen to
open such a school at Reims, that worthy layman found the
ground broken, as it were, for the undertaking. And, naturally,

740 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

a warm friendship sprang up between this enthusiastic edu-
cator and the zealous, far-seeing canon, who perceived the
scope of his own work for the elevation of the people sensibly
widening before his vision.

This was in the year 1680, when other good men and
women also devoted themselves to the cause of popular edu-
cation. The movement spread rapidly, and teachers were sent
to many cities and great seigneuries offered to provide schools
and salaries. De La Salle organized about himself a chosen
band of devoted co-workers, who were, like himself, all young
men.

But, despite the large measure of success attendant on these
efforts, the keen eye of De La Salle detected some grave defects
in the system of instruction, and in the training of the teachers,
such as it was. Himself one of the most systematic of men,
gifted with profound common sense, and a quick reader of
character, it was easy for him to see that if the popular
schools were to yield their best results there must be a clear
delimitation between primary and secondary instruction, and a

THEY TRAIN YOUNG MEN IN ALL BRANCHES OF COLLEGIATE STUDIES.

radical departure from the individual teaching of the day.,
which was fast becoming impossible, owing to the great in-
crease of pupils; while he saw also that many teachers were

i goo.] THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 741

but ill-fitted for their important work, through either lack of
sympathy or lack of proper training. Here, indeed, was a
great problem to be solved ; but the canon of Reims was truly
the man for the hour.

After a careful and exhaustive study of the conditions con-

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS.

fronting him, De La Salle originated the system of simultane-
ous instruction, in classes, and clearly defined what was to con-
stitute primary and what secondary education. And, to insure
the necessary efficiency on the part of the teachers, those whom
he had already closely associated with himself, under " com-
munity " rules, and the obligations of the vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, were to be trained in the novitiate of
his now thoroughly systematized Institute ; while the professors
and assistant teachers, collaborating with the " Brothers," were
to be trained in the normal school established by De La
Salle at Reims in 1685. Thus he was the real founder of
primary schools ; of simultaneous, or class instruction ; and of
the first regularly organized training-school for " primary "
teachers in Europe three great benefactions to his con-
temporaries and to posterity. The completed organization of

742 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

the Institute, under its present name and rules, dates from
1684.

Previous to this De La Salle had resigned his excellent
prospects of church preferment, and even his private fortune,
in order to set an example of self-abnegation and trust in God,
to the young men whom he had gathered around him in the
prosecution of his great undertaking, an effective and enduring
system of truly popular education that was to materially aid in
rescuing the children of the "plain people" from the clutches
of ignorance and vice.

The new schools gave free tuition, and were generally day-
schools, but boarders were accommodated in connection with
some ; and all met with extraordinary success. The saintly
founder often conducted classes himself; and, as the foremost
educator of his time, within his own chosen lines, was some-
times requested to reorganize, or otherwise reform, some large
and famous schools, belonging to other systems, notably that
connected with the Seminary of St. Sulpice at Paris. In De
La Salle's primary schools Latin was an optional subject. The
vernacular, French, and catechism received much attention, as
did writing and arithmetic. The Brothers were to be always
laymen'; thus differing from the teachers in the " Scuole Pie,"
or "Pious Schools," founded by Joseph Calasanctius in 1597,
who might become priests. In these schools Latin was obli-
gatory.

England is often supposed to have been the cradle of the
Sunday-school movement ; but long before England founded
Sunday-schools, De La Salle had established his " ecole do-
minical" at St. Sulpice, in 1699, for both secular and religious
instruction. But the first pioneer in this line was St. Charles
Borromeo, who, in 1580, had founded such a school at
Milan.

It can be seen from the foregoing that centuries before
the French Revolution by many ignorantly thought to have
marked the first foundation of primary schools for the " plain
people"- there was ample and efficient provision for the edu-
cation of the "masses," so-called. Since 1857 many writers in
France have unearthed a mighty collection of books, docu-
ments, etc., conclusively proving the truth of this statement,
The curriculum in these establishments included common
prayers, religious doctrine, the alphabet, numeration, and writ-
ing. Even the much-lauded primary schools of the Moors in
Spain" were decidedly inferior in the scope of their instruction.

1900.] THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 743

As to the more advanced schools of that and preceding ages,
their work and spirit are well if tersely set forth by the Rev.
John Talbot Smith, LL.D., in his admirable Life of Brother
Azarias. Says this brilliant and forcible writer:

" Very learned and very beautiful is his description of the
teachers, pupils, books, studies, methods, and discipline of
the most famous schools of the modern time ; the schools
which gave us all the great lights of the early ages,
so many of our greatest saints, and kept the lamp of
knowledge, in every department, burning through the centuries
of civil disorder. Their discipline, many of their studies, a
few of their methods, and their fine spirit, are the chief fea-
tures in the Catholic colleges and convents of the present
time, and in many secular schools. They trained the clergy,
the monks, the philosophers, the princes, the nobles, the gifted
geniuses of ten centuries."

It was inevitable that a great, good, and successful man
like De La Salle should make enemies; and he had many.
The envious, the unprogressive, and the merely meddlesome

As EDUCATORS THE BROTHERS HAVE ATTAINED THE FOREMOST RANK

744 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

seemed banded against him and his salutary innovations. He
had, also, to contend against years of ill health ; but his faith
in God, and in the future of his splendid educational system,
upheld him through all adversity. For years before his
death, in 1719, he had the gratification of receiving both royal
and high ecclesiastical approval, and of seeing his schools in
flourishing operation in many cities and towns of France.
There they have ever since continued the systematic programme
laid down by their illustrious founder; for even the demon-
ridden tempest of the French Revolution was powerless against
the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. A bull
of approbation from Benedict XIII., in 1725, made the Insti-
tute a religious congregation, which is to-day conducted on

IN THE CURRICULUM OF THE BROTHERS' SCHOOLS SCIENTIFIC STUDIES HOLD A

PROMINENT PLACE.

.substantially the same lines as those established by De La
:Salle in 1684. In addition to over thirty primary schools, a
normal school for the Brothers and four for other teachers, he
had founded also three practice schools connected with the
normal, -two boarding-schools, two schools of technical instruc-

IQOO.] THE BROTHERS of THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 745

THE CAMPUS AT MANHATTAN COLLEGE.

tion, a reformatory, and a Sunday-school, teaching commercial
branches as well as religion. Truly a master mind and a born
educator! Such, in brief, is the history of this great teaching
order.

Let us now consider the character of their work, as we find
it in evidence around us to-day, more especially in this coun-
try, where there are ample opportunities for comparison with
other educational systems. And, so doing, we will naturally
find ourselves studying more in detail, as it were, the spirit
which animated their illustrious founder, and which still in-
spires and directs the labors of the Brothers.

Jean Baptiste De La Salle had the ideal conception of
education. A fervent Catholic, his firm faith caused him to
make religion at once the foundation and the all-permeating
influence of his system of instruction. Above all else to be
considered, the pupil had a soul to be saved. But he was in
the world, and to a certain extent must be of it in order to

746 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

properly fulfil his duties as a social unit. To hold his own in
the battle of life, he must be mentally equipped with the best
weapons for attack and defence, so to speak. To this end his
education must be eminently practical ; the merely ornate
must yield first place to the strictly utilitarian. And it is easy
to see what an immense stride in this direction was taken
when De La Salle made Latin an optional subject in the
curriculum of his primary schools, intended, as already said,
principally for the "plain people," as another great and good
man of towering mental stature, Abraham Lincoln, has happily
expressed it. The use of the vernacular, as the chief vehicle
for instruction, has completely changed the scope and char-
acter of education immeasurably for the better, opening up as
it does domains of knowledge previously difficult of access to
the children of the poor and working classes. Thus, to-day
we find in the United States that the Brothers devote special
attention to imparting a thorough working knowledge of the
noble English tongue, probably the best of all languages for
the general purposes of expression. The term "thorough" is
here used advisedly; for thoroughness is the key-stone of the
Brothers' system of instruction. Both fundamental principles
and details are taught according to the rule of "line upon
line, and precept upon precept," frequent revisions of study
refreshing and strengthening the pupil's memory ; while, in
accordance with strictly modern methods, his reasoning powers
are appealed to at every suitable opportunity. And, in justice
to the memory of the saintly and far-seeing founder of the
Institute, it should here be recorded that De La Salle himself
was one of the first of European educators, if not indeed the
first, to perceive the great importance of constantly applying
ratiocination as well as memorizing to the ordinary subjects
of study,

The schools of the Brothers now include not only the ordi-
nary parochial day-school, but also the well-appointed tech-
nical, or " trade," school, the reformatory, and the full-fledged
college, so to speak, with its staff of able, earnest, and sym-
pathetic professors. In all these the instruction cannot be sur-
passed, on the chosen lines, by any association of teachers, lay
or clerical. And as this is eminently a " business " age, and
as we Americans are essentially a "business" people, the
Brothers' schools, more particularly the ordinary day-schools,
devote much attention to imparting a sound and thorough
business education. The average graduate of these schools

1900.] THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 747

can at least hold his own with him of any other similar school
in the fundamental subjects of penmanship, commercial arith-
metic, book-keeping, stenography, type-writing, and business
correspondence; while his thorough knowledge of the manly,
" all-round " English tongue enables him to easily shine on
occasions when there is demand for something outside a mere
business education. He derives much aid in reaching this
latter phase of his scholastic status from the great literary ex-

THE BROTHERS ARE IN THEIR CHAPEL AT HALF-PAST FOUR IN THE MORNING.

cellence of the text-books so carefully prepared by his in-
structors. The writer, who has had extensive opportunities for
observation on this and other educational points, ventures to
say that in this matter of literary excellence there are but few
series of school-books equal to those compiled by the Brothers
of the Christian Schools ; while in arrangement of details, and
general presentation of the subjects taught, the excellence of
the Institute's text-books is equally evident. To mention one
instance in particular, probably no better series of " Readers "
has ever been issued or used by any other educational
agency.

748 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

To be a graduate of La Salle Institute is a strong recom-
mendation in the eyes of many non-Catholic business men.
Even the most rabid anti-Catholic a type happily fast becom-
ing extinct in this land of broad thought and general enlight-
enment seldom fails to properly appreciate the fact that for
association in business and daily life it would be well-nigh
impossible to find young people with more integrity, general
moral elevation of character, and " all-round " business or
special technical ability, than are almost invariably possessed
by the graduates of the Christian Schools. The logical mind
of the American public, probably the most intelligent the
world has ever seen, has long since concluded that only good
results can accrue from the singleness of high and holy pur-
pose, the self-abnegation, the earnestness, and the thoroughly
trainqd teaching ability of the members of La Salle Institute.

From the foregoing it can be easily seen that the same ex-
cellence of results obtaining in the ordinary popular schools of
the Brothers is to be found also in the colleges conducted by
them.

As for the technical, or " trade," schools of La Salle Insti-
tute, it is well known that they too are unsurpassed of their kind.

In all the schools of La Salle Institute the pupils are taught
to be, first, and before all else, good Catholics, which insures
their being good citizens ; but although in theory, and essen-
tially, the secular aspect of their education is properly subor-
dinate to the religious, even the most exacting utilitarian, if
but reasonable, must feel satisfied by the admirable system of
instruction which in practical operation causes both religious
and secular instruction to, as it were, intertwine and progress
co-ordinately each preserving its proper place and character
in the harmonious and effective result.

It is unnecessary to say that the Brothers of the Christian
Schools, ever adaptive and progressive, see to it that the
"sound minds" of their young charges are enshrined in "sound
bodies," so far as a reasonable cultivation of " athletics " can
insure such a desideratum.

The influence exercised on their contemporaries and pos-
terity by such teachers and such pupils must be powerful and
far-reaching ; one might well say almost incalculable for good.
Their lives and work preach, silently but eloquently, to not
only the Catholic but also the un-Christian element of the
community. Where at all unbiased, and probably with more or
less bewilderment and some overturning of cherished idols, the

1 900.] THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.

749

[PREPARATION FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.

latter can see that a man may easily be at once, and primarily, a
Christian, and also a man of the world, in the better sense of
this much-abused term.

750 THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. [Mar.,

No wonder that La Salle Institute has had many imitators,
even from its foundation. And these increase as the years
roll on, wherever the Christian Schools are found. The march
of these latter is ever onward and upward. From their small
and humble beginning, of a little over two centuries ago, they
have grown and flourished until to-day we find them with a
grand total of 326,579 pupils in France, Belgium, Spain, Eng-
land, the United States, Canada, Spanish America, and other
countries, who are taught by 14,913 Brothers. In this country
their pupils number 16,769, of whom 8,509 are in New York
City, where also labor 239 Brothers.

Their most rapid increase in the United States has taken
place since the Civil War ; and they are now found, doing
glorious work for God and the state, in nearly all our large
centres of population.

And what of the daily lives of such men ? Much of these
is evident in the toil of the class-room, from nine o'clock until
half-past three, with the usual intermissions. The Brothers
themselves rise, the year round, at half past four. This early
rising is necessitated by their many daily spiritual exercises,
which occupy two hours in the morning and two hours in the
evening. The rest of their time outside class-room duties is
chiefly devoted to study and to preparation for and examina-
tion of pupils' work.

The daily life of a member of La Salle Institute is thus
that of a teaching monk. As stated, he lives all his simple,
hard-working life as a member, under strict community rules,
and bound by the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedi-
ence. He owns nothing, and must resign all ownership before
entering the society ; and is merely permitted the use of certain
necessaries. As to comforts and luxuries, these words are
not found in his personal lexicon. The influence for good of
such devoted men needs no comment.

In the foregoing brief resumt of the history, the work, the
spirit, and the daily lives of the Brothers of the Christian
Schools, the writer has placed their more personal aspect last,
as well befitting these meek and humble subjects of his pen ;
but he has done this also because of a certain appropriateness
in the application of this saying of Scripture, " The last shall
be first, and the first shall be last." The Brothers of the
Christian Schools in the United States, with whom this article
is more particularly concerned, were among the last of organ-
ized societies to enter the field of educative effort here; but,

1900.] THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 751

in a comparatively brief space of time, they have taken and
hold a position as educators equal to the best ; and this is the
unbiased opinion of the community at large.

What of weal or woe for our race the coming century may
hide is known to God alone ; but in the light of the present
and the past, this may be safely predicted : no educative influ-
ence, lay or clerical, will produce, in proportion to its oppor-
tunities, more beneficent and lasting results than those certain
to accrue from the unselfish, untiring, God-directed efforts of
the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY.

752 " THE NEW HUMANISM" [Mar.,

"THE NEW HUMANISM."*

BY REV. JOSEPH McSORLEY, C.S.P.

CONTEMPORARY literature must always afford a
fair indication of the thoughts uppermost in
men's minds. If this be true, the religious ques-
tion is surely most prominent among the vital
issues at present under discussion throughout the
world. It is really curious to note the amount of mental
activity the topic calls forth. In constant succession, news-
papers, books, lectures, controversies, and popular movements
stir the public mind into ferment about this or that point of
religion, and evoke unmistakable evidence of the present bent
of human thought.

This value as an indicator attaches not merely to publica-
tions professedly religious in tone, but to any and all pro-
nouncements which bear strongly on religious issues.

Of this class is the volume named below. It is significant
as the declaration of a certain school of thinkers humanistic
or naturalistic they may be called who have advanced a claim
to be considered the legitimate product of humanity's progress
to the high grade of culture and civilization which obtains to-
day. Theirs is the philosophy of the human, the earthly, the
natural. And it conceives of the universal scheme of things
as practically independent of religious obligations, understood
in the traditional sense. God, if God there be, causes little
concern in the mind of the humanist, for devotion and worship
have come to mean, in the main, the dedication of self to the
betterment of the race and the faithful pursuit, through storm
and stress, of that ideal which is ever leading the world on-
ward and upward to fuller life.

As the world stands at present, this philosophy is the bet-
ter of two commonly proposed as alternatives. Men have
grown familiar with the spectacle of religion such as they
know it disintegrating into lifeless elements after practically
confessing failure. Church-going is falling into disfavor. Reli-
gious teachers grow first wavering, and then thoroughly seep-

* The New Humanism. By Edward Howard Griggs. New York, 1900. The American
Society.for the Extension of University Teaching, in South isth Street, Philadelphia, Pa.

1900.] " THE NEW HUMANISM" 753

tical. To many a mind the utter decline of vital religion is so
imminent a danger that one may easily predict speedy dissolu-
tion to be the fate of Christianity. Earnest souls, it would
seem, can find nothing to meet their deepest wants, and not
unnaturally they are coming to look upon dogmatic religion
as an old and worn-out sham well nigh deposed in the process
of advance toward a new era, and destined to be supplanted
by the more vigorous growth of the present or the future.
To men thus repelled by the spectacle of decadent religion
two alternatives lie open. One is to adopt the philosophy of
sour and dogged pessimism, to contend that the chasm of
degeneracy is yawning across our path, and to consider reli-
gion as but the first victim of a ruin soon to engulf the whole
of our boasted civilization. The other alternative is the
philosophy of hope, the religion of progress. Its look is up-
ward, it is trustful in the future,

" That, somehow, good
Wilt be the final goal of ill."

Its adherents cast about for omens of coming dawn, and find
them in abundance. Their buoyant faith in the constancy of
the law of development is as the sweet prelude of approaching
triumph. They are the Apostles of Culture, and their gospel
may not ineptly be termed The New Humanism.

The book we are considering is a characteristic growth of
the spirit just described. The uninterrupted evolution of lesser
to greater is the first article of the writer's creed. It teaches him
to discern in the history of mankind a progressive development
toward fuller, higher, nobler existence, and he regards the
coming age as the time when what was best in the Greek
civilization will have been united to what is true in Christian-
ity, and the perfected synthesis, free of the faults and weak-
nesses of its component parts, will be a religion worthy the
acceptance of the new humanity. This is the general outline
of an essay which concerns us doubly, as being at once a sug-
gestion of the goal to which our age is tending, and a critical
comment on the role that Catholicity is to play in the coming
century.

The book is a pleasant one, with a variety of charms.
From first to last the writer never loses his note of lofty and
inspiring sentiment. His teaching is advanced with calm per-
suasiveness, his criticisms laid down in the spirit of quiet dig-
nity that befits a just and broad-minded man. Certainly, his
voi-. LXX. 48

754 " THE NEW HUMANISM" [Mar.,

words cannot remain quite fruitless, for they appeal to the
noblest feelings in the human soul, and harmonize well with
the cherished ambitions of our race's fairest types. One's
heart leaps up at the invitation to consecrate self to the bet-
terment of humanity ; all that is best within us pronounces it
a noble thing that men, unselfishly as coral insects, should devote
themselves to the building up of the advancing wall, whose
progress by law divine must never cease, while the race lasts
on. Above the wonders revealed by physical science, more
deeply mysterious than the objects of biological research,
humanity itself is coming to the fore as the proper study of
mankind ; and we instinctively recognize the truth that here lie
the things concerning us most nearly. The glory and dignity
of human personality, the use of the vast inheritance of riches
stored up during the whole history of the race, the outlook to
new fields of growth and progress the call to consider these
things as subjects of investigation wins from us joyous and
enthusiastic response.

Nor do we lack justification of our enthusiasm. They of
the humanistic school have contributed no small share to the
advancement of culture and science. Their places have been
in the forward rank of the march toward better things. Al-
ready, and to a considerable extent through their efforts, the
world has learned much, and has received, moreover, the prom-
ise of eternal inspiration and endless progress, on condition of
earnest pursuit of the best revealed to it. It is of no little
import to have discovered that our earth is but an insignificant
atom in an obscure corner of the universe, that matter existed
back in the untold ages before man was created, and that in
all likelihood the globe will sweep along its destined course
millions of years after he shall have ceased to exist in the
body. Such reflection serves to balance our over-ambitious
minds, helps to widen and deepen our sense of realities outside
ourselves and beyond our grasp. So are we taught that there
is no limit to the onward and upward trend of progress, that
we stand on the shore of an infinite ocean, and that eye can-
not measure nor mind conceive our possibilities. Exhaustless
interest in life comes to us with this simultaneous discovery of
human greatness that may be. The conscious freedom of will
and the matchless dignity of individuality buoy us up with new
sense of the potential glory in every being that comes from
the hands of the Almighty. A great history lies behind us,
and a- greater if we will stretches away into the future. We

i goo.] " THE NEW HUMANISM." 755

rise manfully to the work that lies before us, determined to
quit ourselves as men should do.

Is it not inspiring to call the broad world our home, and
every man our brother ? May we not even now perceive
omens of an approaching era when the old poet's cry of
Homo sum will provoke the universal echo of nil humani alie-
num ? What human heart, with tenderness and hopes and
fears, is not stirred to its depths at the suggestion, is not
already throbbing with eager anticipation of a federated world,
of an epoch when the sun of universal peace having dawned,
all nations will walk together in the brightness of its rising?
And why may we not believe that even now race ideals are
slowly being superseded by human ones, even as in the past
nations have been substituted for families and tribes? If that
event should come to pass, what paean ever sung were worthy
to greet it ? Rather its poem shall be the grand joyous sweep
of universal music ringing around the globe, as race calls unto
race, and continent answers back to continent, in the glad
harmony of humanity's united song that all men at last have
been happily born into the kingdom of light and peace after
many days of travail and storm.

If any man say these dreams lack beauty and the charm
that inspires, he must be possessed of a soul strange to sym-
pathy and enthusiasm. But still the humanistic ideal, despite
claims to inspiring power, seems in some sense defective even
as an ideal. It does not stand for the best and highest object
of man's aspiration. Its attainment surely would leave a noble
and generous soul still unsatisfied, still tormented by the un-
conquerable hope of a perfection " surpassing all that human
nature of itself ever can effect. In other words, it is our faith
that the divine unrest in man's soul is caused by instinctive
yearning for something above the order of merely physical,
natural, or created excellence that God has made us for him-
self and that we must ever be unquiet until we repose in him.
The humanistic philosophy is a very beautiful one, but from
our stand-point it is a philosophy essentially defective. It
ignores certain elements which are indispensable to the per-
fecting of humanity, and aims at a success that, being won,,
would prove tasteless as the apples of Sodom. An appeal to
history is not a conclusive argument against it, perhaps ; for
conditions have never yet permitted the experimental testing
of its principles ; but, on the other hand, neither does history
afford secure ground for the belief that we are progressing

756 " THE NEW HUMANISM" [Mar.,

toward an ideal in accord with the conceptions of the human-
istic creed. Individual examples of integrity, nobility, and
happiness may be displayed by the advocates of Ethical Cul-
ture, but will these instances prove to be more than the first
growth of a field rich only in its virgin strength ? Let the
drought come, or let a second crop be attempted, and the
ground may betray the utter barrenness of land without sub-
soil. The philosophy of " sweetness and light " may feed some
souls in peculiar conditions of natural virtue and personal no-
bility, but these souls are few, and they are not fed for long.
One of that very type, who like a tired child crept into the
church's bosom after years of wandering, declared : " Had
faith not come I would have destroyed myself, for all the
loftiness of naturalism left me in darkness and utter hunger."

This is from our point of view, of course. The humanist,
let us understand, judges very differently. Still it is not to
be supposed that his verdict on Christian truth is the result
of careful study of Catholic teaching Catholic teaching, be it
noted; for it in nowise concerns us if any other religious
creed be criticised and rejected. Catholicity, by common
agreement, is always considered apart, as quite distinct from
the sects, as a peculiar phenomenon, with its own proper
claims and credentials, whatever they may be. For this reason
the humanist, not unreasonably, may be required to give a
special hearing to the spiritual philosophy of the Catholic
Church before pronouncing final decision ; in other words,
let him honestly study the Catholic religion. And in so doing
he must not fail to follow a method in accord with his own phi-
losophy and the usual rules of scientific investigation.

First, be it remembered, the student of Catholicity must
divest himself of all prejudice against the possibility of the
supernatural as understood in the church namely, of a divine
order of being, utterly transcending all finite and created
natures, and proper to an Infinite, Absolute, Personal God.
This is not the place for an apologetic treatment of the point
mentioned ; but the humanist, an eclectic par excellence, and
quickened by sympathy with all sorts and conditions of mind,
must accept the Catholic ideal at its value as such, uninfluenced
by narrower principles or personal prejudice.

The foundation of the' Catholic ideal, then, is to be dis-
covered in the relations existent between the human soul and
the Divine Person who created it. The God in whom Catho-
lics believe is one whose love and tender mercy are over all

1900.] " THE NEW HUMANISM" 757

the things that he has made. After having created the world,
he did not retreat into his own eternal and infinite self-
sufficing existence, careless of his creatures and their further
history. Rather, with the tenderness of a parent, his affection
goes out to every man, his providence cares for each created
soul, and he draws his little ones to himself with the cords
of a lave infinite and divine. Through the devious wander-
ings of each human life that divine love haunts the soul, ap-
pealing to it, swaying it, winning it back at last to a free return
of love, even as the mother's heart, never ceasing to pursue
her son, finally leads him back to light and purity out of the
dark slough of lust and hate and crime.

There is a fact not embraced in the philosophy of human-
ism, and yet attested by the universal consciousness of man
through all ages and lands. That fact is sin. To the Chris-
tian, and in its proper sense, sin implies the turning away of
the soul from God toward things of earth. It is rebellion
against the Creator, contempt of divine love, a base yielding to
the spell of glittering enchantments. It is a base alloy, from
which no metal of earth is pure. It poisons the sweetest joys
men know. Its serpent trail of slime has soiled and marred
the beauty of every fairest gift entrusted to human keeping.
It has a sting bitter enough to call forth deep curses on the
dangerous prerogatives of intellect and will, and its blasting
tongue has seared humanity to the very core. Even those gay-
spirited Greeks that the humanists love to dream about felt its
sting; and if their system seems all joyous and light hearted,
that is only because their hours of pain and bitterness were
passed behind lowered curtains. Their philosophy attempted no
ministry of relief it is true, but nevertheless the tooth of the
serpent was embittering their lives, as surely as they were in-
telligent men and women, for the sickening consciousness of
sin, the remorseful horror and despair which pursue the sinner,
are absent from no human soul honest and unwarped. In the
dark forest at midnight, or on the shores of a lonely ocean,
men acknowledge this to themselves. At the moment of death
the concentrated bitterness of the sentiment binds the heart
and exhausts the breath of the man who all through life has
boasted that he knew no law.

Now, in the Christian system as nowhere else, this sense of
personal sin and utter helplessness is balanced by belief in the
Incarnation, the most stupendous phenomenon creation ever
did or ever could witness. The Christian's faith teaches him

758 " THE NEW HUMANISM." [Mar.,

that God Almighty, the Infinite One, came down from heaven
to save a sinful race, assumed human nature, and, clothed
therein, accomplished the redemption of sinful man, winning
him back to God and showering upon him graces and favors
of transcendent value ; and now the children of men can
truly be called Sons of the Most High, since in some true way
they have been raised to a divine order of being, and partici-
pate in the very nature of God.

This, the doctrine of the Incarnation of God and the Re-
demption^of man, is worthy of special note as the central
point of the Christian faith, the foundation and the crowning
glory of Christian idealism. Its truth is a matter of vital
moment to every man born of woman, since it is put forward
as the basic fact in the divine dispensation for human well-
being. Its consideration must not be waived, as though belief
in Christ's human virtue and wisdom could be an adequate
homage ; for if Jesus Christ be God, then he has God's claim
to the supreme adoration of men, and every true man is will-
ing and anxious to offer worship and receive love. And if he
is not God, he is deceiving or deceived, and we may rightly
expect that some day all men will recognize him to be merely
a great teacher of the stamp of Moses and Plato and Paul.
But his own claim is for an eternal and supreme reign, as the
unique figure of the world's history, the God-man. " Jesus
Christ yesterday and to-day, and the same for ever." And
every truth uttered by his lips, every heart conquered by his
love through these twenty centuries, every deed of mercy or
kindness, every struggle with temptation, every prayer in his
name these are single notes in the great swelling chorus that
echoes through the ever-living heart of humanity: "Unto us
is born a Saviour who is Christ the Lord, and the love of him
is life eternal."

Nor does all this say the last word upon the Christian
ideal. There is an indwelling presence of God in the just man,
whereby the latter is drawn to an ever closer and closer union
with his Maker, and united to him in the bonds of the most
affectionate and intimate intercourse. The Paraclete, or Com-
forter, the Divine Spirit, abiding in the sanctified soul, raises it
beyond the sphere of ordinary mortality, causing it utterly to
transcend the laws of created nature. This Divine Person, who
is the Supreme Love, is united with the faithful disciple, as
the soul of David was knit to the soul of Jonathan ; yes, and
in a far. truer sense and a far closer union, not to be described

1900.] '" THE NEW HUMANISM." 759

by any word but that of espousals. And the Christian's aspira-
tion for this is not a mere fantastic wish, but the rational de-
sire of a good clearly revealed as obtainable by well-ordered
conduct. His assurance is based upon the Saviour's promise,
the Church's warrant, and the records of thousands who have
satisfied yearnings no less powerful than those that stir within
himself. To a life of union with God the devout soul looks
forward as a lover to the everlasting embrace of his beloved.
Therein will be attained the acme of all conceivable joy, the
perfect fulfilment of all human possibilities, the rounding out,
expanding, and satisfying of all the noble cravings of which
humanity is capable. That loving aspiration toward such an
end may be crowned by its glorious attainment is the destined
lot of every Christian, and is the purpose of the church's
existence. Purely an efficacious means for the accomplishment
of that aim, she attends man from the cradle to the grave,
ever instructing, guiding, inspiring him in accord with the
great end of his being ; and in her the individual seeks and finds
the divinely appointed assistance for forwarding his life-work.

Thus in definite, precise, and logical order the Christian
ideal evolves by orderly and harmonious development from
primary doctrines into the sublime, majestic teaching of Chris-
tian perfection. That it towers alone, as a magnificent cathe-
dral spire above the surrounding roofs, is but the least of its
glories. Within it is a perfect harmony of wonders. By con-
trast with this we are presented with other ideals built upon
airy speculation, developed in theory alone, and crowning
themselves only with the fanciful splendor of some philoso-
pher's dream. No sure foundation, no historical justification, no
record of results such is the blank page of their story. What
numbers of them already have had their day and ceased to be !

But in such an ideal as we have outlined the Christian
reasonably believes. For such a destiny does he dare to hope.
With a heart aspiring toward that mighty love, he daily ex-
pands his soul in wonderful growth toward higher life. The
ideal and its influence are facts in the history of humanity.
It is little to say that by them the world has been transformed.
In truth, the world has failed of perfect transformation just
when and where and in proportion as that ideal has been lost
sight of and suffered to fail. This is a historical fact that
must be recorded in every honest history, and accounted for in
every honest philosophy of life. The man who is framing the
ideal of the future must build upon the realities of the past.

760 " THE NEW HUMANISM:' [Mar.,

Facts are his foundation, possibilities his superstructure. Let
him search the ages, let him scan the achievements and gauge
the spirit of the great ones gone ; let him learn from the race
that is and was the possibilities of the race to be. He must
discover that in the history of the world there has been no
phenomenon to compare with Christianity, there have been no
deeds like those achieved by typical Christians. Ever onward
and upward the mighty influence of Christian faith has moved
us, bringing us to the possession of the best we know ; and
the personalities evolved under its inspiration remain without
a rival. The martyr-monk Telemachus, after whose bloody
death the amphitheatres opened no more, is of one faith and
one spirit with the saint of Molokai. Each gave simple ex-
pression of the ideal to which new lives have been conse-
crated every day since the cross rose on Golgotha. Let the
records of the Christian Church for the past two thousand
years speak out an answer to the question, What has led the
race ever upward to higher things? Let the student, honest
and deep, declare to us the source of the inspiration which has
given the world all the good it knows. Faith, not reason ;
God, not man ; love of that Perfect One whom Christians long
to imitate ; it is in these words we spell out the infallible
formula of progress.

Any fair summing up of world-culture, any prospective
Weltanschauung^ must reckon with the Catholic ideal in a way
that has not yet been attempted. It is easy to dismiss with a
flourish an argument that has not been considered. One may
readily wave aside a claimant whose case has been already
adjudged. But fair trial, and then rejection, this is an un-
usual experience for the Catholic ideal. Can the humanist
mock at what to him is a mere shibboleth the Catholic Creed ?
Shall he measure and pronounce upon, or seek to adapt, a type
of spirituality of which, according to its own teaching, he is in
no position to judge? The matter is one of importance. The
church can appeal to the humanist standards in evidence of
its worth and virility. It alone has survived among a thousand
less fit passed by on the way. It has builded a civilization
not matched in the history of the race. It has developed per-
sonalities the fairest and the strongest in human records. It
points back, as it points forward, to One who, scorned, be-
littled, passed through the crucible of hostile criticism, yet
maintains his place unrivalled. It sounds its demand for
allegiance in the hearing of every intelligent man who pro-

1900.] " THE NEW HUMANISM." 761

fesses himself ready to believe what is truest, love what is
most beautiful, and embrace what is best.

It is not critical study of the Divina Commedia, nor a yield-
ing to the naive charm of the Fioretti, which will enable the
philosopher to appreciate Catholic ideals and gauge them objec-
tively. The faith goes deeper than that. Scientific method de-
mands of the religious student that he should imitate the
thoroughgoing devotion of modern archaeologist, philologian, or
artist. These men bury themselves in the environment which
will permit them perfectly to assimilate the spirit of their
chosen study. So we suggest that no man should write critically
and dogmatically on Christian ideals until he has put himself
under the direction of a spiritual master whose life embodies
these ideals. The student of composition spends his years in
the Quartier Latin, perhaps. Let the curious humanist visit La
Trappe, or some retreat-house of the Jesuit Fathers, and follow
retreat rules for a week, as an aid to imbibing the real spirit
of Catholic ascetics and mystics. Or if this be impracticable,
why he may easily enough consult the nearest priest as to the
best way of humbly learning all that can be learned by a will-
ing inquirer concerning the inner realities of the spiritual life.
One must instantly perceive this to be the course most in
harmony with modern methods, and admit that most weight
will attach to the opinions of such critics as have given this
proof of honesty and thoroughness. It is utterly foreign to
the spirit of contemporary criticism to study social phenomena
from the outside, and then comment upon and proffer instruction
to those to whom the environment in question has been from
childhood as the breath of their nostrils. And it is a curious
fact, worthy of note in future monographs on the subject, that
conversion to the Catholic faith is the almost inevitable result
of loving and sympathetic study of its ideals. They who
dread this danger may stand aside, but their lips should be
sealed in respectful silence as to the matters they dare not
deeply investigate. All other students are welcome. It will be
but an oft-told tale if for them, as they proceed, the voice of
the Siren, the Gorgon face, and the dizzy whirl of the mael-
strom change into the music of heaven, the Divine Presence,
and the tender, comforting embrace of the Spirit of Love.
Fair as the moon and bright as the sun, the Church stretches
forth inviting hands of interest and affection to those who are
treading the wilderness in search of truth.

Of this sort, beyond question, are some among the votaries

762 THE PASS-WORD. [Mar.,

of humanism Israelites without guile, indeed, to whom Christ
most willingly would speak. There is an apostolate open
among such souls, many of them crying for the bread of life
that Catholic fingers alone can break unto them. The qualifi-
cations for that apostolate we perceive broad culture, thorough
learning, perfect honesty, a sympathy wide as the race of man,
a love of truth in every shape and guise, and such a personal
devotion to the progress of religion as no barrier can balk.
These are the means Divine Providence would use for the
revolution of the world. Let love of God and the zeal of His
House be centred in men that are such as we have described,
and the Kingdom of Christ will overspread the earth in
mighty leaps. Working hopefully at our own little tasks until
the shadows flee away and the day-star rise, we should be
begging God to send these chosen laborers into the harvest
white for their coming. Awaiting them, in sympathy with the
spirit which will be theirs, we can beckon meanwhile to each
honest passer-by with : " Friend, come and see : a wonder
that never shall be duplicated upon earth the Church of the
Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Enter, and
look about."

BY F. X. E.

BROKEN-HEARTED Peace! art thou no more?
Thy foes, alas! bend o'er thee gloatingly,
And bursting into maddening minstrelsy
Upraise thee on the gruesome cross of war !
Ah, why again the self-same scene of yore,
When thou, the scorn of proud humanity,
A truce abiding for its infamy
Didst of thy Father piteously implore?
O Sweetness Crucified, O Peace Divine!
Upon the fray one look of mercy deign,
High o'er the fleets thy radiant flag unfold,
That e'er the armored hosts of Earth's domain
May, thro' the new-begotten years, behold
In thee, Fair Love, their sacred countersign !

1900.] A SON Of ITALY. 763

A SON OF ITALY.

BY ANNIE ELIZABETH O'HARE.

INSLIE'S luck" was a byword in the office of
the World.

As Jeffries confidentially remarked to Jarvis,
the ' new 'un " on the staff : " I have a deuce of a
time with my big assignments. If it's an inter-
view, nine of 'em positively refuse to see me, and the tenth
closes his mouth tight when I venture a few leading questions.
If it 's one of those way-up-country railroad wrecks, the Herala
man is sure to get at the single wire just a minute before I
pant up with the force of a steam-engine. But with Ainslie
things fairly mould themselves to his liking. Never saw such
confounded luck ! "

Perhaps it was not luck, but it pleased them better to call
it so. A fellow-journalist's luck is much easier to bear than
his ability. But the strangest part of it all was that no one
envied him. " He 's such a good fellow," they explained. Sa
when it was announced that Ainslie was to have the special
Italian correspondence, every one was as well pleased as it was
possible for a man to be who wanted it for himself and had
not got it. Of course, old Jack Bowden swore a little and
railed against " the young 'uns getting everything."

But Jack grumbled at everybody and everything. He had
been in the office twenty luckless years, and he was the leaven
of the occasional enthusiasm of the staff.

Jarvis, who yet was very young and very humble, looked
over his glasses wistfully as Ainslie locked his desk preparatory
to his long absence from the office. In truth, it was not a thing
to be thought lightly of a year abroad and the increased salary
and importance of a special correspondent. But the men
smothered their sighs as they watched him go, and told him
they would miss him in the office. What matter if the imps
of the press-room found them a snarly set that night ?

It was in the late sixties. The columns of the World had
worn threadbare the tales of the war and its aftermath. The
chief was a man of enterprise. He knew when the public had
had a surfeit, so he looked the world over for another sensa-

764 A SON OF ITALY. [Mar.,

tion and he bethought himself of Italy, just then in the throes
of a mortal struggle. The Editor's news sense was on the
alert in an instant.

" The very thing ! " he murmured. " The tales of Papal
misrule and priestly oppression will be nearly as good as the
war. Popular sympathy will be at the boiling pitch at the
pathetic pictures we can draw ! Exclusive inside information
about Italian affairs. ... By Jove! I'll make it my special
feature. Young Ainslie will be the best man. He 's a clever
chap, and he's ambitious. He'll do good work on his own
account." And the Editor rubbed his hands with satis-
faction.

With the Editor of the World to think was to act, and be-
fore the end of the week Robert Ainslie set out.

He had been told that he must find out just how affairs
stood, that he must not be sparing in his denunciation of the
present government, that he must give sensational individual
instances. " In short," said his chief at parting, " you must
excite people, give them something to talk about, keep up
their interest."

When at last the great ship had broken from its moorings
and Ainslie was alone, his first feeling was one of freedom
freedom in the great boundlessness of the stretching sea, freedom
in the deep draughts of the fresh-blowing air. The conscious-
ness that there was nothing to confine all his young energy,
that the winds and the waves and the sky were breathing-
places for his healthy vigor, impressed him more than the blue
beauty at the heart of the Jbillow, more than the filtering of
the spring sunshine through the white and azure of the foam-
crest. For he was just a blithe-hearted American, this Robert
Ainslie, with all his national pride and all his national pre-
judices just a generous, frank young fellow whose life-current
had flown in smooth channels, without striking against any of
the stony places that help us while they hinder. And as he
thought of his errand there on the open sea, it was natural
that his sympathies should be with the "Young Italy " movement
the movement that meant for Italy something of the liberty
that was so dear to his American heart. Not that he felt any
particular hostility to Catholicism or the Papacy. He believed
that all men have a right to worship God how and when they
please. For himself he had no very decided religious views,
so he could afford to look with something like contemptuous
patronage on all creeds.

1900.] A Sow OF ITALY. 765

Had you asked him his objections to Papal government, he
would have told you that the Pope and his priests are all very
well in their place so long as they remain in that place, but
that they had no right and no mission in affairs of state. He
would have told you that it is unjust to use religious authority
over a superstitious people for the enforcement of tyrannical
civil measures, for he never doubted that Papal rule is tyranny.
He would have told you, finally, as his unanswerable argu-
ment, that the Italian people want a new government, and
that no reasonable man could be in sympathy with the power
that kept them enslaved.

It was with such. thoughts in his mind, and something of
the Southern fire in his heart, that he first saw the wooded
hills of Italy rising out of the blue depths of the sea to the
bluer vastness of the sky.

First of all he sought Rome, the centre of the smouldering
strife. He had determined to make himself one with the
Italian people, to live among them and to imbue his own mind
with their spirit. And in those first few days he threw him-
self with all ardor into the " Young Italy " movement. He
made himself perfectly familiar with Garibaldian and Mazzinian
principles. The face of the eager young American was seen
at every meeting of the Carbonari ; he had long and enthusias-
tic talks with the leaders of the popular rebellion, and he sent
to the World accounts so glowing, descriptions so graphic,
incidents so fraught with interest, that the Editor chuckled
again at his own good judgment and went so far as to raise
the young man's salary.

But as the weeks passed into months Ainslie's early enthusi-
asm cooled. Sometimes he even caught himself wondering if
there was not something more than he thought in the old govern-
ment. He began vaguely to realize, in the chaos that came
from the shattering of his early impressions, that the real
people the men that make up the life and sinew of the nation
were devoted to the Papacy, the more strongly because their
devotion combines patriotism and religion. He saw that it was
only the surface of the stream that was agitated and the, deep
under-currents of the national life flowed on as tranquilly as ever
though the waters were dark with the shadow of coming ill.

For himself, he had studied so carefully into the whole
situation that he saw destruction approaching with swifter
strides than the old Roman States dreamed. He knew that the

766 A SON OF ITALY. [Mar.,

danger came not from within but from a mighty power with-
out, fast sweeping with the force of an avalanche to over-
whelm all Italy.

Struggling with many conflicting thoughts, one day he sought
relief from the portent-laden air of the city and wandered forth
into the sweet open places of the country, where Nature has
set her eternal seal of peace. From the near-by hills the
whole of Rome spreads out before him, with its shadowed
domes and stately ruins scattered on the Tiber's banks. How
full of the old life it is ! The purple veil of the sunset steeps
it in no richer glory than the splendor of its traditions and its
history had stamped upon it for ever. Even to this sceptical
man who looks down upon it, the golden light clothes its
old walls with a shining strength that makes his heart bow
before the strange majesty within.

" Are you wondering, messer, what havoc the coming storm
will work yonder?" said a deep voice at his elbow, and Ainslie
turns sharply to find the speaker an old padre he had seen
often in his walks through the hill-country, and whose face
had interested him in spite of his prejudices against priests
and priestcraft. It was one of those faces lined by life rather
than by nature a face whose eyes had looked into many a
struggling life and had turned to the*" world with a fresh
sympathy.

" I see the clouds gathering thick beyond the mountains,"
he went on, "and methinks the tempest will beat wildest on
the great Dome"; and he pointed to St. Peter's. " But she
will stand firm ! She cannot fall ! " Ainslie wondered what it
was that made the old face lighten and the pale cheeks flush.
And often as they talked always of Italy, her past glory or
her present danger the padre's eyes would glow with a new
light that puzzled his companion and set him to thinking that
perhaps, after all, Italy's priests had her best good at heart.

" Ah, messer, you do not know," the padre was saying ;
" you have seen only the surface, but beneath, beneath Come
with me ! I will take you to one who can tell you these things
far better than I, one who loves Italy with a love beyond all
telling and who burns for Italy's good. Ah, there is the
Angelus! We must wait for the morrow. Meet me yonder
at the head of the road, and we will go to San Bernardo.
It lies thitherward, just beyond the Martian hill, and Fra
Marco stays within the monastery after the vesper-time. Ad-
dio, messer, and may God keep us all safe ! "

1900.] A SON OF ITALY. 767

As Ainslie made his way back to his lodgings he smiled a
little to himself.

"A Papist priest!" he murmured. -"And I'm taking pairs
to meet another of them to-morrow. Jove ! I rather enjoy the
situation. That Fra Marco I know I 've heard of him before.
Ah, I have it ! He 's the very man the Carbonari have so
often railed against. They say he does untold harm to their
cause. This is going to make good copy."

On the morrow, as Ainslie and his companion knocked at
the great portal of San Bernardo, the young American looked
with a feeling of curious interest at the old monastery, with
its high gray walls and mountain-shaded sides. Fra Marco
was in the hospice, the old porter told them. A poor man
had been injured in the mountains that morning. Would they
come in and wait for him ?

The padre nodded, and they were led through the cool, dim
court-yard and into a little stone-walled room beyond.

" A wall-painting of one of the masters ! " cried Ainslie as
he looked around.

" Yes, this room was once the cell of Fra Giovanni," the
padre answered him. " He was of renowned skill with his
brush. Only a boy he was, too. He had come hither from
Florence, where he painted under Fra Angelico, weakened
with overmuch fasting and study. One morning they found
him here, this picture fresh upon the wall, and his wet brush
held between cold ringers for the soul had fled. The Madonna
there was his life-work."

"The Father gave him not much to do in His vineyard,"
said a voice, low and clear, behind them. ."Not many of us
can paint a picture and die in peace."

" To few of us is given the power to paint a picture such
as that, else we might die in peace," retorted Ainslie, turning
quickly, for the fresco had stirred all the artist soul within
him. But as he turned he stopped suddenly, startled by some-
thing in the eyes that met his.

Fra Marco always impressed people thus. The flame that
burned in his deep eyes startled those who looked into them
for the first time. Men said there was something unearthly in
the power of those eyes. Under the stress of some great emo-
tion their brilliancy was almost unbearable. They flashed
forth strangely from the pallor of his face, as if their depths
concentrated the fire of the whole man.

"Ah, but we have something greater to do than the work

768 A SON OF ITALY. [Mar.,

of Fra Giovanni," he said, as he motioned them to be seated,
while he stood, a tall, straight shadow, in the light of the deep
window. " Italy has need of all her sons for sterner duties
though her true sons are few and weak against the hosts with-
out. For they come " his voice grew lower and clearer
"and God's children are to be tried with a great trial. And
we we must bow our necks while the father is fettered before
us .and the city of God is ruled by the hands of her enemies.
O Italy ! Italy ! thy slavery they will call freedom the while
we are powerless, powerless ! "

All were silent as he paused. The old padre's face was
buried in his hands. Somehow, all Ainslie's arguments dropped
away from^him, and he felt himself weak before the strength
in this stern, brown-clad figure. Afterwards, when they were
talking more calmly, though he rallied some of his old confi-
dence, the arguments came more slowly and seemed robbed of
half their weight under the burning gaze of those piercing
eyes. He was as a maker of platitudes who finds himself sud-
denly face to face with the fierce fires of life itself.

"You think you know the people," the monk said to him.
" You cannot know and you Americans never can under-
stand the great furnace of passion that burns in this sun-
scorched soil of Italy. You pride yourself upon your foresight.
You cannot help seeing yonder the gathered armies that are
to sweep down upon Rome. Perhaps you think we do not
care. Ah, messer, the eyes that have been blindfolded do not
see ! But the great passionate life-pulse throbs on, despite the
blinded eye and the dogged step. You shall see for yourself,
and I shall take you with me to get at the heart of the real
Italy."

Many days since that first afternoon has Robert Ainslie
spent with Fra Marco in the old monastery of San Bernardo.
Many days has he wandered by the monk's side, up hill and
down valley, into cottage and village. "The real Italy" does
not make such good copy as he thought. The Editor of the
World no longer chuckles gleefully over the Italian bulletins.

"What has come over Ainslie?" he mutters to himself;
" I wonder if he thinks I pay him to go over there and take
sides with the Papacy. ' The patriotic efforts of her priests,' in-
deed ! I '11 have to wire him that if he sends us any more of
this trash, I '11 send over a sane man in his place. That '11 soon
settle .him." And he reached for his bell with a jerk that

1900.] A SON OF ITALY. 769

brings the office-boy up three steps at a time. "This cable-
gram must be sent off at once"; and then he turned again to
the copy with stern mouth and drawn brows.

Before the Editor's message reached Ainslie the great blow
had fallen upon Italy. The Pope was declared a prisoner in
his palace. The Carbonari and the friends of "Young Italy"
carried lighted torches through the streets and floated their
victorious banners from the house-tops. " Long live United
Italy!" they cried. "Long live Victor Emmanuel!" The air
of Rome seemed gay as for a festival.

But as Ainslie walked along the crowded streets he noticed
many a drawn blind and closed shutter, and he knew that they
hid faithful and devoted hearts. Meanwhile, his own heart
was with Fra Marco at San Bernardo. For the first few days
he left him alone with his grief. He felt that it was too deep
for even friendly eyes to look upon. When at last he made
his way over the quiet hills, it was to say good-by.

"I wonder if the Editor wishes to dispense with my services
at home as well," he mused, as he came in sight of the gray
towers of the monastery. In the exhaustion of his new emo-
tions he hardly cared.

"Ah, is it you, Fra Marco?" as a figure emerges from the
great portal.

" Yes, friend, it is I," said the monk, turning towards him.
" I expected you. It has come at last. Italy's doom is" spoken
and her sons are indeed slaves." It was a new light that burned
in the eyes that met the American's. Surely, there was some-
thing sacred in the burning, as if it were a flame of sacrifice.

" To-day," he went on, after they had stood long in silence,
"the word has come that bids us leave San Bernardo. The
king wishes to make a castle of it for one of his barons, and
he thinks that already there are too many of us in Italy. So
he bids us take off this"; and he touched the habit that he
wore. " My brothers have just departed ; sorrowing they have
gone forth to do what is left for them in Italy, and I alone
am left. But I too must depart I too "

"But where, frate where?" interrupted Ainslie sharply.
" What will you do?"

" I know not yet," answered the monk slowly ; " but God
will help me. Somewhere, even in Italy, there must be a
place where I can still labor for Him and for the weal of
souls."

VOL. LXX. 49

770 A SON OF ITALY. [Mar.,

There was no bitterness in his tone. The patient calmness
of it irritated Ainslie.

" But you are not safe here ! " he exclaimed. " Why don't
you come to America with me ? I 'm going at once to-morrow.
There you can remain a monk, at least, and there you will
find rich fields for your labor. Why, in New York alone,
frate, there are thousands of your own countrymen the poor-
est and the meanest of them. These people need you and
many like you. Come with me ; there is nothing here. Come
where the work lies ready for your hands ! "

"And leave Italy?" Fra Marco's question was like the cry
the wounded utter when the wound is mortal. " And leave
Italy?" Up and down he paced the silent cloister, up and
down. The fierce light in his eyes died out, leaving them like
spent fires. Ainslie leaned against the wall and waited silent-
ly. It was no time for further words, and in his own heart
there were strange forces working.

" You say they have need of me there ; that I can do
God's work?" said the low voice at last. Another pause, and
then " Son, I will go with you ! "

II.

That Italian correspondence of Ainslie's is almost forgotten
in the office of the World.

" It wasn't such a great piece of luck for Ainslie, after all,"
said old Jack Bowden. " He came pretty near getting the
worst of it altogether. If he had n't been such a clever chap,
we'd have another 'sub' to-day. The Editor knew his busi-
ness, and if he has one or two more strokes like the one he
had the other night, it is n't hard to tell who '11 be editor-in-
chief. Then won't things spin around here ! " And Jack
rubbed his head in gleeful anticipation till he came to the
spot that was getting bald, when he stopped suddenly.
" Always these young fellows!" he added, not quite so
amiably.

Ainslie's return had created no little excitement on the
staff, for he had brought with him, of all things on earth, an
Italian monk ! A tall, grave man, with wonderful eyes, who
had stepped quietly aside when they were shaking hands with
Ainslie. They had not seen him again until Ainslie said :
" Excuse me, boys, I '11 see you later and answer all your
questions. But my friend here is a stranger and I must
attend to him first. Yes, of course, I'll be around to-night."

A SON OF ITALY. 771

Then they had driven off, and from that day to this and
that had been three years ago the staff had never seen the
strange, brown-robed figure. Though Ainslie was the same
good fellow as of old, he was with them less as the days went
on, and it was vaguely whispered that Ainslie was a Catholic.
But the staff shook their heads at this and smiled incredu-
lously. Meantime, they watched him a little more closely as
he went in and out amongst them.

Although Fra Marco was not known in the offices of the
World, there was a place in New York where he was so well
known that crowds of dirty children followed him in the
street ; so well known that rough men and women smiled
gently as he passed them, and burly policemen looked after
the straight, stern figure with something like amazement in
their stolid faces. He had taken up his abode at the poor lit-
tie church in the Italian quarter, and during three years he
had labored there. Often his great, Italy-loving heart was
very sore. The people among whom he worked were the
lowest and the vilest of Italy's children, and he must claim
kindred with them ! He must remember that these, too, were
sons of Italy, born on the soil that was dearer to him than
life. But none of this inward shrinking showed itself in his
intercourse with them. Day by day he did his work with in-
finite patience, striving to lift them higher, and thinking, when
his thoughts were not with Gofi, of Italy's blue sky and Italy's
dear hills; the gray walls of San Bernardo, and the rolling of
the Tiber past St. Peter's. Whenever Ainslie spoke to him of
Italy a depth of wistful tenderness shone in the pale face,
though the lips said no word of longing or complaint.

These two the monk and the man of the world had
grown very near to each other in three years. Just two years
ago, in the little, dark Italian church, Ainslie had been baptized.
Since then he had thought of Italy with a changed heart, and
he had dreamed that some day he and Fra Marco should go
back together. They would tread the streets of Rome with
reverent feet, and kneel together in the great nave of St.
Peter's. He had heard that San Bernardo was once more a
monastery ; the king had been obliged to concede it to his
indignant people. Together they would enter the familiar
portal and Fra Marco should remain where his heart had al-
ways been.

He had planned it all out, and the time for it came at last.
One day Ainslie set out for the Italian quarter with light step

772 A SON OF ITALY. [Mar.

and blithe heart. The end of the frate's exile was at hand.
How his great eyes would shine with gladness !

Joyously he knocked at the door of the little room where
Fra Marco was wont to sit in prayer and meditation when the
long day's work was done.

" Enter, son," he heard the clear voice say, and he rushed
in with all the ardor of a school-boy with his first prize.

"I have such good news for you, frate," he cried, " such
good news! I must out with it at once. I came near shout-
ing it along the streets on my way here. What would you
say if we could go back to Italy in a week ! Think of it in
a week ! "

The light of a great joy brightened the pale features and
a glad brilliancy shone out of the deep-set eyes. But just for
a moment. Then he looked out of the window, over the high,
dark buildings, down into the street with its swarthy, jostling
crowds, at last at his crucifix on the wall before him.

"Son," he said after many silent minutes, and the low
voice was very clear " son, the work of God still waits me
here, and I must stay."

" But, frate, your place is with your brothers at San Ber-
nardo. This was all very well so long as they were scattered
and the monastery dismantled ; and you have done brave
work. Now Italy calls her son again your place is there."

" Fra Marco ! " wails a childish voice up the narrow stair
" O Fra Marco ! the madre is dying and she calls for you,
always for you ! And Giuseppe is getting bad again, Fra
Marco. Come to us! What ever shall we do?|"

Fra Marco shook his head smiling. " My work is here,"
he said. " I am coming, cara mia ; wait till I get the medi-
cine for the madre. God wills it, and he has shown me his
will. You must go to bear my messages to the padre and the
frati, and to look for me on San Bernardo. But I I must
stay. Addio, addio, my son ! God bless thee on thy way ! "

The eyes blaze with something not of earth as he gathers
his brown cloak about him and leads the child out into the
darkening street. It is Saturday night and muttered curses
fall upon his ear from the open doors of the grog-shops.
Coarse voices swear by Italy's loved shores and Italy's far
hills. But he does not turn. And Robert Ainslie utters no
word to stay him.

ROME INVITES YOU LOVINGLY TO HER BOSOM."

THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE."

(The Holy Year in Rome.)

BY SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.

HE attention of the whole Catholic world is
turned lovingly in these early days of the Jubi-
lee Year to the City of Peter, to Eternal Rome,
where the Keeper of the Keys unlocks the
Church's treasures to the faithful, to mark the
close of a dying century and the dawning vigil of a new.
Many are the pilgrims from every land who will swell the ranks
of the world's modern pilgrimage to the Apostle's Tomb.

It was with doubt and apprehension of the Holy Father's
living to proclaim it that the Universal Jubilee of 1900 was
first spoken of in the spring of 1899, when Leo XIII., to all
human seeming, appeared to lie at the point of death. But

774 " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

the venerable Pontiff weathered the storm, and made, in spite
of the weight of years, an almost miraculous recovery. Accord-
ing to his own words, the Pope, "through the prayers of his
children, fervently hopes to be spared to open and to shut the
Holy Door of Jubilee," thereby ushering in a new era of peace
and pardon to the latter-day world, by this act of homage to
the Redeemer, who has redeemed us through twenty centuries
o/ mercy.

The Universal Jubilee was instituted in the ages of faith,
when all that was Christian in the world owned the dominion
of the See of Peter, and sovereign and subject alike knelt
side by side, in humility, at the feet of the successor of the
Apostles. It is a long retrospect of history from 1300 to 1900,
from Boniface VIII. , in the beginning of the fourteenth century,
to Leo XIII. , in the end of the nineteenth; but the aim and
end, the form and ceremonies, of the Jubilee which was in-
augurated this Christmas Eve of 1899 are the same as that of
the first jubilees.

The idea of a jubilee, like almost all the celebrations of the
church, derived not only its origin but its name from Biblical
institution, when, according to the law of Moses, a "jubilee,"
or festival of sacrifice, expiation, and penance, was celebrated
by the people every fifty years, called in Hebrew " Jobel." So
in the church of the new law the Sovereign Pontiffs followed
out the ancient custom, modifying and rendering it suitable to
the times, deeming it advisable and timely thus to renew in
the hearts of the faithful the contrition, love, and homage to
God, and devotion to the Tomb of the Apostles, which from
the earliest ages of Christianity had been the purpose of the
favorite pilgrimage of the faithful.

The first Jubilee was proclaimed by a mediaeval pontiff,
who was one of the most remarkable figures of his age, Boni-
face VIII. ; and the twenty-second Jubilee can claim the same
distinction in the person of Leo XIII. The grand old mediae-
val Lateran palace, then the residence of the popes, was the
scene of its publication, and the " Mother and Head of all the
churches in the world " first re-echoed the stirring sentences of
the jubilee bull of promulgation on a day in February, 1300, a
bull which was to be repeated, in subsequent centuries, by
various pontiffs of the long line of St. Peter's successors, in
vastly differing circumstances and in widely differing times. A
fresco of the jubilee proclamation of Pope Boniface VIII., exe-
cuted by the great mediaeval painter Giotto (who was present

1 900.]

THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE.'

775

in Rome for the jubilee), is still extant in the basilica of St.
John Lateran. It was painted originally on the walls of an
open loggia of the Lateran palace, from whence the first jubi-
lee was proclaimed, and now is carefully preserved in a frame
covered with glass, on the wall of the basilica, still glowing
and fresh in its
delicate coloring.
The first of Italian
artists has handed
the portrait of a
mediaeval Pontiff
faithfully down to
us for all time, as
Dante, the first of
Italian poets, has
framed for us a
pen picture of the
Eternal City in
those far-off days.
Dante's lines de-
scribe the crowds
of pilgrims going
and coming over
the Bridge of St.
Angelo a picture
which, in many of
its details (if we
except a consider-
ably less amount
of law and order),
m igh t almost
serve for the
scene of the pre-
sent day ; for in
1900 as in 1300

the crowds throng yet ceaselessly over the bridge, spanning the
brown, sullen river, and pass beneath the shadow of the trium-
phant angel who guards now, as then, the citadel of the Tomb
of the Apostles. For gladly and willingly had Christendom re-
sponded to the appeal of Pope Boniface VIII., and it is said
that no fewer than two millions of strangers visited Rome dur-
ing the course of the year ; among the illustrious visitors being
Charles Martel and Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV. of

GIOTTO'S POPE BONIFACE VIII. OPENING THE FIRST JUBILEE.

776 " THE WORLD* s MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

France, who came, together with his wife and child, to lay his
homage at St. Peter's feet.

The jubilee was then intended to take place only once in
a century, but in the pontificate of Clement VI., who pro-
claimed the next jubilee, the period was changed to fifty
years, and successive pontiffs reduced it to thirty-three years,
until the pontificate of Pope Paul II. In 1470 the recurrence
of the jubilee became finally reduced to a period of every
twenty-five years, a custom which has been followed down to
the present day, except in times of trouble and disturbance for
the church, as was the case during the pontificate of Pope
Pius IX. The second Universal Jubilee took place in 1350, at
that saddest of periods when the head of the church was ab-
sent from the City of the Apostles, in exile at fair Avignon,
and Petrarch and Rienzi were the ambassadors chosen to
beg the pope to proclaim a jubilee. This jubilee, despite
the absence of the Sovereign Pontiff, was attended by vast
multitudes of people, who thronged the narrow byways of the
mediaeval city almost to overflowing on their way to the
basilicas.

But for magnificence and splendor of pomp and ritual the
jubilee under Pope Alexander VI. stands out pre-eminent. In
this jubilee, for the first time, the proclamation was made from
the Vatican, and the solemn ritual of reserving a special Holy
Door at the basilicas, walled up and only publicly opened on
the occasion of a jubilee, was instituted ; for though a holy
door had been used in one of the previous jubilees, it had
been lost sight of in the lapse of time. As one reads the ac-
counts of the solemn opening ritual of those early jubilees,
they are found almost identical with that which we witnessed
in the St. Peter's of to-day solemn, impressive, scriptural, in
their deep symbolic meaning, from the very ceremony of open-
ing to the beautiful Mosaic prayer (written by Alexander VI.)
and uttered by the Sovereign Pontiff before entering the holy
threshold. The tenth " Holy Year," under the pontificate of
Pope Julius III., was splendid also in its solemnities, when
many a saintly and noble personality, afterwards to be raised
to the highest honors of the altar, came as humble suppliants
to St. Peter's feet.

There were St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Borgia (then
a courtly Spanish knight), St. Philip Neri, who, true to his in-
stincts of philanthropy, noticing with the keen-eyed vision of
the "saint of human nature" the crying need of "hospices"

1900.]

" THE WORLD' s MODERN PILGRIMAGE"

777

for the weary, travel-worn pilgrims, established therewith these
pious institutions in the Eternal City, which have endured
even to the present day. For though St. Philip's " Trinita dei
Pellegrini," which has sheltered pious wayfarers from many
lands, throughout long centuries of jubilees, no longer opens
its hospitable doors, Leo XIII. receives his poor pilgrim
guests in the Hospice of Santa Marta, at the Vatican, close
under the protecting shadow of St. Peter's, where they are
waited upon and cared for by the young men of the " Circolo
di San Pietro," descendants of the young Romans St. Philip
gathered around him to help in his good work.

After this jubilee succeeded jubilee, at regular intervals of
fifty years, till it came down to 1775; after which stormy days
succeeded the times of peace, and not until 1825, under the
pontificate of Pope Leo XII., was the universal jubilee cele-
brated again with solemn pomp and ceremony. Pope Pius IX.,
it is true, proclaimed a jubilee in 1875, but it was bereft by
the condition of the times of all the gorgeous solemnity of
ritual ; so it was left to Leo XIII., the Pontiff grown old with
the century, and bearing the burden of ninety years on his
venerable shoulders, to open the Holy Portals closed by his
namesake in the Papacy on the Christmas Eve of 1826. It is
useless here to revert to the memories of the jubilee of Pope
Leo XII., when, in his papal bull of proclamation, our present
Pontiff has drawn with a masterly hand the striking picture of
the Jubilee Rome he knew as a boy. In the audience given

. 7* -

MOTHER AND HEAD OF ALL THE CHURCHES OF THE WORLD.

;;8 " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

to cardinals and prelates on the feast of his patron, St.
Joachim, the Holy Father lovingly recalled the early memories
of his first jubilee, the preaching in the open squares, the
crowds of faithful, and the great Pontiff who called the little
scholars of the Roman College around him in the Vatican to
give them a special blessing, especially praising the young
Joachim Pecci, who, as the head of his class, was called
upon to thank the Pope for the honor bestowed on his school.
It must seem truly marvellous to the aged Pontiff to look
back upon it all now ; and one wonders if there could have
come to the clever boy with the sensitive face, as he watched
the closing ceremony of the jubilee in St. Peter's, even a slight
premonition of how he himself, seventy-five years afterwards, on
that very spot, would reopen the Holy Door as Sovereign Pon-
tiff of the Universal Church.

The jubilee bull of 1900 was looked forward to with inter-
est, not only on account of the solemnity it proclaimed, but
doubly solemn coming so recently after the severe illness of
the Sovereign Pontiff.

Nor were the faithful disappointed ; for in scholarly majes-
ty, beauty of language and sentiment, and above all in the deep,
heartfelt devotion which breathes through every line, the jubilee
bull of Leo XIII. will go down to posterity as a record of one of
the greatest pontiffs ever given to the church. Well may the in-
spired utterances, expressing the deep pathos of the sentiments
of the aged heart, so near eternity, with its apostolic yearning
for the return of the wanderers to the fold of Peter, be graven
on the gold hammer with which Leo XIII. 's Jubilee will live
in the archives of future history. Few modern speeches or
letters contain a more memorable address than that of Leo
XIII. (even to those who miss the spiritual meaning) to the
faithful, "Rome, then, invites you lovingly to her bosom, O
beloved children, wherever you may be, who are able to visit
her"; or the concluding sentences on the effect and grandeur
of Eternal Rome on the Christian soul, in which the graceful
fancy of the pontifical poet reveals itself in flowing, eloquent
language.

According to ancient usage, the papal bull was publicly
proclaimed for the first time on Ascension day, May 12, 1899,
by the Papal Abreviator di Curia, in the portico of St. Peter,
after having been received direct from the hands of the Holy
Father in the Vatican. Monsignor Dell' Aquila Visconti, the
Papal Abreviator di Curia, made the publication from a pulpit

1900.] ' THE WORLD' s MODERN PILGRIMAGE" 779

erected in the centre of the portico, in the presence of the
Prefect of Pontifical Ceremonies, the Pontifical Precursors, and
the Chapter of St. Peter's, to the sound of the joy-bells of
every church in the Eternal City, which rang out their welcome
to the approach of the Jubilee Year. The Pontifical Precursor
then carried the bull to the other major basilicas, where it
was solemnly read in the same manner and affixed to the
portals; the next proclamation not being made till the fourth
Sunday of Advent, a week before the opening of the Holy
Door. Despite the long interval between the first and last
proclamation of the jubilee, minds were by no means idle in
the preparations for the Jubilee Year. The work of the " Commit-
tees for the Homage to our Saviour," by means of religious acts,
practical charities, erection of memorials, and arrangements for
the reception of pilgrims of every kind and of every class, pro-
ceeded apace. Retreats for the clergy began with the spiritual
exercises at the Vatican, in which the aged Pontiff himself
took part. It was a worthy preparation, and when the long-
expected Christmas Eve came at last, it found Rome ready
and waiting for the Papal summons to usher in the new year
and century with praise and prayer. The last public procla-
mation of the bull took place on the fourth Sunday of Advent,
in the portico of St. Peter's, where it was read aloud, in both
Latin and Italian, by the Prelates Auditors of the Rote.

Already, in the consistory of December 14, the Sovereign
Pontiff had appointed the Cardinal Legates " ad latere " who
have the privilege of opening the " Holy Doors " at the three
other patriarchal basilicas of Rome, and it was arranged that
at each basilica the doors should be opened simultaneously
with that of St. Peter's on Christmas Eve; three well-known
cardinals, the archpriests of the basilicas, performing the cere-
mony. The splendid presentation hammers with which the
ceremony of opening was to be performed by the Pope and
the Cardinal Legates were all in readiness for the ceremony,
and a few days before Christmas the hammer for the Papal
ceremony was presented to His Holiness by the Committee of
Homage to the Saviour, under the presidency of his Eminence
Cardinal Jacobini, the new Cardinal Vicar of Rome. It was a
touching sight, say all those present, to watch the venerable
Pontiff as he took the symbolic implement in his hand and
pressed it to his heart. It is a gift in its richness and beauty
worthy of the episcopate of the Shepherd of Souls, and sym-
bolic of the occasion it represents with its rich gold hammer

;8o

" THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE." [Mar.,

was opened bg
111.

inlaid with gems, and bearing the words "Aperite mihi portas
justitiae," while the ivory handle is embossed with gold orna-
mentation. The dedication by the episcopate is engraved upon
a medal attached by gold chains to the handle, which also
bears the memorable words already quoted from the bull :
" Rome, then, invites you lovingly to her bosom," etc. As he
handled it for the first time Leo XIII. repeated the words
aloud to the bystanders ; expressing his satisfaction at the gift
of those " who deigned to call themselves his brethren in the
apostolic charge," and his hope that this opening of the
church's treasures would bring profit to many souls. Three
nations were represented in the three hammers with which the

1900.] " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" 781

Cardinal Legates "ad latere " opened the doors of the major
basilicas to the faithful. Catholic France had the honor of
presenting the offering of the costly hammer, with its rich
traceries, to his Eminence Cardinal Satolli, Archpriest of St.
John Lateran, who threw open the doors of pardon of Mother
and Head of the Churches in the world. Catholic Italy gave
the hammer to Cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli for the opening
of Santa Maria Maggiore, and Cardinal Oreglia di San Stefano,
Dean of the Sacred College, opened^ the holy gates of
St. Paul's-outside-the-walls with the jubilee gift of Catholic
Germany.

Only one more interesting ceremony remained to be ac-
complished before the inauguration of the Jubilee; that of ex-
amining and verifying the contents of the holy doors of the
four basilicas. For weeks the " Sanpietrini," or workmen of
Saint Peter's, had been preparing the portico of Charlemagne,
enclosing it in wood and glass, to minimize the risk incurred
by the venerable Pontiff in exposing himself to the chill of a
draughty portico. At last, however, the arrangements were
complete, and the workmen turned their attention to the work
of knocking in the " Porta Santa " and putting it lightly to-
gether again, so that on the light touch of the Sovereign Pon-
tiff with the hammer it would fall inward, and be carried away
from inside. Seen from the portico outside, the walled-up
Porta Santa, with its severe metal cross in the centre, and its
inscriptions of Popes Pius VI., Gregory XIII., and Leo XII.,
is simplicity itself; simpler even than the other great portals
of bronze which give access to the basilica of the Apostles,
but it recalls, a world of pontifical memories, of jubilees pro-
claimed on this holy spot. The work of demolition began
from the inside on Tuesday, December 14, in the presence of
Monsignor Delia Volpe, major-domo of His Holiness, attended
by the secretary of the Prefect of the Apostolic Palace, the
" Economo " of the fabric of St. Peter, Monsignor De Neckar,
and the architects of the basilica, as witnesses. The Papal
major-domo began the ceremony by kissing the cross in the
centre of the door, then gave the sign to the Sanpietrini to
level the wall. The inside bricks revealed various initials, the
papal arms, the arms of the Vatican basilica, and the initials
of a tile-maker whose descendants still ply their trade near
St. Peter's. Under the central stone, as the picks and ham-
mers do their work, the hidden memorials of the jubilee o
1825 come to light, after seventy-five years: A marble casket

" THE WORLD' s MODERN PILGRIMAGE"

[Mar.,

with the inscription: " Leo XII. P.M. Anno 1825, in the
Illrd year of his pontificate"; a receptacle for coins of the
period ; a leaden box, and three blocks of marble, bearing the
names of the economo of St. Peter's and the superintendent
of the Sanpietrini in 1825. In the presence of Monsignor
Delia Volpe the caskets were opened and examined in the
sacristy of St. Peter's. They contained respectively a copper
casket inside the marble, sealed with the seals of the major-
domo of Leo XII., "J^rancesco Marazini, prefect of the pontifi-

THE POPE RESTING WITH MONSIGNOR DELLA VOLPE ON HIS RIGHT.

cal household," and containing about one hundred and fourteen
medals of the epoch of Leo XII. in bronze, silver, and gold,
with a parchment describing them. The leaden casket con-
tained a curious souvenir two rosaries in gold and white
enamel, bearing a medal coined in Paris on the birth of the
Duke of Bordeaux, and a cross presented by the Duke of
Rochefoucauld to his godson, M. Millet, who deposited these
things in the holy door. The coins, medals, and other records
found in the holy door were conveyed to the Holy Father for
his immediate inspection, and the Sovereign Pontiff found
much to interest him in these souvenirs of the jubilee he wit-

i QOO.] " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" 783

nessed in his youth. The same examination of the interior of
the holy doors took place in the three other basilicas, coins
and memorials of a like nature being found walled up in each.

The Porta Santa in St. Peter's, by an ingenious engineer-
ing arrangement on the part of the superintendent of the San-
pietrini, was put lightly together with a thin coating of lath
and plaster, so that from outside it presented its ordinary ap-
pearance ; while inside the door was attached to cranes and
pulleys which, on a signal given by an electric bell, would fall
inwards without the slightest hitch.

All was ready in St. Peter's on December 23. From every
nook and cranny of the portico the keen winter air was rigidly
excluded, and braziers in all available places regulated the at-
mosphere throughout the night. As the joy-bells of every
church in Rome rang out their summons to the morrow's
ceremony, pilgrims and Romans knew that the long-expected
Jubilee was on the eve of fulfilment. Early on the morning
of Christmas Eve, though the air was chill and rain had fallen
on the glistening streets, all Rome turned its face to the
Vatican, and St. Peter's was the magnet and loadstar for all.
As it was considered the most suitable hour for the venerable
Pontiff, the opening ceremony was fixed for mid-day, though
by ancient usage it should take place just before Vespers.
But time was as flothing to the patient pilgrims who had
come from far and near to hear the Vicar of Christ proclaim
the Jubilee, and eight o'clock found them waiting at the
bronze door which gave entrance to the portico. By special
privilege (the space within the portico being limited) tickets
were also distributed to receive the Apostolic benediction from
Leo XIII. in St. Peter's, after he entered the Holy Door. In
the ritual for the opening of a jubilee the basilica should re-
remain closed and empty until the Sovereign Pontiff passes
through, all the public following him, but on this occasion, as
admittance was by ticket and thousands, unable to be present
at the opening ceremony, would thereby have missed all
chance of seeing His Holiness, the rubric was relaxed ; and
while the Papal ceremony proceeded in the portico, St. Peter's
was slowly filling by the sacristy entrances with great crowds
of people. Troops were drawn up in cordon across the square
of St. Peter's, only allowing those with tickets of admission to
pass ; but law and order were perfect, and to the credit of
Romans and foreigners be it said, that in all the cosmopolitan
crowds which crushed through the Holy Doors of Rome's

784 " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE:' [Mar.,

Basilica on Christmas Eve not a single accident occurred to mar
the religious solemnity of the Jubilee of Peace a modern con-
trast this of our less excitable age to the jubilees of mediaeval
times, and even those of later date, when people were crushed
to death in numbers in the confusion. Even on the last jubi-
lee, in 1825, it is said that as many as eight persons were
killed, as the result of accidents in the crush of the holy
doors. So, if we have lost much of the picturesqueness of
olden times, we have gained in prudence and common sense.
But as for picturesqueness, it still survives and crops out in
Rome unexpectedly. Few contrasts could have been more
startling, and yet more Roman, than the bright decorations
many-colored cloths and brocades hanging from the windows
of the tall old houses in the Borgo and Piazza of St. Peter's,
and the close stream of electric tramcars, jostling each other
in close file as they deposited the modern Jubilee pilgrim at
St. Peter's gate.

Once inside the bronze door of the Vatican, however, where
the Papal flag floats over the entrance, and, pike in hand,
stand the sturdy Swiss, drawn up across the barrier, Rome
changes with one of her lightning transformations from modern
utilitarianism to mediaeval picturesqueness. The portico of
Charlemagne is the throne-room of the Papal sovereignty, in
surroundings beautiful and picturesque as the ancient ritual to
which they form the background. We entered the portico
from the side door of the Scala Regia ; its vast expanse was
carpeted, the walls hung with crimson and gold draperies, and
raised galleries or tribunes ran half way around it, and across
the further end. No trace of its colonnades remained, for they
were completely boarded up and covered with brocade, and
lighted in the upper portion by glass a colossal work of
preparation, for which the Sanpietrini deserve much credit.
Close by the Porta Santa was erected the Papal throne a
symphony in white and gold, of cloth of silver with raised gold
fleur-de-lis, and a crimson canopy bearing the papal arms,
while great tapestry paintings flanked the holy door, on a back-
ground of rich velvet. All the five entrances were closed, and
festooned with graceful drapery of silk and velvet.

The space around the throne in the centre was reserved for
the cardinals, bishops, and the Papal court, the rest of the
portico being occupied by the public with special tickets of
admission ; while the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See,
the Roman patriciate, and the Knights of Malta took their

i goo.] " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" 785

places in raised galleries facing the throne. The royal tribune
(destined for members of royal reigning houses) had for occu-
pants the Duchess of Trani (the widowed Duchess Matilda of
Bavaria) and the Duke d'Alengon, who was the object of so
much sympathy in 1897 on the terrible death of his wife in
the ill-fated Charity Bazaar in Paris.

During the time of waiting the scene was one of ever-chang-
ing motion, every figure in the portico appearing suitable to
its surroundings. The first arrivals were the general public of
distinguished strangers and Romans, the men in evening dress
and the ladies in black, with lace veils on their heads, who
poured ceaselessly in till after II o'clock, when one began to
doubt if the portico really only held one thousand, as had been
just stated, or three thousand or four thousand, at least.

Almost as if by magic, the crimson-covered galleries of the
ambassadors were brilliant with color in the uniforms of the
diplomats of various courts, glittering with stars and official
decorations, while the ladies of the Roman patriciate glided by
to their places with a rustle of silken trains, the soft folds of
their Spanish lace veils forming a pleasing contrast to the
sombre black of the court dress, relieved by flashing family
jewels. The Papal chamberlains of the Cape and Sword in
their Van Dyke costume did the honors of the tribunes, while
the Swiss and Pontifical gendarmes formed the picket of the
guard. The cynosure of all eyes was the " Porta Santa,"
which presented to the observer, not near enough to perceive
its covering of paper and plaster, its ordinary appearance, save
that on the sides there hung long gold cords with tassels, in
connection with the electric bell inside St. Peter's, which was
to give the signal for the withdrawal of the doors. A huge
silver basin containing the holy water for the washing of the
threshold stood near the throne, and all was in readiness for
the Papal ceremony as the clock struck 11:30.

Simultaneously the peal of joy-bells clanged sonorously over
Rome, to call on all the churches to re-echo the note of re-
joicing, bidding every heart in the Eternal City turn, at least
in spirit, to the Papal ceremonial under St. Peter's dome ; for
at the moment the bells began to ring the Pope, having
assumed the Papal vestments, was kneeling at the foot of the
altar in the Sistine Chapel, intoning the " Veni Creator," the
signal for the formation of the procession. They were moments
of keenest anticipation, as we waited for the great doors to be
opened ; but the storm of the joy-bells continued in every
VOL. LXX. 50

;86 " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

note, in every key, as if Rome had gone wild in the riot of
rejoicing. At last, high above it all, arose clear and sweet the
distant chant of the choir in the strophes of the " Veni Crea-
tor "; coming nearer and nearer, note by note, as the procession
slowly descended the stairs from the Sistine. As it swelled
louder the bells ceased, and silence reigned over the vast
assembly, broken only by the chanting, plainly audible through
the now open doorway. Finally the gold cross marking the
beginning of the procession headed the defile of the religious
orders of the church, walking two by two, giving place in their
turn to the College of Parish Priests, the prelates, the ponti-
fical chaplains, the consistorial advocates, the chapter of the
Vatican Basilica a conglomeration of vivid color, white, scarlet,
violet, purple. Then came the long line of bishops, arch-
bishops, patriarchs, and cardinals, in white vestments glittering
with gold embroidery, white mitres on their heads and lighted
candles in their hands a moving vista of ^diant splendor, as
they slowly, almost interminably, filed into the portico, and
took their places around the throne. It seemed as though no
sight could have been more impressive than this march of the
hierarchy of the church, but a picture still more striking was
in store as, from the shadows of the archway, a crimson chair
with its white-clad occupant appeared high in sight under a
golden canopy, the feather screens waving behind it in billows
of undulating whiteness. Simultaneously the silver trumpets
pealed out the triumphal march, and Leo XIII., in vestments
of cloth of silver, with a white mitre on his head, arose in the
" sedia gestatoria " and blessed the crowds, as he was slowly
borne along the white radiance around him reflected on the
brilliant uniforms of the princes, prelates, soldiers of his noble
court. Almost before we had time to realize the exquisite
picture it had passed and the Pope had ascended the throne,
and, surrounded by cardinals and bishops, read the opening
collect of the ceremony. Another moment, and with the rapid
movements so characteristic of him, His Holiness had left the
throne and stood before the Porta Santa, when the Cardinal
Penitentiary (Cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli) proffered the
symbolic hammer. A silence, if possible more unbroken than
before, reigned at that solemn moment, and each one in the
dense crowd felt as if he were alone with the Pontiff at the
opening ceremony. The first loud knock of the hammer on
the door resounded through the length and breadth of the por-
tico, and the voice of the venerable Vicar of Christ intoned

1 9 oo.]

" THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE"

7*7

THE CRIMSON CHAIR WITH ITS WHITE-CLAD OCCUPANT.

in unfaltering accents, slow but unutterably distinct, " Aperite
mihi portas justitiae," the choir responding " ingressus in ea
confitebor Domino." A moment's pause, the double knocks
resounded again, and the ringing voice rose once more on the
stillness, this time in louder and clearer tone, " Introibo in
domum tuam Domino," with its corresponding response by the
choir. Then again, and for the last time, the knocking of the

;88 " THE WORLD' s MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

gold hammer fell on the holy portals, while the Sovereign
Pontiff intoned, in a tone still higher, " Aperite portas quoniam
nobiscum Deus," u and, with a slight vibration and rending, the
1 Porta Santa ' fell back and disappeared instantaneously from
sight, leaving the long walled-up portals opened wide to all the
world." The Holy Father then returned to the throne, where
he recited the prayer " Actiones nostras," after which the six
penitentiaries of the basilica washed the threshold and sides of
the doorway with sponges of holy water, to the strains of the
Psalm " Jubilate Deo," set to Palestrina's music, never pro-
duced in Rome since the last jubilee of 1825.

It was a strange coincidence that the music of the great
Italian composer Palestrina should be produced for the second
time in the century under the direction of the greatest living
composer of church music in the present day, the Abbe Perosi,
whose boyish face and figure look younger than the boy
choristers of his able choir. A tranquil smile was noticed on
the face of Leo XIII. as he leaned back on the throne for an
instant's repose, listening to the music of the choir a smile
which seemed to denote that the Holy Father was well pleased
with the labor accomplished, the successful opening of the
Holy Door. At the end of the psalm the Sovereign Pontiff
arose and read the beautiful prayer for the opening of a
jubilee, " Deus qui per Moisen famulum tuum," each word
rendered slowly, clearly, distinctly, in that wonderful voice of
his, which seems to gain in sympathetic " timbre " and vibrat-
ing pathos as the Pope grows older. He then descended from
the throne and took off his mitre, each cardinal, patriarch,
archbishop, and bishop lifting his mitre simultaneously with
that of His Holiness. With venerable white head uncovered,
carrying a cross in one hand and a lighted candle in the other,
the Vicar of Christ, intoning the " Te Deum," crossed the
holy threshold under whose portals he had passed for the last
time seventy-five years ago.

It was a sight which might have inspired an artist, under
the title " In hoc signo vinces " or " At the century's close."
And yet people tell us that religion is out of date ; but the
unbelieving generation are wrong, as they were in the days
when the standard of the first Christian emperor floated in the
sky. " In hoc signo vinces " is true now as then, and until the
end of time Christ's Vicar will bear the standard of the Cruci-
fied King.

Following the Pope into St. Peter's came the train of

1 9 oo.]

THE WORLD' s MODERN PILGRIMAGE"

789

cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, and prelates, each carrying a
lighted candle and chanting the hymn of praise. Then the
great doorways were thrown open and throngs who had as-
sisted at the ceremony poured into the basilica, emptying the
portico in an instant. It had been arranged that the Holy
Father would give the Apostolic benediction from a raised
platform before the tomb of St. Peter. So he passed with his
cortege up the right nave, which had been completely barri-
caded from the rest of the church, so that His Holiness was
enabled to pay a visit to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and
take a short rest and restorative before appearing amidst the
people, who filled the two lateral naves, and the lower part of
the church opposite the statue of St. Peter. More striking,

CARDINAL VINCENZO VANNUTELLI PROFFERED THE SYMBOLIC HAMMER.

790 " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

perhaps, than the scene in the portico was this Papal function
in St. Peter's, for the vast spaces, the grand architecture, and
the waiting thousands under St. Peter's dome, are the suitable
environment and background of a Papal procession. The
Italian pilgrims and Rome's " Catholic Associations " were
grouped together in one spot, ready to join in the Papal cortege,
and form a guard of honor around the Sovereign Pontiff's
chair, and the radiant sunshine streamed on their brilliant
colored banners, glinting also on the gold and marble of the
Apostle's tomb. It was long that we waited, but after all one
does not wait for a pope in St. Peter's every day; and besides
taking a much needed rest in the interval, the Holy Father
received the religious confraternities of Rome, assigning them
their charge as custodians of the holy doors of the basilicas
throughout the Jubilee Year.

Once more the chanting of the choir was heard, the long
procession moved slowly forward, and the sedia gestatoria under
the white canopy appeared suddenly in sight of the people. A
burst of enthusiasm arose from every side of the great church,
drowning choir and silver trumpets alike. It was the one
touch of nature which stirred the hearts of the multitude, in
seeing the venerable man before them ; so old, so apparently
feeble, yet full of the mighty spirit which sustains the frail
body; for though weary with the strain of the morning, Leo
XIII. would not give in till his duty was done and he had
blessed the faithful in St. Peter's. The sedia gestatoria was
placed on a platform before the confessional, and here, stand-
ing before the people with arms outstretched over them, in all
the majesty of the pontificate, the successor of St. Peter gave
the Apostolic benediction and plenary indulgence from St.
Peter's tomb. It was over all too quickly, and the gorgeous
procession faded from our sight ; but the inauguration of the
Jubilee of 1900 by Leo XIII. was a day not soon to be for-
gotten by those present.

From that moment Rome's holy doors were open for the
whole Jubilee Year, and ever since crowds of the faithful
have been ceaselessly surging through them to gain the indul-
gences held out by the church. And they will continue to do
so till the first year of the new century ends and the Holy
Father closes the door once more on the Christmas Eve of 1900
when, with the same ceremonial of the opening, His Holiness
will throw mortar on the sides of the door with a golden
trowel, and the Sanpietrini will finish the work of walling it up.

i QOO.] " THE WORLD' s MODERN PILGRIMAGE" 791

From every land pilgrimages are coming to the Eternal
City. Italy holds the day in January, February, and March ;
and no fewer than nineteen pilgrimages in all will arrive be-
fore April, every diocese, from the snow-clad Alps to the fair
southern island of Sicily, sending its contingent to Jubilee
Rome. In April come the Portuguese, the Swiss, and the Irish
(in Holy Week), while the month of May will see the colossal
pilgrimage of the " Eldest Daughter of the Church " to assist at
the Tertiaries' Congress and the double canonization of Blessed
John Baptist La Salle and Blessed Rita of Cascia. After them,
also in May, will come the Austrian, Polish, Dutch, and
Bavarian (the latter to assist at the beatification of a Bavarian
saint). This, however, is only a short forecast of one-half of
the Jubilee Year, and Catholic America will not be behind-
hand with the nations in offering her homage of devotion at
St. Peter's feet.

A truly modern feature of our Jubilee Year are the work-
ingmen's pilgrimages organized in various countries, which will
be a great success, taking the French pilgrimages under M.
Louis Harmel as a precedent. It is surely only right and just
that the workman of the present day the greatest factor for
good or evil in the fortunes of a nation should, if he pro-
fesses the Catholic religion, see in person the Vicar of Christ,
and the centre and abiding-place of his faith. The workmen
are well to the fore in the Jubilee proclaimed by the Work-
men's Pope ; and on New Year's Eve, " when the Mass of the
two centuries" was celebrated by the Sovereign Pontiff in the
midnight stillness of the Vatican, the golden and jewelled
chalice he raised aloft represented the offerings of thousands
of artisans. Wishing to show their devotion to the Vicar of
Christ, they chose this most appropriate of offerings, that in
raising it the Father of the faithful may daily remember the
workmen at the Offertory of the Mass. Inexpressibly solemn
in its devotion was the vigil of homage to the Lord of the
Centuries all over Rome, from the Pope's quiet Mass in his
private chapel to the splendid High Mass, sung in presence of
the Blessed Sacrament, in St. Peter's and nearly every other
church in the Eternal City an event unique throughout the
ages and attended by crowds of people.

The Holy Father's Jubilee wish was more than abundantly
fulfilled, that the greatest number of Catholics throughout the
world should ring out the old year and century and ring in
the new, not by mirth and feasting but before the altar in

792 " THE WORLD'S MODERN PILGRIMAGE" [Mar.,

silent prayer, to bring down a blessing on the century so well
begun. It should be a " holy year " indeed, not only of prayer
but of works, for nowadays, in this hard-cornered world, we
Catholics must forge ahead even in old-world Rome, to keep
our " separated brethren " from getting the upper hand in
practical works of charity.

The International Committee of Homage to the Redeemer

AFTER THE FATIGUES OF THE CEREMONY.

is doing a right royal work, and besides the special religious
services, the erection of nineteen monuments and statues to
the Redeemer on Italy's mountain heights, there will be works
of charity, corporal and spiritual, to the people. There will
be the opening of deserted chapels in the Roman Campagna,
soup kitchens for the poor, popular lectures to the working-
folk on the Jubilee Year, and the sacred oratorios of Perosi, so
specially suitable to this holy time.

If modern Rome is not the Rome of other days ; if the
preachers no longer declaim in the public squares, nor popes,
nor emperors visit barefooted the jubilee shrines, still the old
Catholic spirit is there, deep in the hearts of the people, even
though they live in the midst of a generation of unbelief.

1900.] THE NUPTIALS OF SORROW. 793

The words of a Padre Zocchi or a Radini Tedeschi are none
the less eloquent and convincing if spoken from the pulpit in-
stead of the public square, and pilgrims none the less devout
who visit the basilicas in electric cars. Those who come to
the Eternal City in this Jubilee Year "to listen to the voice
of Rome's monuments," will not fail to find in it the Holy
City of yore Christian Rome, the heritage of the ages, which
no earthly power can take away.

CR 1WCIflS 07 SORROW.

from tbe dark of the desert of saints,

In the night of mp loss,
Came a soul haunting echo of plaints

And tDe shack of a face on a Cross*
forth I went as a little one led tp the band.
the death smelling sand.

II.

Jls one pales at toe clanging of steel,

jflnd is sickened with dread
Jflt toe blood dripping loud its appeal,

inp poor heart lieth still as the dead;
rtnii mp soul is aswoon with a weak woman fear
Of a scourge bissing near.

III.

Ratb Re bidden tbere jop far above

Jill this menace of rain,
Chat Re tbus might entice to a love

Unalloped bp tbe vision of gain?
hath Re made Rim an flitar for wedding a Bride
Of tbe Cross wbere Re died?

J. O. AUSTIN.

794 T/IE "CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED" [Mar. t

THE "CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED " AND THE

FILIPINOS.

BY E. B. BRIGGS, D.C.L.

HE Declaration of Independence, being an
American state paper, can be properly con-
strued and interpreted only in the light of
American jurisprudence. This is a truth which
is " self-evident " ; and it is the purpose in this
paper to give, in the language of American publicists and of
the American courts, such construction and such interpretation.

Should it appear that such construction and interpretation
correspond with the best and highest expression of Catholic
opinion, so much the greater our appreciation of the institu-
tions of our country.

The Declaration begins in these words, viz.: " When, in the
course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them
with another"; and goes on to state certain " self-evident "
truths, among them being the much-abused phrase that "all
governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed."

That particular phrase is now being construed by the anti-
social press, as well as by honest ignorance, in the sense that
the Fathers of the Republic proclaimed by it to the civilized
world the astounding and essentially anarchistic doctrine that
civilized states are inhibited from imposing upon savage ard
barbarous man civilized government, without his own " con-
sent," albeit to rescue civilization from anarchy and disorder!

It is earnestly submitted to the candid judgment of our
fellow-Catholics that, if any such a priori assertion were true,
the Declaration of Independence would deserve the reproba-
tion of all decent men, as being the Bible of anarchy, instead
of being, as it was, a plain and concrete statement of what its
authors conceived to be the rights of man living in organized
political society.

As opposed to all a priori assertions as to the meaning of
the Declaration of Independence, the writer proposes to prove,
in the concrete, the following thesis, viz.:

1900.] AND THE FILIPINOS. 795

The "consent of the governed" spoken of in the Declara-
tion of Independence as essential to the just powers of gov-
ernment means only the consent of organized political societies
or peoples. But the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands in
their present state do not constitute an organized political so-
ciety or people.

Therefore, the " consent of the governed " spoken of in the
Declaration of Independence does not apply to the inhabitants
of the Philippine Islands.

In jurisprudence the term, " The People" is synonymous with
civil and political society ; "and does not include forms of society
inferior to the nation or state"

" When a number of persons (whom we may style subjects)
are supposed to be in the habit of paying obedience to a
person, or an assemblage of persons of known and certain de-
scription (whom they style governor or governors), such per-
sons altogether (subjects and governors) are said to be in a
state of political society." (Bentham, Fragment on Gov., ch. i.,
par. IO-H.)

"The state is defined by Aristotle (Politics, III. ix. 14),
'the union of septs and villages in a complete and self-suffi-
cient life.' The first and most elementary community is the
family. A knot of families associating together, claiming
blood-relationship and descent, real or fictitious, from a com-
mon ancestor, whose name they bear, constitute a yevos, called
in Ireland a sept, in Scotland a clan, in England nameless.
When the sept comes to cluster their habitations or encamp-
ments in one or more spots, and to admit strangers in blood
to dwell among them, these hamlets or camps gradually reach
the magnitude of a village. When a number of these villages,
belonging to different septs, come to be contiguous to one
another, this mere juxtaposition does not make of them a
state. Nor does exchange of commodities, nor intermarriage,
nor an offensive and defensive alliance ; these are the mutual
relations of a confederacy, but all of them and more are needed
for a state. To be a state it is necessary that the septs and
villages should agree to regulate the conduct of their individual
members by a common standard of social virtue, sufficient fcr
their well-being as one community. This common standard is
fixed by common consent, or by the decision of some power
competent to act for all and to punish delinquents. The
name of this common standard is law. The community thus
formed leads a life complete and self-sufficient, not being a

796 THE "CONSENT of THE GOVERNED" [Mar.,

member of another but a body of itself, not part of an
ulterior community, but complete in the fulness of social good
and social authority." . . . "This self-sufficient and per-
fect community, which is not part of any higher community,
is the state." . . . "A community that is to any extent
governed from without, like British India or London, is not a
state, but a part of a state, for it is not a perfect community."
(Rev. Joseph Rickaby, Ethics and Natural Law, ch. viii. pt. 3.)

" The right of government to govern, or political authority,
is derived by the collective people or society from God
through the law of nature." ..." Here it suffices to say
that supposing a political people or nation, the sovereignty rests
in the community, not supernaturally, or by an external super-
natural appointment, as the clergy hold their authority, but by
the natural law, or law by which God governs the whole
moral creation." ..." Under this law, whose prescriptions
are promulgated through reason and embodied in universal
jurisprudence, nations are providentially constituted, and in-
vested with political sovereignty." ..." The political sove-
reignty, under the law of nature, attaches to the people, not
individually but collectively, as civil or political society. It is
vested in the political community or nation." ..." Under
the patriarchal, the tribal, and the Asiatic monarchical systems
there is, properly speaking, no state, no citizens, and the or-
ganization is economical rather than political." . . . (Brown-
son, American Republic, ch. iii.; Zigliara, Sumtna, III. 228249;
Liberatore, Summa, III. 209-213; 240-285.)

" Society may be distinguished into two kinds, natural and
civil. This distinction has not been marked with the accuracy
which it merits. Indeed, some writers have given little
attention to the latter kind ; others have expressly denied it,
and said there can be no civil society without civil government.
But this is certainly not the case. A state of civil society
must have existed, and such a state, in all our reasonings on
this subject, must be supposed before civil government could be
regularly formed or established. Nay, 'tis for the security and
improvement of such a state that the adventitious one of civil
government has been instituted. To civil society, indeed, with-
out including in its description the idea of civil government,
the name of State may be assigned by way of excellence."
(James Wilson, signer of Declaration of Independence, Lectures
on Law, i. 270-271.)

" The people, in its organic unity, constitutes the nation.

1900.] AND THE FILIPINOS. 797

It is not a sum or aggregation of men, a chance collection
accumulated as a heap of fragments ; it is hot a mob but a
people, not a vulgus but a populus" " Hence, ye fragments ! "
(Mulford, The Nation, p. 61.)

" Sovereignty resides in the society or body politic ; in the
corporate unit resulting from the organization of many into
one, and not in the individuals constituting such unit, nor in
any number of them as such, nor even in all of them, except
as organized into a body politic and acting as such." (Jamieson,
Constitutional Convention, pp. 19-20 ; 5 Pet., i. 52.)

People is defined as : " The entire body of the inhabitants
of a state or nation, taken collectively in their capacity of
sovereign." (Am. and Eng. Ency. Law, vol. xviii. p. 696.)

People : " A state, as the people of the State of New York.
A nation in its collective and political capacity." (Black, Law
Diet.)

" The word People means the supreme power of a country."
(Nesbitt v. Lushington, 4 Term Rep., 785, Hilary Term, 1792.)

<l When the term ' the people ' is made use of in constitu-
tional law or discussion, it is often the case that those only
are intended who have a share in the government through
being clothed with the elective franchise." . . . " But in
all the commentaries and guaranties of rights the whole
people are included, because the rights of all are equal, and are
meant to be equally protected. In all of the States the power
to amend their constitutions resides in the great body of the
people as an organized body politic." (Cooley, Prin. Const.
Law, sees. 295, 383.)

" The word people may have various significations accord-
ing to the connection in which it is used. When we speak of
the rights of the people, or of the government of the people
by law, or of the people as a non-political aggregate, we mean
all the inhabitants of the state or nation, without distinction
as to sex, age, or otherwise. But when reference is made to
the people as the repository of sovereignty or as the source
of governmental power, or to popular government, we are in
fact speaking of that selected and limited class of citizens to
whom the constitution accords the elective franchise and the
right of participating in government. The people, in this
narrow sense, are the ' collegiate sovereign ' of the state and
the nation. But the sovereign can exercise his powers only in
the mode pointed out by the organic law which he has him-
self ordained." (Black, Const. Law, p. 25.)

798 THE "CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED" [Mar.,

"A distinction was taken at the bar between a state and
the people of the state. It is a distinction I am not capable
of comprehending. By a state forming a republic I do not
mean the legislature of the state, the executive of the state, or
the judiciary of the state, but all the citizens which compose
the state, and are, if I may so express myself, integral parts,
of it." (Penhallow v. Doane, 3 Ball., 93.)

It would thus seem that, neither in Political Science, nor in
Jurisprudence, does a vulgus, composed of disintegrated tribes-
men reinforced by an aggregate of half-breed Chinamen, con-
stitute a " People."

In what manner does a " People " give the " consent of the
governed" according to the interpretation placed by American jur-
isprudence upon the A merican Declaration of Independence ?

" Government derives its just powers from the consent of the
governed." . . . u Whence does one-fourth of the popula-
tion get its right to govern the other three-fourths ? "

" Certain it is that the alleged social compact has in it no
social or civil element. It does not and cannot create society.
It can give only an aggregation of individuals, and society is
not an aggregation, nor even an organization of individuals.
It is an organism, and individuals live in its life as well as it
in theirs. There is a real, living solidarity which makes indi-
viduals members of the social body, and members one of
another. There is no society without individuals and no indi-
viduals without society ; but in society there is that which is
not individual, and is more than all individuals." . . .

" The constitution is two-fold : the constitution of the state
or nation, and the constitution of the government. The con-
stitution of the government is, or is held to be, the work of
the nation itself ; the constitution of the state, or of the people
of the state, is, in its origin at least, providential, given by
God himself, operating through historical events, or natural
causes. The one originates in law, the other in historical fact.
The nation must exist, and exist as a political community,
before it can give itself a constitution ; and no state, any more
than an individual, can exist without a constitution of some
sort." (Brownson, American Republic, 22-74 ; Zigliara, iii. 228-
233, 240-249; Liberatore, iii. 244-247, 264-267, 270-275.)

" All tribes and nations in which the patriarchal system re-
mains, or is developed without transformation, are barbaric,
and really so regarded by all Christendom. In civilized nations
the patriarchal authority is transformed into that of the city

1900.] AND THE FILIPINOS. 799

or state, that is, of the republic ; but in all barbarous nations
it retains its private and personal character. The nation is
only the family or tribe, and is called by the name of its
ancestor, founder, or chief, not by a geographical denomina-
tion." . . . " Even when the barbaric nations have ceased
to be nomadic, pastoral, or predatory nations," . . . ' they
have still no state, no country." (Brownson, American Repub-
lic, ch. 3.)

" The political maxim that government rests upon the con-
sent of the governed appears, therefore, to be practically sub-
ject to many exceptions ; and when we say the sovereignty
of the state is vested in the people, the question very naturally
presents itself, What are we to understand by the People as
used in this connection ? What should be the correct rule up-
on this subject does not fall within our province to determine.
Upon this men will theorize ; but the practical question pre-
cedes the formation of the constitution and is addressed to
the people themselves. As a practical fact the sovereignty is
vested in those persons who are permitted by the constitution
of the state to exercise the elective franchise.

" The voice of the people, acting in their sovereign capac-
ity, can be of legal force only when expressed at the times
and under the conditions which they themselves have pre-
scribed and pointed out by the constitution, or which, con-
sistently with the constitution, have been prescribed and
pointed out for them by law ; and if by any portion of the
people, however large, an attempt should be made to interfere
with the regular working of the agencies of government at
any other time or in any other manner than as allowed by
existing law, either constitutional or otherwise, it would be
revolutionary in character, and must be resisted and repressed
by the officers who, for the time being, represent legiti-
mate government." (Cooley, Constitutional Limitations, pp.

37, 598.)

" The maxim which lies at the foundation of our govern-
ment is that all political power originates with the people.
But since the organization of government it cannot be claimed
that either the legislative, executive, or judicial powers, either
wholly or in part, can be exercised by them directly. By the
institution of government the people surrender the exercise of
their sovereign functions of government to agents chosen by
themselves, who at least theoretically represent the supreme
will of their constituents. Thus all power possessed by the

8oo THE "CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED" [Mar.,

people themselves is given and centred in their chosen repre-
sentatives." (Gibson v. Mason, 5 Nev., 283.)

The phrase that " all governments derive their just powers
from the consent of the governed," as interpreted by American
jurisprudence, means, therefore, that in organic political society
the people, the satiety itself, consents to the enactment of
the laws through the representative system, a system which
does not exist, and never has existed, in any human society
of an organization or constitution lower than the civil and
political organization ! (Blair v. Ridgely ; Luther v. Borden.)

All a priori theories, fulminations, and assertions to the
contrary notwithstanding, this is the construction placed upon
the principle of the Declaration, in an unbroken current of
decisions of the courts, as well as in the commentaries of the
publicists. The fathers themselves, as is shown in the opening
sentence of the Declaration itself, had in mind a state of
political society, and none other. Were the contrary the truth,
it might not be amiss to remind our readers that, not the
Declaration of Independence, not the " Farewell Letter " of
George Washington, but the Constitution of the United States,
is the "supreme law of the land"; but this is unnecessary.
Contemporaneous history amply supports the interpretation
placed upon the language of the Declaration. The Declara-
tion itself, the Revolution of which it was but one link in the
chain, were brought about because of the denial by the mother
country of the political right of representation, an institution
solely appertaining to political society ; and the Revolution
itself was successful because the colonists had, prior to the
Declaration, and with the organization of the "people" in the
Continental Congress, awakened to the self-consciousness of the
fact that they were already a self-sufficient political com-
munity, a " people," a nation, a sovereign state. The Declara-
tion proclaimed to the civilized world an accomplished fact.
(Burgess, Pol. Science and Comp. Const. Law, i. 100.)

Our major premiss would seem to stand proved. To get to
a valid expression of the " consent of the governed " you must
have representative political government, itself based upon
political society.

, As to the minor premiss: Are the " Filipinos ".(not a name
self-consciously chosen, but imposed, in derision, by the
Spaniards, the " insurgents " being of the " hyphenated " order,
Tagalogs-Chinese-half-breeds) a political society or "people,"
with a -providential or natural constitution ?

I 9 00.]

DE PROFUNDIS.

801

" The Filipinos are not a nation, but a variegated assem-
blage of different types and peoples, and their loyalty is still
of the tribal type.

" Should our power by any fatality be withdrawn, the com-
mission believe that the government of the Philippines would
speedily lapse into anarchy, which would incite, if it did not
necessitate, the intervention of other powers and the eventual
division of the islands among them.

" Only through American occupation, therefore, is the idea
of a free, self-governing and united Philippine commonwealth
at all conceivable." (Report U. S. Philippine Commission,
Nov. 2, 1899.)

The conclusion follows.

Catholic University of America.

E)e IProfundi.

BY MARY GRANT O'SHERIDAN.

AS that Despair who passed me by but now,
Or was it vigil-keeping Grief gone mad ?
Affrighted eyes beneath a death-white brow,
And clinging, clammy locks. A broken vow
Naught else could make those trembling lips

so sad.

And, oh, what agony the hands betray!
Thin hands clinched downward, as if knowing not
Love ever lives and ever holdeth sway,
And only those are happy who obey,
Humbly accepting what Love doth allot.
And though she called me as she passed along,
Brushing me with her sombre robe, wind-blown
And damp, I answered only with a song,
Singing of right, victorious o'er wrong,
And the sweet joy Love giveth to His own.

VOL. LXX. 51

Soz SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? [Mar.,

SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER?

'INGE the Catholic Summer-School of America
was located at Cliff Haven, N. Y., on the shore
of Lake Champlain, it obtained legal existence
as a corporation by an absolute charter from
the Regents of the University of the State of
New York, and is now classified within the system of public
instruction devoted to University Extension. By this charter
from the Board of Regents many advantages are secured for
students preparing for examinations, besides the legal privileges
which could be obtained in no other way. In the official
documents relating to the charter ample guarantees were given
that the object for which the Catholic Summer-School was
organized shall be steadily kept in view, and the good work
continued according to the plans approved by its founders and
trustees. The practical results have justified the wisdom of
the plan adopted. Further discussion has shown that Catholic
Educational Institutions have a reliable guarantee of official
protection and recognition through the Charter of the Regents.
The object of the Catholic Summer-School has been to co-
operate with professional educators by increasing the facilities
for busy people as well as for those of leisure to pursue lines
of study in various departments of knowledge by providing
opportunities of getting instruction from eminent specialists.
It is not intended to have the scope of the work limited to
any class, but rather to establish an intellectual centre where
any one with serious purpose may come and find new incen-
tives to efforts for self-improvement. During a summer vaca-
tion, without great expense, one may listen to the best thought
of the world, condensed and presented by unselfish masters
of study.

At a reception tendered last August to the Hon. John T.
McDonough, Secretary of State and ex-officio member of the
Board of Regents, the presiding officer, Rev. Thomas McMillan,
C.S.P., spoke on behalf of the Summer-School as follows :

" We are gathered together to pay our respects to a very
honorable body of the State of New York known as the Board
of Regents, from whom we hold our charter for University
Extension work. That charter represents great advantages to

1900.] SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? 803

the Champlain Summer-School. Our friends in New England
have appreciated its value, and were willing to have the Sum-
mer-School located in the State of New York by preference
to any other State, chiefly on account of this charter. We
are able to get recognition for our work in this way which is
of professional value, so that we can take rank as leaders in
educational work. It has been our aim from the very begin-
ning not to attempt to teach every subject of interest to edu-
cated people, but to teach a few and in a way to command
respect ; and our Syllabus has been welcomed in many educa-
tional institutions. It has been a surprise to many non-Catho-
lics in the way of talent displayed. Some of them were not
able to realize, from any previous document, that we had so
much talent at our command, in our colleges, 'universities, and
academies under Catholic control."

From the address delivered at the Champlain Summer-
School by Regent McDonough the following abstract is taken
with a view to show the historical bearings of the present dis-
cussion on Educational Unification. He claimed that the
State of New York is liberal to her educational institutions, as
she is in everything else. Politicians could tell you of contests
so close that the change of one vote in each school district
would change the political complexion of the State. That was
true in the last election. The successful candidate had only
17,000 majority, and the change of one vote in each school
district would have elected the other candidate. In these
school districts the people elect a trustee, a clerk, and a collec-
tor ; and these are the big men of the district. The trustees
select the teachers ; they do not examine them.

We have in the State of New York outside the cities .
School Commissioners, in the rural districts; and there are 112
of these elected by the people, for a term of three years.
They have charge of the district schools. They distribute
State money, and look after the trustees and the teachers.
They are supposed to examine the teachers, or preside at the
examination; but as a matter of fact the questions are all pre-
pared in Albany, by the Board of Examiners, and the ques-
tion determined there whether the candidates are qualified.

A Union Free School District in the country means that
several of these district schools may unite and form one school,
for higher education.

In cities and in villages of 5,000 inhabitants and up-
wards they have Boards of Education. The enormous extent

804 SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? [Mar.,

of our schools in this State may be seen by the statement
that we have 1,500,000 people of school age the school age is
from five to twenty-one and the number, of school age, wh
attended the schools of the State last year was 1,168,000, and
there was an average attendance of 827,000 every day.

The teachers constitute a great army. There are 29,330
teachers in the public schools and high schools of the State ;
this year they earned over fifteen millions viz.: $15,156,000.
In addition to that there were paid for new buildings in this
State over $8,000,000; and the total expenditures of the
schools, as reported to the Superintendent of Public Instruction,
were twenty-nine million five hundred thousand dollars, in one
year.

These schools are all under the supervision and direction of
an officer called the Superintendent of Public Instruction. He
receives a salary of $5,000 a year. He is elected by the
Legislature of the State, in joint ballot, just as a United States
Senator is elected. He has very large powers. Through his
department people qualify as teachers ; he looks after the ex-
aminations. He has charge of distributing the school moneys
raised by taxation, amounting to over four million dollars a
year. This is distributed through the State. He has the
power, also, to hear appeals. Any school question that arises
in any of these school districts may be referred to him. If a
party is dissatisfied, he may appeal to the Superintendent of
Public Instruction. That superintendent hears the appeal, just
as a law case is heard, and he decides the case ; and from his
decision there is no appeal to any court. He is absolute ; his
authority is final. Sometimes this works great injustice ; some-
times it is for our good. There was a case some time ago,
where an appeal was made to the superintendent as to the
question of whether a hat was a ballot-box. At a school
meeting they put the ballots in a hat and some party was
beaten for trustee, and he appealed to the superintendent,
claiming that the law required that a ballot-box should be
used, and that a hat was not a ballot-box. The superin-
tendent decided that the election was legal and valid. In
school questions he is all-powerful. In addition to the
public schools he has charge of eleven Normal Colleges.
These are supported by the State for the purpose of educating
teachers.

Now we come to the question of higher education. Very
little was done in this State, in the early days, for higher edu-

i goo.] SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? 805

cation. When the Dutch had the New Netherlands they are
said to have originated a very good school system. When the
English took the colony, they did little or nothing ; and the
first effort that resulted in any great good for higher educa-
tion was as late as 1746, when the Legislature passed an act to
provide for the founding of a college, and the foundation for
that college was to be twenty-two hundred and fifty pounds,
to be raised by lottery in the colony of New York. We have
changed so much since then that our constitution forbids all
lotteries. That was followed by the chartering, in 1754, of
King's College. That charter came from King George II., and
the institution was aided by that king and some of the noble-
men of his reign. That King's College was the foundation of
Columbia College. King's College was broken up during the
Revolution ; became defunct, virtually, and nothing was done
for higher education until after the Revolution. The very first
Latin School was established in New York in 1688, by the
Jesuits, and it was one of the first schools of that time. That
school was established when Thomas Dongan, a genuine Catho.
lie gentleman, was governor of this colony ; and he gave
protection to everybody. He gave a charter of liberties
to this college, in which he granted freedom of worship,
and the Jesuits were free to have their schools. After the
Revolution, in 1783, the population of the whole State of
New York was a little more than one-half the population of
the present City of Buffalo two hundred and fifty thousand
people. The great City of New York, the Borough of Manhat-
tan, had at that time 25,000, and Long Island 30,000. The
Hudson Valley, up through to Lake Champlain and west to
Schenectady, had the remainder. Schenectady was the only
town of importance west of Albany, only seventeen miles
distant.

In 1784 Governor Clinton thought that a great effort ought
to be made to revive and encourage seminaries of learning,
and sent a message to the Legislature asking them to do
something for this purpose. This was considered an opportune
time to revive King's College, and provide means for higher
education of young men. The governors or trustees of Old
King's College then saw their opportunity. They came to Albany
in great force Hamilton, and Jay and Duane, and others and
made an effort to obtain control of the university which was
about to be established. Duane introduced the bill. He was
one of the friends of King's College. The majority of the

806 SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? [Mar.,

committee were afterwards governors of the college. They
had the principal offices of the Legislature, and they took to
what we call " lobbying," and they actually got the bill through,
reviving King's College under the name of Columbia, and giv-
ing it control of the whole education of the State of New
York. That caused a good deal of dissatisfaction among the
people in the country districts. The Board of Regents, as
organized under that law, was not pleasing to them. The result
was the agitation went on. Clinton, Livingston, Lansing, and
L'Hommedieu took the side of the people ; and Hamilton,
Jay and Duane, and others were for Columbia. Finally the
matter -was compromised by the passage of an act in 1787,
which act is substantially the law of to-day under which the
operations of the Board of Regents are authorized, and which
has continued in force for over a hundred years. The Board
of Regents, or University of the State of New York, as it is
called, is not an educating body; it is a governing body. It
has charge of all the colleges, and it has the academies, and it
has the high schools ; and it consists of the State Library, the
State Museum, and all the other libraries in the State and all
museums and institutions of higher education chartered by the
Regents.

There were last year, in the University, 21 colleges of arts
and sciences for men, 8 colleges of arts and sciences for
women ; $ colleges of arts and sciences for men and women ;
7 law schools; 12 theological schools; 523 high schools; 131
academies, and 50 other institutions, making a total of 760
institutions under the Regents. The number of students at.
tending these colleges was 29,800. The number attending the
high schools and academies was 66,340.

The net property of the colleges of this State amounted to
$70,251,000 ; and the annual expenditure of the schools amounted
to $7,738,000; showing an increase of two hundred per cent, in
ten years.

There are nineteen elective Regents, and four ex-officio
Regents : the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Secretary of
State, and Superintendent of Public Instruction. In case of
vacancy the office is filled by the Legislature, and the Regent
is elected for life. They have power to confer honorary de-
grees ; to establish examinations, to grant diplomas; to main-
tain lectures connected with higher education ; to apportion
public moneys to academies and to high schools. No student
can naw become a lawyer or a doctor without passing a

1900.] SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? 807

Regents' examination, unless he is a graduate of a college.
They have the power to examine the conditions and operations
of every institution in the University, and require annual
reports.

During the past thirty years that I have been interested in
this work, it has been surprising to me to note the great ad-
vancement made in the schools under the Regents, and to
watch the increase in the number of Catholic academies estab-
lished under them. They have made it very easy to incor-
porate an academy. Formerly it was required that persons
desiring to incorporate an academy must own five thousand
dollars worth of property, and have apparatus, etc. In order
to induce Catholic academies to come in under the Regents,
they have modified that rule very much. They do not require
absolute ownership ; they take a lease of fifty years as equiva-
lent to ownership of property. So we have been in the habit,
around Albany, of simply leasing a school to five trustees,
who are, chiefly, the bishop, vicar-general, a chancellor and
two other clergymen, to be selected by them. It is permitted
also in case the trustees cease to use the building for school
purposes, or allow it to be used for any other purpose, that
the property revert to the church. So that it is perfectly safe
to make such a lease, and we find that it has been very popular
and very beneficial. We have three or four academies incor-
porated under the Regents in Albany, and others in Troy,
Cohoes, Catskill, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and
other parts of the State. Examination papers are sent out
every quarter, and the schools take these examinations. There
is no provision whatever in regard to teaching religion in these
academies ; they can teach what they like. The Regents look
to the work in secular studies, and they judge what is done by
the examinations. Catholic academies have already petitioned
for money for credentials earned, under that section of the con-
stitution which provides for the expenses of examinations and
inspections. The Legislature is free to appropriate just as much
money as it sees fit for the examinations in the State of New
York.

During the session of 1899 tne School Revision Bill, intro-
duced by Senator White, aroused intense opposition. That bill
contained over eight hundred sections, one hundred and eight
of which were absolutely new, in the principles introduced.
An effort was made to bring in the Deaf Schools, and the
Blind Schools, and the Dumb Schools, as Public Schools

8o8 SHOULD THE REGENTS HAVE MORE POWER? [Mar.

make them common Public Schools. This was objected to by
a great many people. It meant taking the blind children away
from where their parents wanted them, and it meant that there
should be no religious instruction whatever in these schools for
the deaf, dumb, and blind ; and the Catholics of New York,
Buffalo, and elsewhere were opposed to it. The Catholic
people did great work in that direction. They sent Judge
Daly and other very able men from New York. Buffalo sent
down Judge Lewis, and Rochester sent also some able repre-
sentatives. They came to Albany in great force, and worked
strenuously to prevent the enactment of the last mentioned ob-
jectionable features of the bill. These efforts were rewarded
by having all those clauses stricken out of the bill. Pending
this result, another question came up ; the question of Unifi-
cation. The Superintendent of Public Instruction desired to
have the absolute control of the high schools the five hun-
dred high schools and take them away from the Regents.
The Regents were determined he should not take them. The
fight went on, and is not ended yet. The men who are most
interested in education do not object to putting all these in-
stitutions under one body, but they are not in favor of putting
them under one man who has absolute power. They are not
in favor of putting them all under the Superintendent of Pub-
lic Instruction. That is the stand I took in the matter that
I am in favor of putting the whole school system of the State
under the Regents, who have been fair and just and honora-
ble ; who are men of experience, and who discuss all these
questions with due deliberation, and decide by a majority
vote. I believe it is our duty to do all that we can for Unifi-
cation, under the Regents of the University.

After examining this condensed statement of the facts of
the case the impartial reader will answer the question given at
the head of this article in the affirmative. To continue the
good work already begun, and to extend it all along the line
of educational progress, from the Kindergarten to the Uni-
versity, the Regents should have more power conceded by an
act of the present Legislature. It is time to abolish the cen-
tral despotism exercised by the State Superintendent of Public
Instruction, and to subordinate his office to the general welfare
of the people in the city as well as the country districts, thus
securing the greatest good for the largest number of citizens.

MR. AUGUSTIN DALY, THE GIFTED PLAYWRIGHT.

THE STORY OF 'THE DALY BIBLE."

BY LIDA ROSE McCABE.
I.

HE keystone to the remarkable book collection
of the late Mr. Augustin Daly is the Douai
Bible.

The story of how the gifted playwright and
master stage-manager extended, at a cost of
eighteen thousand dollars, the original edition of one volume to
forty-two folio volumes by the insertion of more than eight
thousand rare prints, engravings, etchings, water-colors, and
mezzotints, recalls the munificence of the Medicis, and is re-
freshing evidence of the deep religious feeling of the man

8io THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE." [Mar.,

whose life-work has left indelible impression not only upon the
artistic growth of New York but upon the entire country. It is
less than a year since Augustin Daly passed to his reward, and
the public has yet to waken to a true estimate of what he ef-
fected through his plays and his theatres for art and morals.
It was his ambition to make the playhouse the handmaid of
the pulpit. For more than thirty years Mr. Daly's playhouse
was, in the homes of conservative culture, the synonyme of
all that is clean, wholesome, and uplifting in the world of en-
tertainment. In bringing about his reforms in the dramatic
profession Mr. Daly is credited with the first wholly successful
attempt to give the actor, as a member of the artistic brother-
hood, his proper place in society. Before his time even stars
were wont to seek the playhouse carrying their wardrobes
across their backs, after the manner of the early emigrant.
By paying the actor a salary sufficient to meet his needs he tend-
ed to transform him into a staid citizen of the commonwealth.

No green-room in the world had decorum like the Daly
Theatre. The same deportment was obligatory on the mem-
bers of his companies when they went abroad in the public
streets, the railroads, or ocean steamers. While he was ever a
hard task-master, his actors realized, while they often chafed
under his discipline, that his was unselfish service to high
ideals. The reforms he wrought are to-day the accepted order
of things. Theatres are upon the whole respectable and safe.
The play, carping pessimists to the contrary notwithstanding, is
for the most part clean and splendidly mounted. Actors in good
parts are now largely persons of character, laborers worthy of
their hire. The stage, through Mr. Daly's precept and practice,
has risen to a position of vital influence as regards art and society.
He was the pioneer in bringing the American manager and the
American player to the serious attention of Great Britain.
Against fearful odds, and at a financial loss that would have
intimidated a less courageous, a less valiant spirit, he softened
prejudice, and established in the heart of London a Daly
Theatre which commanded the respect and the applause of an
exacting British public. He not only opened the door to the
American actor and manager in London, but paved their way
to future hearing in the French and German capitals. Such
distinctive and far-reaching achievement was possible only to
gifts of a rare order.

In a day when privacy has ceased to be a virtue, few
men of, such wide-reaching influence succeeded so effectively

1 900.

THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE"

Sir

CELEBRATED PORTRAIT OF SHAKSFERE IN THE DALY COLLECTION.

as did the incomparable manager in concealing his inner self
from the prying eyes of the multitude. The wall round an-
cient Troy was scarcely less impregnable than the reserve
with which he is said to have warded off the intrusion of the
business and the social, no less than the chance acquain-
tance. He was a man of few words and fewer intimacies.
How much this reserve was due to natural shyness, how much
to consciousness of weakness which, prudence dictated, reserve
alone would protect from imposition, it is left to his bio-
grapher to elucidate. The fact remains, that of the hundreds
of columns his passing evoked in the public press, while there
is much of Daly the playwright and the stage-manager,
there is little or nothing of Daly the man. In gathering his
rare and costly library of fourteen thousand volumes, which
covers the last twenty years of his life, Mr. Daly unconsciously
wrote his own autobiography. On margin or interpolated in
the text in his own fine script are marked passages, references,
quotations, and remarks that, to one with the gift to read
aright, are assuredly " the foot-prints and the hand-prints "*
which, to quote the Sage of Concord, " give the whole man."

812 THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE" [Mar.,

II.

As early as 1869, when after six years of experimental
theatrical work undertaken while he pursued the exacting
labors of a journalist he had fairly begun his public career as
a theatre manager, he was known among print dealers as a
man who rarely turned from a scriptural illustration. Mr.
Daly was a book-lover in the truest sense. He knew his
books from the inside. He was a born collector. His fond-
ness for the pictorial waxed with the years, until his collection
became rich in volumes extended, by the insertion of rare prints,
engravings, and etchings, to veritable libraries within themselves.
He rarely spoke of his books, and never boastfully.

When a collector asserted in his presence that he pos-
sessed the finest group of a subject which Mr. Daly had not
touched upon, the latter immediately began gathering in
that line until his collection equalled if it did not excel
that of the boaster. To this idiosyncrasy is attributed the
myriad ramifications of his library, which detract somewhat
from its value in the estimation of the collector and the dealer.
That a man absorbed by such exacting and harassing re-
sponsibilities and varied interests should have had the dispo-
sition, aside from the time, to devote to so unfashionable a
work as the Bible, has not ceased to pique a public to whom
the real man was as a sealed book. His was essentially a re-
ligious temperament. Had he not been born in the Faith, his
artistic sense, in all probability, would have led him into the
church. It appealed to and satisfied his every impulse and
yearning for the beautiful and the artistic. More than three-
fourths of his collection were naturally dramatic, or works per-
taining to the drama. Aside from Faith, where in the whole
gamut of literature is there a work so profoundly dramatic as
the Book of Books ?

Wherever he went, for more than twenty years, evidently
the Bible, pictorially considered, was in his thoughts. No print-
shop of the Old or the New World escaped his vigilant search.
It was his purpose to make it a compendium of every nation's
artistic conception of the Old and New Testaments. In this*
as in all his undertakings in the service of art, expense was not
considered. His extravagance was the marvel of employees
and business associates. Often Bibles of rare and costly edi-
tion were bought, then torn apart solely to secure one or more
prints that he desired in order to illustrate a certain passage,

1900.] THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE" 813

proverb, or canticle. In this manner the Dore" Bible, for exam-
ple, was utilized by this modern Renaissance prince. The Books
of Ruth and Job, exquisitely illustrated by a celebrated Ger-
man etcher, were destroyed for a single picture. As the prints
accumulated they were sent, from time to time, to Augustus
Toedteberg, the bibliophile and print expert. Mr. Daly kept
him in his employ for many years, and between them there was
a sympathy and an understanding as refreshing as they were
rare. In the studio of the quaint old Hollander the prints were
cleaned, trimmed, and inlaid to folio size. The texts of various
editions were used as foundation before it was finally decided,
in 1888, to take the Douai Bible. Toedteberg had made con-
siderable h e a d-
way with the
Mechlin edition,
when he was in-
structed to de-
stroy it. Mr. Daly
decided to use the
Douai Bible
" Translated from
the Latin Vul-
gate; diligently
compared with
the Hebrew,
Greek, and other
editions in divers
languages : the
Old Testament,
first published by
the English Col-
lege at Douai,
A.D. 1609, and the
New Testament,
first published by
the English Col-
lege at Rheims,
A.D. 1582 " since

.1- ,t MR. DALY ARRANGES FOR HIS BIBLE.

this was the ac-
cepted English version of the Church.

True appreciation of the art and of the labor involved in the
inlaying of the texts and plates is possible only to one skilled
in its technicalities. Of the eight thousand prints there were

814 THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE" [Mar.,

scarcely more than a hundred of the folio size to which the
original text was extended. Each print had to be trimmed
and inserted in paper of weight in keeping with the print, and
cut to a size uniform with that to which the text was enlarged.
In delicacy and exactness it is an art not unlike that of the
worker in mosaics. Where text or print begins and margin
leaves off is not to be discerned by the naked eye.

When the greater part of the plates were inlaid they repre-
sented the work of fifteen years. They were given to Mr.
Henry Blackwell, to whom was entrusted the inlaying of the
text, the reading in of the plates, and the binding of the whole.
Two editions of the Douai Bible (1794) were used. As every
page had to be inserted by itself, one side of each leaf was
lost. The pages were so dirty had they not the usage of
a hundred years ? Mr. Blackwell was forced to wash and boil
them as does the washer-woman soiled linen. For many weeks
this was his Sunday morning's recreation at his Long Island
home. Each page, as it was taken out of the tub, was
pinned to the clothes-line in the back yard. Seated on the
back stoop, the quasi-laundryman smoked his pipe, as he
watched the pages dry in the sun, much to the mystery and
the horror of the neighbors, when they learned the usage to
which Holy Writ was being put. When partly dried each page
was taken down and carefully ironed. Then the edges were
trimmed preparatory to the inlaying on white vellum paper, es-
pecially prepared and cut to folio size. More than two thou-
sand hours were spent in arranging the plates and inlaying
the text, before the volumes passed to the binder.

" I read the Bible through four times," said Mr. Blackwell,
recalling the work. " I had concordances, dictionaries, and
every authority pertaining to the Scriptures that was available.
When I got through reading in the plates I felt that I could
stand examination for orders."

To read in the plates that is, insert them where they best
illustrate the text exacts not only minute and extensive knowl-
edge of Scripture but artistic discrimination and fine sense of
fitness. How largely these requirements are fulfilled in Mr.
Daly's wonderful Bible is without the province of this paper to
discuss. It took three months to bind the forty-two volumes
in half white levant, with red morocco labels and fine gold tool-
ing. Each book of the Old and New Testaments, save in a
few instances, was extended to one or more imperial volumes,
while the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Book of Kings each

1900.]

THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE"

815

covers four volumes. To each volume
text enclosed in a cross, decorated in
water-color sketches by the well-known

is a title-page, the
exquisite luminous
French aquarellist,

Eugene Grivaz. The frontispiece of the first volume of Gene-
sis is a valuable portrait print of Raphael, and on the opposite
page is the only drawing by the painter of Urbino in the
United States. It is a red wash-drawing, apparently a study of
hands and feet, and on one side, when held to the light, is
discernible a nude figure, probably Adam. The whole is well
preserved, but as frail and delicate in texture as the skin of a
babe. It bears
the mark of Sir
Joshua Reynolds,
and was once a
part of his collec-
tion.

Original etch-

ings of Rem- ^ A ^ ><w-< L

brandt, Albert *^~** ' / ,
D u re r, Holbein, - <~

and many engrav-
ers of world re-
nown are scatter-
ed profusely
throughout the
volumes, together
with not a little
to offend the con-
noisseur. It is

replete in Ma-

donnas Annunci-

ations, Crucifixions, every phase in the life of Christ and his

Blessed Mother, as conceived by each nation since "art's spring-

time." The Sermon on the Mount is illustrated by the Lord's

Prayer in one hundred and fifty different languages.

The forty-second volume is given to a History of the Bible.
The text, an American publication, is inlaid and illustrated in
keeping with the Douai edition. The frontispiece is a picture
of Pope Leo XIII., kneeling on a prie-dieu before a statue of
the Blessed Virgin. Beneath the picture, written in French, is
Augustin Daly's supplication to the Holy Father for the Apos-
tolic Blessing and Plenary Indulgence upon his work. This
volume also contains an autograph letter of Pius IX., written

FAC-SIMILE OF MR. DALY'S LETTER TO MR. TOEDTE-
BERG ANNOUNCING THE HOME-COMING OF THE BIBLE.

8i6 THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE." [Mar.,

in Italian, dated 1842, and addressed to a citizen of Rome
apropos of a biblical subject. A Catholic Dictionary adapted
to the Douai Bible fittingly closes the last volume. The Bible
was completed Easter, 1892.

Preparatory to its home-coming, Mr. Daly had made for it,
in harmony with the furnishing of his beautiful library, a solid
mahogany case of rare workmanship. On the three upper
shelves, fourteen volumes to a shelf, the famous Bible was en-
shrined, to confront, through the mullioned glass doors, the
garnered literary treasures of the ages : first four folios of
Shakspere, first editions of " Paradise Lost " (1667). Spenser's
" Faerie Queene " (1692), Moliere, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
etc., which, clothed in the varied skill of the modern binder,
flanked the walls of the library proper, that covered the entire
rear of the second floor in his spacious residence in West
Fiftieth Street.

Characteristic o'f the retiring simplicity of the man is the
note in the illustration, asking his old friend Toedteberg to
drop in and see the completion of the work he had begun
twenty-one years before. Notes of equal simplicity found their
way to the highest dignitaries of the church, the judiciary,
and the various arts and professions, and on the afternoon
of April 12, 1892, following Shakspere's birth-day, the home-
Doming of the Bible was formally celebrated.

III.

" In case of the death of my wife, Mary P. Daly, before
mine," reads Mr. Daly's will, " I bequeath my extended Bible
(42 volumes) to the Library of St. Francis Xavier's College ; the
History of London (37 volumes) and the Illustrated History of
New York (15 volumes) to the Catholic Club, and all news-
papers and magazines of my collection to the Cathedral
Library."

Since his sudden death in Paris last June, which leaves
by the provisions of the will his entire library to his widow,
the final disposition of the Bible has been the subject of
varied conjecture among ecclesiastics, scholars, and laity. It
has been suggested that if the American Catholic Historical
Society of Philadelphia and the United States Catholic His-
torical Society of New York should petition the metropolis
for a department in the new Public Library for the deposit
of Catholic historical documents, the petition, in all proba-
bility, would be granted. Collectors throughout the country,

now at a loss
how to dispose
of their collec-
tions of Catho-
lic historical
data in case of
death, would
be relieved to
learn of so safe
a receptacle,
while for refer-
ence such a de-
partment would
be invaluable.
What more fit-
ting place or
more splendid
nucleus for a
Catholic collec-
tion than the
extended Douai
Bible in the new
Public Library?
To the bibli-
cal student
it would, of
course, be only
a curiosity, but
its worth to the
artist and writer
would be incal-
culable. De-
part ment in the
Public Library
assured, two
ways remain by
which the Douai
Bible might be
secured : either
through the
generosity of an
individual, or by
the formation
VOL. LXX. 52

A OLID MAHOGANY CASE OF RARE WORKMANSHIP FOR'THE HlBLE.

8i8 I HE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE." [Mar.,

of a syndicate willing to donate, at the sacrifice of personal
recognition perhaps, money for its purchase. Either way would
thwart the rumored purpose of two booksellers bent on buying
the Bible to tear it apart for the prints to reproduce in cheap
form as a commercial speculation.

A rumor that Mr. Daly intended to leave the Douai Bible as a
memorial, to his two young sons gained wide credence. Their
untimely death in 1885 both died the same day of diphtheria
was a sorrow from which he is said never to have fully recovered.
The loss, undoubtedly, quickened his interest in the Bible, for it
was with renewed vigor he set about, after their death, to hasten
its completion. Mr. Daly was a practical Christian, in the fullest
sense of the word. Sundays, after early service at the Cathedral,
he was wont to shut himself up in his favorite "den" in the
basement of his home, where he indulged with his books the taste
and leisure the cares and duties of the working week denied.
Replete was this " den " in all that savored of art, letters, and
good fellowship. There he kept much of the working tools of
his profession. From the book-lined walls portraits of Shak-
spere and " Rare Ben Jonson," Macready, Kean, and the elder
Wallack looked down. Here he dipped into his favorite first
editions of Lamb the rarest group collected by an individual in
America or polished the manuscript of one of his own dramas,
or readjusted to the needs of his theatre a Shaksperian drama.
Every room in his house was filled with books. It was his
dream to erect a home on the Riverside Drive with a separate
fire-proof building on an adjoining lot in which to preserve
his treasures. The land was bought, but before the dream
materialized financial reverses overtook him. Each room of
his house had a clock and a desk ; likewise had the seven
offices of his theatre. It was his self-imposed task to wind
the clocks at his home every Sunday morning. When en-
grossed in writing, if interrupted, he could not pick up the
broken thread unless he changed his environment. It was to
humor this peculiarity that every room and .office had a desk.
He knew what he wanted, and was quick to decide. His
memory was prodigious ; his capacity for work seemingly un-
limited.

Every detail of his collection was at his command. Evi-
dence of his lively faith and practical devotion was on every side.
In the drawers of desks, or in ready reach on shelf or table,
were devotional: books. His bed-room and his libraries were
rich in statues of the Madonna, the Sacred Heart, and devo-

i QOO.] THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE"

819

THE ORIGINAL OF "RARE BEN JONSON " FROM WHICH ALL KNOWN PRINTS
HAVE BEEN TAKEN.

tional pictures of rare and curious art ; asperges, censors, col-
lection baskets, and ecclesiastical curios gathered in foreign
lands.

He was not unmindful of little things that make for joy.
Throughout his busy life he never failed Sunday afternoons to
pay a visit to his aged mother. Once a week he entertained
at dinner. Covers were generally laid for twelve in a dining-
room sumptuous in carvings as the banqueting hall of a
mediaeval knight. At the theatre or on the road he never

820

THE STORY OF " THE DALY BIBLE."

[Mar.,

failed to telegraph his wife the size of the audience before
the curtain rose on a performance Thoughtful of the enter-
tainment of his domestics, he had an organ in the kitchen of
his home, and parrots and pets of various kind. He was the
friend of the friendless, as his annual benefit, covering a quarter
of a century, to the Catholic Orphan Asylum, and various
charitable institutions irrespective of creed, attest. The memorial
altar in St. Patrick's Cathedral, the bell in its chimes, the
baptistery in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, are among
the visible proofs of his spirit ; but hidden for ever in the
hearts of men and women of the dramatic profession and
numerous artistic guilds are countless beneficent deeds, for it
was his way not to let the " right hand know what the left
hand doeth."

He was appreciative and grateful for true service cheerfully
rendered. In public or private he never failed to pay eloquent
tribute to the gifted, winsome woman whose talent he so
signally developed, and who, in turn, loyally assisted him to
round out a career of distinctive and enduring achievement
a career which was given him to voice the epilogue : " If I fall
asleep, do not waken me."

IQOO.] CHURCH IN THE EARL Y YEARS OF HENRY VIII. 821

THE CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF
HENRY VIII.

BY REV. GEORGE McDERMOT, C.S.P.

! ATHER GASQUET in a recent work* tries to
present the position held by the church in the
mind of the English people just before the new
doctrines broke out in Germany. His aim is to
collect the information on the subject from the
best sources without more than implying his own opinion on
the attitude of the public. He acknowledges the difficulty in
satisfying men that such a change could have taken place
unless causes had been long at work leading to it. The evi-
dence he adduces points to the conclusion that the change
was sudden and startling. The book will amply repay any
reader who desires to ascertain for himself the character of
the change. We cannot call it a movement, for this word
suggests the gathering of intellectual and moral forces, guided
in a particular direction ; we can as yet only call it a change,
the explanation of which is to be attempted. We shall, for
the greater part of this paper, part company with Father
Gasquet. His work has suggested it, but we shall proceed in
our own way to determine the character of the change as a re-
volt against authority, without the conditions which even pagan
morality would demand as a justification for rebellion in a state.

PERSONAL RESENTMENT THE FIRST MOTIVE OF THE

REFORMATION.

An important consideration in dealing with the attitude of
the English people in the beginning of Henry's reign is that
we have no proof of disaffection against the Papal authority.
Another is, that Henry when he quarrelled with the Holy See
intended only the withdrawal of obedience, while preserving
intact fidelity to the doctrines of the church. He was actu-
ated by personal resentment; his position when he assumed
the supremacy was closer to the church than that taken thirty
years ago by Dr. Dollinger. If Dr. Dollinger had been fol-
lowed by a large secession, his disobedience would be looked
upon as the intellectual and moral act of a conscientious

* The Eve of the Reformation. By Dom Gasquet, O.S.B. New York : G. P. Putnam's
Sons.

822 CHURCH IN THE EARL v YEARS OF HEAR v VIII. [Mar.,

thinker to whom a tyrannical majority had left no alternative.
He was used for awhile and flung aside as a broken tool.

Henry himself not only believed every doctrine of the
church except that of the supremacy but he insisted on his
subjects believing as he did.* It is arguable that his subjects
saw in the setting up of his supremacy nothing more than
the assertion of temporal sovereignty in matters that ought to
have been left to the secular jurisdiction. We are by no means
clear that a separation from the centre of unity would have
commended itself to the people ; but it happened that the
question on which he took his stand that of the marriage-
was one which in many of its relations necessarily lay within
the secular domain. It might be thought that it was one of
the class of mixed questions concerning which the ecclesiastical
and " common " lawyers had been so long waging war; and
we know that in a conflict of jurisdiction between the secular
and ecclesiastical courts popular sympathy, or at least the
sympathy of the landed proprietors and the burghers, would
be with the home tribunal. To persons not accustomed to
precise habits of thought a question of the validity of a mar-
riage might appear one for the courts of law, when all ques-
tions concerning settlements on marriage and the devolution
of title, in which every step must be proved by a marriage,
were determined by these courts. To persons, legal or lay,
inclined to give the law courts exclusive jurisdiction in mixed
questions questions savoring both of the temporality and
spirituality the king's declaration of headship might mean no
more than the freedom of his own courts from foreign juris-
diction in matters which ought to belong to them. That it
meant no breach in the unity of Christendom for the mass of
the people is certain. It meant nothing more than a right
royal-minded way of ruling his own household on the part of
their king, and a toleration on their part for the fickleness
that carried him from his rather aged and unattractive-looking
queen to the youth, beauty, and vivacity of "Mistress Anne."f

NO EVIDENCE OF DISAFFECTION AGAINST THE CHURCH.
This view explains why the majority of the people went

* We are inclined to think the denial of the supremacy was merely a temporary thorn to
plague the pope, but events were too strong for him.

f This disreputable woman seems to have been popular on account of her showy qualities,
and perhaps the use made of her by the Reformers helps to strengthen the idea that she
was virtuous. Henry's pride made him so suspicious, the unhappy creature could not escape.
He was a sukan in temper.

i goo.] CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII. 823

with him. It is the only explanation ; for no learned or capa-
ble man saw the coming of the change, saw the signs of the
tempest ; and therefore there could have been no deep-seated
and wide-spread hatred of the church, such as we are told in
the literature of three centuries had been sapping her authority
from the time of Wycliffe. We must recognize the forces which
were concentrated and directed in France in the last century.
That a change was certain, men of all conditions had been seeing
for a long time; and men belonging to the cultivated classes, par-
ticularly the nobility of the provincial robe, were deliberately
working to bring it about. The great nobility about the court
were not blind to the waves approaching from the horizon, as
they fiddled with a solitaire or talked blasphemy which they
called philosophy with a languid dogmatism. They would do
nothing. It was the business of Providence to look after per-
sons of quality if there were a Providence ; but an earth-
quake or the crash of worlds must be awaited calmly.

Where is there a scintilla of evidence of the disaffection of
the English people towards the church ? Lollardism was a
thing of the past ; and even if there were a religious element
in it, it would have proved nothing. The hold it took was
purely social. The disaffection was not because the church
had become corrupt, or that the religious houses were rich,
the monks vicious, or that the Bible was in Latin, but because
there were statutes of laborers, revocations of manumissions,
efforts to extinguish the copyholds and other tenures conferred
on the partly emancipated bondsmen, or the wholly enfran-
chised villeins ; because serfs enfranchised by city or borough
custom were reclaimed by the lords of the lands on which
they were born. Now, when these persons were told that the
Bible proved them the equals of their oppressors ; not only
that, but that they were of the same stock and had the same
rights to the common inheritance, the point of doctrine would
draw other principles to it as to a centre, and thus a social move-
ment become a demand for reform in the teaching of the church.

THE CHURCH WAS MADE A SCAPEGOAT FOR SOCIAL CRIMES.

The most common of all the kinds of misrepresentation of
the action of the church on social welfare, on moral and in-
tellectual progress, is charging her with causing the state of
feeling which so often broke out into violence, so often into
terrible excesses of lust and fury, simply because the insur-
gents employed as shibboleths some isolated maxim of the Cos-

824 CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII. [Mar.,

pel, some passage of the Old Testament divorced from the
context, and from all practical relations, more completely than
if it belonged as parallel or sentiment to the realm of No-
where.* There were epidemics of outbreak of this kind all
over Europe during the Middle Ages ; but the supreme system
of religious authority was unshaken. Now, in speaking of this
incomparable system with regard to spiritual jurisdiction in
England, Professor Maitland, cited by Father Gasquet, tells us
"the whole of Western Europe was subject to the jurisdiction
of one tribunal of last resort the Roman Curia. Appeals to
it were encouraged by all manner of means appeals at almost
every stage of almost every proceeding. But the pope was far
more than the president of a court of appeal. Very frequently
the courts Christian which did justice in England were courts
which were acting under his supervision and carrying out his
instructions. A very large, and by far the most permanently
important part of the ecclesiastical litigation that went on in
this country, came before English prelates who were sitting,
not as English prelates, not as * judges ordinary,' but as mere
delegates of the pope, commissioned to hear this or that par-
ticular case." This was true of England up to the divorce
proceedings, and the statement is consistent with the absence
of all traces of speculative dissent.

THE SUPREME SYSTEM OF THE CHURCH IGNORED.

The formative power of the church from the sixth century
to the fourteenth is the most marvellous instance of the tri-
umph of ideas over force. It is well-nigh impossible to meas-
ure the comprehensiveness and difficulty of the work ; to
understand how a system of authority and law, without a sin-
gle soldier behind it, could have risen from the fragments of a
broken order and the passions of untamed minds. And yet we
are met with puerilities such as : the system went down before
the Revival of Learning; Greek culture, flying from the Mos-
lems, opened the intelligence of Europe to the defects of an
institution which held it in a swoon. Algebra from Moorish
Spain, Plato from Adrianople, were in the luminous clouds that
led the world out of the bondage of the Papacy. It is quite
immaterial that Luther hated the New Learning as the devil
hates holy water, the Greek classics prepared men to pull
down all in the old religion which had no authority from the
questionable example of Olympian deities.

* The reader will know we mean no slight to the wonderful tract of Sir Thomas More.
We shall have- l o say a little about its incomparable foresight by and by.

i goo.] CHURCH IN THE EARL Y YEARS OF HENR v VIII. 825

The truth is, there was a dissipation of forces breaking the
cohesion of the European commonwealth in the era from the
fourteenth century to the sixteenth. The Moslems had their
toils round Europe on the east, from Africa, from Spain. The
dream of universal conquest had been but for a moment
clouded by the Crusades. It must have been known to the
policy of the German and Western sovereigns that their interest
should have bound them together against that enemy. Recol-
lections of jealousy from the Crusades and their inherited rivalries
at home as independent princes blossomed into the evil fruit of
a selfishness which sought the humiliation of a neighbor as its
foreign policy and the destruction of liberty as its domestic.

AS RACHEL WEEPING FOR HER CHILDREN.

It was a time of paganism in Italy, and of all social and
political crimes. In the north and west it was the age of
despots. The popes were no longer umpires in the disputes of
kings ; wars and rumors of war were on the nations from end
to end of the Continent. Mercenary soldiers, skilled in the
science of ferocity, sold themselves from camp to camp. An-
archy, misery, plague, famine scourged the peoples, and the
church was as Rachel weeping for her children.

England escaped these calamities to a great extent even
the desolating wars of the Roses had at least the merit of a
chivalrous inspiration and perhaps because she escaped these
calamities her relations to the church afford a better means of
estimating the true inwardness of the Reformation than we
have in the history of the other Reformed nations. If we take
as a guide the merits claimed for the Reformation, England
possessed the mental form most fitted for their reception. She
enjoyed greater liberty, at least it is said constitutional principles
were better understood there than elsewhere.* It is pointed out
that questions between the secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction
were debated there with a boldness not found elsewhere.f

NO INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTIES.

Assuming, then, that the scholarship from across the seas
awoke men's minds to a sense of abuses arising from the wealth
of the church, the luxury of the clergy, and the encroachment
on the secular power, we can understand that a people whose
representatives would express themselves boldly in parliament

* We doubt that they were better understood than in the Spanish monarchies that were
consolidated by Ferdinand and Isabella.

t In Spain and Naples only purely ecclesiastical questions went before the ecclesiastical
courts. We think the smallest temporal element ousted the spiritual jurisdiction.

826 CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII. [Mar.,

must have demanded somewhat drastic legislation. If doctrinal
errors were discovered through newly printed editions of the
Greek dramatists or, as Mr. Green would say, if the human
virtues which had been crushed by the church were recalled
by Greek culture, there would be some traces in the journals
of the Commons during the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry
VIII. There are none; but we find in the end of the latter
reign proclamations of the king and proceedings of the bishops
against heretical books from Germany and English works by
those " evangelical divines " who were described by the name
of " pot-wallopers " at the time, as even in the next reign they
were laughed at as " hot gospellers," and later still pilloried
as " round-headed rascals " and " crop-eared curs."

There was really no question of doctrine and morals in
England, and this must be true for Germany and Switzerland.
There were abuses the church was for twelve centuries in
contact with the world. The friendship of kings and great
men has been always a peril ; the miseries of the poor are
never absent, and the poor are sharp, carping and unjust too
often, unmindful of many good offices on their behalf; they are
ready to regard with jealousy intimacies between priests and per-
sons highly placed, too ready to exaggerate its importance ; nay,
more, some of them will not stop at imagining and then inculcat-
ing as gospel truth charges fatal to character. Somewhat in
this way the idea must have gone abroad immediately before the
dissolution of the religious houses that they were abodes of
wickedness. We think no fair-minded man can accept the
report of the Commissioners on the lesser houses ; they were
far from wealthy, their inmates had no temptation to sloth or
any other kind of sensuality. The wealthy foundations were
reported as being distinguished by the purity of those who
dwelt in them. What is the difference ? The scheme of sup-
pression, as at first contemplated, only embraced houses the
annual income of which did not exceed 200 a year. It was
a report to justify cruelty which one dare not think of. Men
ignorant of the world as children were turned out to beg, to
steal, or die upon the highways.

ORIGIN OF THE DEFAMATION OF THE MONKS.

The infamy, like every incident of the Reformation, is sus-
tained if not on one ground then upon another. As the scur-
rilous scribes, the playwrights, and the buffoons of Elizabeth, of
James I., and Charles I. made this hideous spoliation the

i QOO.] CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII. 827

cleansing of an Augean stable, a summoning to England of airs
of Arcady in the suggestions issuing from minds tainted by the
madness of their licentious lives ; as the wild ranters who
roamed through Wales and the desert places of the east and
south in the last years of Henry, all through the reigns of
Edward and Mary and Elizabeth, heaped upon the banished
monks their scorn that a reproach and an ignominy had come
upon their old age, and led their youth from the cities of
strength in which they had prided in their carnal wisdom, and
made them a hissing and a byword ; as the smug minister of
some conventicle raved over the wickedness so sternly visited
by the Lord when he sent forth righteous ones to the high places
of idolatry; as the picnic cicerone of to-day, leading his London
shepherds and shepherdesses beneath arches of rare beauty and
along groves of columns richer in association and form than
any that ever stood beneath a Grecian sky, points with awed
face of holiday deportment to secret places and gasps, "An
if they would," " then these stones could tell"; so we have our
men of history with their theories of advancement, our politi-
cal economists with their dicta concerning indiscriminate bene-
volence, to pronounce the king pious and intelligent in driving
out the monks ; his ministers, agents, courtiers humane, disin-
terested, far-seeing, patriotic in taking possession of their lands.

JEALOUSY OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION.

We think much has been suggested to show there was
nothing against the doctrine of the church in England and
elsewhere before the very breaking out of Luther's opposition
and the display of Henry's high-handed resentment. There
certainly was nothing in common between the fiery monk and
the equally fiery king when the former first took the field
against the wisdom and authority of sixteen centuries.* We
have from the writings of Saint-German, both directly and in-
directly, the strongest case which could be made against the
church. More replied to a good deal of Saint-German's attack ;
there are some points we must note, familiar to their contem-
poraries indeed, but of which people now are not aware mat-
ters that are needful for fairly estimating the controversy.

We think it very plain Saint-German must have had the
full measure of a lawyer's prejudices against the clergy generally,
but above all against the clerical legists. The English lawyers

* This Luther is a clever man, said Leo X. with a smile, when informed of the nailing up
of the theses and of the handsome epithets applied to himself. Leo must have thought him
mad.

828 CHURCH IN THE EARL Y YEARS OF HENR Y VIII. [Mar.,

had been for a long time jealous of a body of men who divided
the field of knowledge with themselves, and who had an exclu-
sive right of audience in the ecclesiastical courts. In his Dialogue
he lays down the principle that the state is entitled, and in
cases bound, to enact sumptuary laws for funerals, to fix the
dues payable to the clergy, and to inquire into sums claimed
or gifts in kind through prescription as mortuary benefits. That
he was a Catholic in principle is plain notwithstanding these
views and what he intended as severe attacks upon the reli-
gious. He bases the state's right to interfere in those mortu-
ary matters in the interest of executors and heirs. Without
laying too much stress on his hostility to privileges and exemp-
tions belonging to the clergy in what may be looked upon as
purely temporal interests, we think there can be nothing more
unjust than his attack upon the privilege of sanctuary. If he
argues, on the ground of public policy, that it is an interference
with the administration of law, we answer it was not in its origin
or the use of it a corrupt instrument to maintain influence. It
sprang not only from a public policy higher than that involved in
a conflict of jurisdiction ; it was at one time the only security for
justice. It had the sanction of the Old Dispensation and the
usage of the New. We cannot think the fair mind, no matter
in what school it has been formed, will consider these were
titles the clergy should readily surrender to the objections of
innovators. Possibly it was abused ; but who shall tell the
murders it prevented, the oppressions it arrested. By means
of it in countless instances in the wars of Stephen, in the
lawless reign of John, in every period of civil tumult the virtue
of women was secured from violence, the succession of property
preserved where the defenceless would have been compelled
to execute conveyances to powerful relatives or unscrupulous
neighbors. Now, this right is one of the difficulties of Henry's
reign ; that is to say, it is alleged as an instance of the ambition
of the clergy ; like all the rest it vanishes before examination.

GROUNDLESS ACCUSATIONS AGAINST THE CLERGY.

All along we have no impeachment of the doctrines of the
church ; on the best evidence the lives of the clergy were
worthy of their position. As to the latter, except in some
ribald ballads, we find nothing. Chaucer, though plainly in-
fluenced by Italian literature, to which the priestly life was the
game to be hunted by the satirist, gives a picture notwithstand-
ing which is the very ideal of a parish priest, and this at a

1900.] CHURCH IN THE EARL Y YEARS OF HENR Y VIII. 829

time when Lollardism, if ever, was a power. It can hardly be
matched in the severest demands of the modern standard.
Indeed we doubt does the overflowing benevolence of a pure
conscience and simple heart united to a solid understanding,
such as Chaucer's priest possessed, range themselves among the
gifts of the modern pastor so pronouncedly as knowledge of
politics or social science. It is true we have no other picture,
for the best reason, because there is no other poet ; but we
have side lights from the influence of the clergy on the laity,
and the respect paid to their counsels by men impatient of
any other counsel. The schools built upon estates during the
reign of Henry VII., and up to the dawn of Henry VIII.'s
quarrel, could have scarcely proceeded from the inner prompt-
ings of great land-holders bent on clearing them of their
tenants. It is conceivable that the parish sermons arrested
depopulation now and then, when the preachers fulminated God's
punishment on those who took away ancient landmarks and
added field fco field. That this evil increased under Edward
VI. and Elizabeth and James I., and was only attempted to be
checked in that of Charles I. by a state prosecution before the
Star Chamber, affords a presumption in favor of the popish
parish priests.*

GREED AND AMBITION THE MOTIVE OF PERSECUTION.

We have already suggested some reasons for holding that
the members of the religious orders were, upon the whole, faith-
ful to their sacred character and the obligations of their pro-
fession. The outcry in England came from Germany, and only
obtained an echo when the policy of the court was clearly for-
mulated for dissolution of the religious houses and the diversion
of the funds to other purposes. Saint-German completely fails
on the branch of his case against the monks which comes
under the head of laxity of conduct. That there was a falling
off from primitive rigor is possible, we admit within certain
restrictions. We are not permitted by our space to examine
the allegations of Saint-German representing the policy of the
court and the expectations of the cloud of obscene birds of
prey behind it. Every politician who maintained his giddy
place, or who aspired to the royal favor, or the Cardinal's,
or Cromwell's, to dismount the man then upon the ladder,

* There is a remarkable case under the statute of Henry VII., in which the attorney-
general of Charles I. prosecuted to conviction a great proprietor for depopulating his
estates. This enactment of Catholic policy ought to be known in this time of sociology in
lieu of religion. Religion still holds the field as a system of social amelioration.

830 CHURCH IN THE EARL Y YEARS OF HENR Y VIII. [Mar.,

wanted money to recoup himself for his expenditure on gracious
ladies who had access, or on his gifts to the clients who en-
joyed their patron's ear. The ruffler of the tilt-yard, the waiter-
on of the ante-chamber, brave in unpaid silks and velvets, must
have a grant of lands if he is to remain about the court. With
this impoverished and high-born crowd pushing on the scheme,
a far-sighted, selfish, and sinister ambition calculating the possi-
bilities it contained, the dissolution of the monasteries and the
appropriation of their endowments was a foregone result.

THE MONASTERIES A SOCIAL AID AND BLESSING.
But there must be a pretence of some kind of virtue when
a violent or an unjust act is to be done. The monks consisted
broadly of the two divisions into which mankind is ordinarily
but rather inexactly divided the deceiver, the dupe, the saint,
the sinner, the knave, the fool that is, the monks were sloth-
ful and indolent men free from gross vices and harmless on the
whole, or crafty, unscrupulous, wicked men for whom religion
was a cloak, and to whom their order and its emoluments
were the supreme interest of life. As drones or scoundrels
they had no claim on the wealth which should be directed to
its original destination of charity and learning and prayer.
Yet they fed the poor with a large-hearted liberality and a
benevolent patience which no secular eleemosynary institution
since has imitated. At the present moment the efforts of social
benevolence bringing help to the homes of the needy are dis-
trusted by the persons upon whom they are employed. If re-
ceived, they are accepted thanklessly ; if some temporary in-
crease of work rouses a fleeting spirit of independence, they are
rejected with contempt. The history of the Poor Laws is an
exceptional record of official insolence and hardness, and of
mental, moral, and physical degradation produced in the victims
of official insolence and hardness. We have accounts of the
crowds at the doors of the religious houses everywhere over
England, the laborer and small farmer not ashamed of seeking
temporary help side by side with the maimed, the aged or the
feeble, who necessarily were beggars ; we have the picture of
a lord chancellor of England having to ride back from the
crowds before a monastery door and turn down another street
to make his way.

CLERGY RESTRICTED AND LAITY EXEMPT.

Saint-German, we presume, must be right in laying stress on
" mortified lives," as one charge against the monks is they led

i goo.] CHURCH IN THE EARL Y YEARS OF HENR Y VIII. 831

unmortified lives we have dealt with that of their giving no alms
he must be right in laying stress if such lives were de-
manded by the ideal of his day. He surely would not take
the view of the good, stolid German who said to More " Fare
to sould te laye men fasten ? let the prester fasten," when
that great lawyer and saintly man suggested that the laity had
obligations as well as the clergy ; we might add that the laity
ought to have some kind of reverence towards, and observance
on account of, the infinite holiness of God, even though the
display of these things is not nominated in the bond. But with
regard to the fasting, it is obvious if there were a relaxation
it must have come from different conditions and possibly
characteristics. It was said on occasion of such objections at
that time in England, before then, and in other lands then
and before then, that it was better to abate the rigor of a rule
so that it might be observed by all than to maintain a rule
which could not possibly be observed by all.

THE STANDARD FOR THE RELIGIOUS VERY HIGH.
The passionate devotion and almost superhuman energy of
the old founders raised them above the average of their
fellow-men to a height that in a manner constituted them of a
different order, as we say Shakspere is from a poor Bosjesman.
Their contemporaries and the next few generations of their
brethren possessed the same quality of devotion and zeal, but
with time the flood was subsiding and eventually it flowed
along the ordinary levels. This is what we find in England in
the sixteenth century and over Europe. We are not quite clear
how far the hostility of the monks was carried to the New
Learning. By it they possibly lost useful friends in England ;
their distrust of it was more than intelligible ; it was not more
to be censured than the judgment which would not permit cer-
tain of the Greek and Latin classics to be read by school-boys
and university students in England,* which more than a century
ago caused the issue of expurgated editions of the classics ;f
which at the present moment expurgates the plays of Shak-
spere and proposed expurgating the classical novels of the last
century. But when it was plain what was the real policy of
those who aimed at the destruction of the religious houses,
then it became manifest that the New Learning had no invet-
erate antagonism to them, such as it entertained towards the
half-educated and wholly vulgar apologists and preachers of the

* How much of them would be left by a severe hand ?
t This led to a singular result in the case of one editor.

832 CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIIL [Mar.,

new doctrines. Saint-German's complaint, that the monks had
given up the wearing of the hair shirt, is, we think, only useful
as showing the temper of their opponents and the very trivial na-
ture of the charges against them. If their enormities could only
be adequately dealt with by a punishment like that which has
made the Dead Sea a perpetual monument of the justice
of God, it is very immaterial indeed whether the hair shirt was
worn, alms given, or whether the fast was observed according
to the stern temper of the ancient rule, or modified to suit a
weaker generation. These are the only objections the most
astute and able of their enemies can bring against them we
do not take account of the ex post facto charges invented
when the crime of spoliation was accomplished, any more than
of the sarcasms of Erasmus before the dissolution, which meant
about as much seriousness as the riding of a hobby-horse in
the mock tournament of a court festival.

THE PEOPLE AS A CLASS WERE FOR THE MONKS.

We can, in answer to the case made at any time against
the religious, offer the following as a fair judgment on the
charges and replies, on the evidence from authoritative sources,
and on the conduct of considerable lay interests, altogether
forming the materials available for the purpose. The monks
as large land-owners administered their estates more liberally
than others, took smaller rents than the lay landlords, and
never disturbed their tenants. There may have been a care-
lessness concerning the religious objects of their trusts here
and there ; there probably was a degree of wastefulness in the
management of their estates ; but all this we think inseparable
from the existence of institutions not incorporated for trade
and profit, nay, for the very opposite, namely, the effacement of
individual interest and the surrender of the corporate interest to
the use of others that is to say, employing the activities of the
brain and the powers of the body for the poor and the stranger,
to whom nothing is due except as it is the will of the Lord Christ.

The fact is, up to the last, we have proof that the monks
were on good terms with the country gentry, and had school-
rooms for their children in the monasteries. So far from a
universal desire for their suppression being entertained, the bill
for their dissolution was the first check received by Cromwell.
It was, the first on any subject he had met with, for he
ruled the Commons with the iron strength and pitiless resource
of a Borgia or a Medici ; it was the only check he sustained

i QOO.] CHURCH IN THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VI I L 833

for some time, as though the Commons were alarmed at their
temerity. It is wonderful, with his spies in every house, he
could not have obtained more against the monks he who
" tortured into treason " the murmurs of a petulant abbot or
the ravings of a silly nun, as men said passionately at his trial,
writhing as they were under the recollection of a spy-system
which made them feel as though a scorpion slept under every

stone.

THE COST AT WHICH THE REFORMATION WON.

We shall conclude with the statement that the people were
Catholics up to the Act of Supremacy, Catholics in attach-
ment and belief, and they remained so in secret where they
understood its force, smothering conscience as men will in the
hope of change. But there were men who could not com-
promise, who expected " no change " " until we fight for it,"
as Lord Hussey exclaimed. Fury at the dissolution of the
smaller abbeys stirred a revolt of the northern nobles, with
thirty thousand men under the Banner of the Five Wounds.
The insurrection would have been successful, but the Reforma-
tion, illuminated, guided, inspired by the ineffable perfidy of
Cromwell, won.

There need be no more said. In 1533 there were few
heretics, though their "policy," says. More, was " to make their
number larger than* it is." We admit the Reformation gained
the day. Cromwell slaughtered the men whose demands for the
old faith he and the king had granted when they had all England
from Berwick to the Don in their hands; the land was covered
with gibbets from which hung the bodies of men who had
been induced to return horrte on the faith of royal promises.
The Reformation won. What was the immediate gain to the
country? Within sixty years twelve acts were passed to relieve
distress, the necessity for the passing of which Thorold Rogers
tells us ** can be traced distinctly back to the crimes of rulers
and their agents."

The Reformation won, and we find a change of religion
against the will of the people ; vast numbers reduced to beg-
gary, the gallows staring at one wherever he turns, robberies by
beggared peasants not checked by the Terror that stalked
from village to village, and the spy that listened at every eave ;
the Reformation won, and all provision for religious instruction
was destroyed ; the Reformation won, and England bent to a
despotism under which parliamentary government could only
offer adulation to the king and make his wishes law.
VOL. LXX. 53

834 SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE. [Mar.,

SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE.

BY REV. THOMAS McMILLAN, C.S.P.

HE teachers of Manhattan Borough, New York
City, have within a few years developed the power
of organization which forced the Legislature to
consider their just claims. Now that they have
a substantial victory to encourage the diffident,
they should continue their efforts to foster the strength that
can be obtained only by a union of forces. Individually, how-
ever great may be the personal qualifications, the teacher is at
a .disadvantage in dealing with theorists who are ever trying to
introduce new fads, and to cram the minds of children in
opposition to the law of normal development which requires
that the curriculum of the college and the university should
not be made compulsory in the kindergarten and the elemen-
tary schools. Neither has the average teacher the time, nor
the requisite amount of patience, to refute the carping criti-
cism originating from small coteries representing some historic
families whose social prominence enables them to rush into
print easily.

It seems obvious that those wno are earnestly seeking to
improve the school laws of New York State should give more
attention to the suggestions that can be elicited from teachers
of recognized professional standing. The best text-books are
produced by the men and women who have had the supreme
test of actual experience in the management of children. It
may be hoped that our law-makers will seek to borrow wisdom
from the rulers of the class-room. Some of the educational
journals have already presented very able statements of the
evidence in favor of proposed changes for the codification of
school laws. The editor of The New Education, published at
Tremont, is alarmed by the thought that politics should rule,
and proceeds to ask :

Are our officers, from the State Superintendent down to
the cross-roads trustee, elected because of fitness or because of
pull? Each city, village, and district will have to answer this
question according to its own experience. Where fitness gov-
erns there is little danger for that place ; but if political pull
is the requisite which will outstrip other qualifications, the

1900.] SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE. 835

walls are already crumbling and tottering, and must be shored
up until they can be relaid by a master-hand.

That brings us to a vital question, one in which all who
are interested in any department of education must be deeply
interested, namely, the pending efforts to reorganize and
unify our state system of educational supervision. Shall we
rescue from the dangers noted our entire system of public
education, or must those of our public schools, our high schools,
which hitherto have been kept well outside of the pale of
political domination, be exposed to its corrupting influence?

Quite recently the Rev. Washington Gladden directed public
attention to the grave peril threatening the public schools of
the United States, in the ruin that is wrought to the highest
interests of the children and youth of the nation, therefore to
the nation itself, by allowing politics to dominate educational
interests. He says that formerly only men of a broad public
spirit accepted places on school boards, seeing there a grand
opportunity to serve human interests. They had an eye single
to the public good ; they had the disposition and the training
which fitted them for the serious work of supervision and
direction in the educational field. But, he says, when politi-
cians discovered that through the public schools there was
money and patronage to be levied for the purpose of strength-
ening political machines by the appointment of teachers, the
sale of school sites, the award of school contracts, a wholly
different type of men came up as candidates for election or
appointment on School Boards, and a sharp deterioration in
the work done in the schools naturally followed. With cor-
ruption possible in the purchase of sites, the building of school-
houses, the selection of text-books, the appointment and dis-
missal of superintendents and teachers, with political pull pre-
dominating throughout the entire system, he sees that pre-
tenders and charlatans are promoted over the heads of con-
scientious teachers ; that the tenure of the teacher is so pre-
carious that many men and women of the highest type fail to
see sufficient encouragement for entrance upon the work.

In a recent number of the Boston Journal it is stated that
Dr. Gladden does not exaggerate the extent of the evil, and
it says : " Locally there rs ample corroboration of his view,"
and calls attention to the scandals of the proceedings of that
board, adding: "A deterioration like this has been going on
very generally in cities, large and small ; and it is time that
a healthful public sentiment were aroused to check it ! "

836 SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE. [Mar.,

Many fairly well educated men and women do not seem to
know that our State educational system in New York com-
prises two distinct departments, the one controlled by the
Board of Regents, the other by the State Superintendent. The
Regents are men such as Dr. Gladden describes as having be-
longed to a previous period, men of prominence, attained be-
cause they are high-minded and capable ; men who are in close
touch with educational matters, questions, and people ; men who
were selected because of peculiar fitness, and who have always
served without pay, laboring constantly in the field of educa-
tion, gaining expert experience, which can only come with
years of service and from contact with just these conditions.
This Board is entirely free from harmful influences and from
the corrupting touch of the politician.

Receiving no compensation, seeking no personal gain, the
board is thoroughly independent of politics and men, and
works solely for the upbuilding and uplifting of our educational
interests. Let what its members have done during the past
hundred years and more give promise of what they might
accomplish in the years to come. On the Regents' roll are
names illustrious in history, in education, in finance, and in
letters. They have been and are men from the leading walks
of life.

The other department, that of Public Instruction, has charge
of elementary schools and work, and is presided over by a
single head, the State Superintendent, who is entrusted with
almost autocratic powers, and unfortunately is not always se-
lected because of eminent fitness, gained by education and
experience, but too often for political reasons. And the method
of his choice, coupled with the tenure of his office, makes it
extremely difficult for a superintendent to free himself from
political constraints during any portion of his term of service,
which, being for only three years, almost from the day of his
advent into office, impresses upon him the necessity of con-
tinued active political scheming if he would succeed himself.
He easily comprehends that official efficiency will count less
in promoting his re-election than will the multiplication of
grateful partisan friends. The present Superintendent has
been quoted as recently saying : " I have seen superintendents
stand up and resist political pressure which never yet appeared at
the door of the Regents of the University"

The Superintendent of Public Instruction is the victim of
his surrounding conditions, as the Regents of the University

1 900.] SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE. 837

are protected by the conditions of their life tenure and other
incidents of their organization. The case might safely be
submitted here without further argument and upon the Super-
intendent's testimony alone. No intelligent jury, mindful of
the welfare of our schools, would hesitate to render a verdict
in favor of the unification of our State educational system
under the supervision of the Regents of the University. But
there are other reasons for such a change in our system as
will bring the execution of the educational functions now
vested in the Superintendent under protecting supervision of
the Regents at least to the extent of making them responsi-
ble for the choice and retention in office of the official who
shall execute such functions. Their importance and the advan-
tage of such change in our educational system will appear
upon a slight review of the Superintendent's varied duties,
which are too great in aggregate to be safely committed to
any one person's unaided judgment or unrestrained discretion.
The time is opportune for the change, and all valid reasons
and worthy influences make for its accomplishment. Educa-
tional unification, under well tested, capable, and trustworthy
supervision, is the desideratum. The Regents of the Univer-
sity meet all the requirements for the needed supervising body.
Their board has become an institution the ripened fruit of a
century's experience. What has been thus evolved and has
so conspicuously proven its almost ideal usefulness, may not be
lightly set aside. To bring the Superintendent of Public
Instruction into harmony with and under supervision of the
Regents .of the University, little more legislation is needful
than to give them the power to elect and remove such officer.
His responsibility to them, and their responsibility for him,
will be thus simultaneously established. He will then recog-
nize the Regents as his natural and helpful advisers, and will
gladly accept their potent protection. Harmony will be es-
tablished in our educational household, and all, animated by a
common purpose, can work together for the common good.

The School Bulletin, published at Syracuse, reported at
length the proceedings of the State Teachers' Association held
last July in Utica. Supervisor Daniels, of Buffalo, was very
emphatic in his declaration that there should be a unification
of the educational work of the two departments at Albany
under the control of the Regents. It is important to remem-
ber also that many professional teachers share the same
conviction, but for prudential reasons would not make any

838 SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE. [Mar.,

public declaration. In certain cases there seems to be a sort
of intimidation displayed by superior officers which checks the
spontaneous expression of opinion among teachers. The annual
address of the State Superintendent, Charles R. Skinner, con-
tained a summary of the progress claimed for his administra-
tion during the past five years. According to the report given
in the School Bulletin Mr. Skinner did not stop with his demon-
stration of the advance that New York has made. " Unfor-
tunately he thought it necessary to discuss the question of
unification, and his best friends regretted the most to see him
descend to the undignified plane of personal altercation. * I
am suffering more than you are,' he said to some of the
teachers who were retiring, and the audience could well believe
it was true. Some of his notes were misplaced, he felt that
he did not have the sympathy of the audience, he was strug-
gling against odds, but he continued with dogged persistency
to finish all that he had prepared to say. He attacked by
name Regents Sexton, McKelway, and Reid ; and referring to
the statement in the New York Sun that at the convocation
the Superintendent of. Public Instruction and his deputies were
worsted in a fight of their own choosing, said that the speakers
at the convocation were manifestly packed in the interest of
the Regents. It is a curious fact that before the meeting
some of the Regents thought the speakers were packed on the
other side, and expressed dissatisfaction thereat.

"The impression Mr. Skinner made was a good deal more
of his annoyance at the turn opinion is taking than of the
strength of the arguments he presented. He declared that the
election of the superintendent by the Regents would be unwise,
unpatriotic, undemocratic, and unrepublican ; and yet a few
moments before he had said that the department itself had
proposed that the superintendent be elected by the Regents on
condition that the care of the high schools be transferred to
the department. He declared there was not one of the
Regents who would not consider it a punishment to be called
upon to pass a Regents' examination, which caused some
laughter; but a principal near us whispered that if Mr.
Skinner were called upon to pass one of his own uniform ex-
aminations in drawing he would discover a new cure for obes-
ity. He declared that not only was he himself in favor of
high schools, but he would make them absolutely free ; and
instead of allowing schools Hke the Utica Free Academy to
charge "tuition for outside pupils, would require them to take

1900.] SCHOOL LAWS IN NEW YORK STATE. 839

all country pupils who applied, and make the tuition a charge
upon the State."

On a recent occasion, in Brooklyn, Mr. Skinner again took
the attitude of supreme critic of the Regents, and gave utter-
ance to many offensive personal statements regarding honora-
ble men who have given long and faithful service to education
without any financial compensation. His dominant ambition
seems to run in the line of enlarging his own power and in-
creasing the " charge upon the State." Concerning his own
department he is an optimist, and a pessimist in all that re-
lates to other departments. The tax-payers of Utica undoubt-
edly have very good j reasons for the policy approved for their
academy, and they may safely claim exemption from censori-
ous dictation.

By an act o.f legislature M[r. Skinner was authorized, at
great expense, to .assume the responsibility of taking a bien-
nial school census, chiefly on his own recommendation of
competency for such a difficult task. The results of his work
will not bear critical inspection or a " uniform examination,"
in the words of his own pet phrase. No gain can be shown
proportionate to the money expended. The boroughs of Man-
hattan and the Bronx in New York City were commanded,
against the decision of the local commissioners, to pay for the
honor of this census about thirty-eight thousand dollars. By
a peculiar juggling of the figures there was no distinct men-
tion of the large number of volunteer workers in the cause of
education, representing hundreds of prominent families, philan-
thropic and religious organizations. A census that misrepre-
sents the work done by the people of New York State for
education, or which presents only in a partial way the evidence
of their generous zeal, deserves severe condemnation. This
consideration may be taken by those in charge of the figures
to be prepared for the Paris Exposition, which should be ar-
ranged according to a reliable standard. It is to the glory of
the Empire State that so many of its citizens do not need any
compulsory law. They take the initiative in educating their
children, and cheerfully pay the cost of their religious training.
By an unjust discrimination, fostered by the bigotry of the
past, they are also obliged to assume the whole burden of pro-
viding instruction in the secular branches required for intelli-
gent citizenship.

For all whom it should concern, and to comply with the
request of public officials seeking accurate information, the fol-

840 A MEMORY. [Mar.

lowing exhibit of the parish schools of New York State has
been prepared from the Catholic Directory for the year 1899.
To remove a widespread misconception, it is necessary to state
that the children in these schools have homes supported by
their parents, who are entitled to all the civic honor that be-
longs to tax-payers. From their contributions have been paid
the salaries of two thousand, six hundred and twenty teachers.
The number of pupils is indicated according to the dioceses,
representing all the counties of New York State :

Diocese of New York, ..... 47,109

" " Brooklyn, 27,785

" Buffalo, 21,324

" " Albany, 13,000

" " Rochester, 12,777

" " Syracuse, . . . . . 4,840

" " Ogdensburg, .... 3,500

Total, I3335

A Memory.

BY REV. WILLIAM P. CANTWELL.
I.

HE day is dull with sullen cloud,
And fog-wraiths haunt the sea ;
The fretful waves cry out aloud
In angry prophecy.

II.

The ebon wing of night afar
Speeds o'er the seething foam

When lo ! amidst the gloom, a star
That leads the sailor home.

MR. PHILLIPPS belonged to the ranks of the
country gentry and was a convert to the church
before the Tractarian movement began. The follow-
ing words of his son, who took up his Life* after
Mr. Purcell's death, indicate the stand-point from
which the life is written : " My object has been to vindicate the
Wiseman-De Lisle ecclesiastical policy ; to establish my father's
reputation as a man possessed of the ' perfection of Catholicity,'
and of the love of his country and her constitution ; and as a
man who laid down, in conjunction with his friend, Father
Ignatius Spencer, the only lines upon which the conversion of
England is, humanly speaking, possible ; not by raising a new
church on the ruins of the old one already established, but by
laboring to root out all heresy and hatred from the existing
churches of Canterbury and York, together with the kindred
dissenting bodies, and finally to restore all Christ-worshipping
Englishmen to their former ancient Catholic condition of
union with the churches of the Continent and the Holy See
of Rome the privilege of the actual Church of Westminster
so that the Scripture may be fulfilled on earth as it is in
heaven : And there shall be one fold and one Shepherd (John x.
16)."

Mr. Phillipps was associated with the Association for the
Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, the methods of which
were condemned by the Holy See. A full and particular ac-
count of the whole matter is given in these volumes. He was
also in intimate relations with Father Spencer, Mr. Gladstone,
Cardinal Newman, Aubrey de Vere, the last Catholic Earl of
Shrewsbury, Count de Montalembert, and other distinguished
men.

Many letters, unpublished before, from Cardinal Newman
and Mr. Gladstone add greatly to the interest of this work.

* Life and Letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle. By Edmund Sheriden Purcell. Edited
and finished by Edwin de Lisle. London : Macmillan & Co., limited ; New York : The
Macmillan Company.

842 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

He brought the' Trappists into England, giving them land and
building for them a monastery. He was deeply interested not
only in religious matters but also in public affairs, although he
was unwilling himself to take part in them. Of all these
things and many others these volumes give particulars. It is
a work of the highest interest and importance, presenting the
often told history of the Catholic revival from a distinctly new
point of view.

We have received these volumes too late to give of them
the extended and careful notice they deserve, and which next
month we propose giving. All we can say now is, that they
are a most valuable and important contribution to the reli-
gious history of our times. Taken along with Mr. Wilfrid
Ward's two volumes on his father's life and his Biography of
Cardinal Wiseman, together with Mr. Purcell's Life of Cardinal
Manning, they serve to set forth that history in great com-
pleteness. What is chiefly wanted now is the long-expected
life of Cardinal Newman.

Straining for effect and laboring under the burden of a
conscious style, the new pastor of Plymouth Church seems
less at ease in his recent volume * than might be expected
from one trained in the deep-souled spontaneity of pulpit
appeal, warm from the heart. On the other hand, one may
surmise that sermonizing must, to a great extent, tend to
dull one's sensitiveness to the niceties of language ; making
no great difficulty about careless phrasing, questionable syn-
tax, sudden digression, and curious figures. In the eloquent
fervor of discourse, no doubt, the speaker would ignore and
the hearer pardon such minor shortcomings.

It would be unfair to end our comment here. Several of
the studies presented by the author, notably the first and
second, are lovely and full of inspiration. Though they be on
themes much exploited nowadays " Progress " and " Honest
Living "the treatment is clever and even winning. It is a
style of teaching which can do much good, and may possibly
influence many who have been stolid hitherto into wakening
to better life. But a little of it goes a far way, and it cannot
be that the older method of appeal through supernatural
motives is quite out of date.

It is a great good fortune to the reading public that Miss

* Great Books as Life Teachers. By Newell Dwight Hillis. New York : Fleming H.
Revell.

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 843

Katherine Conway is not unacquainted with the principle of
moral theology that declares the nullity of a vow not made
pro bono meliori. It were a pity had the present delightful
volume of reminiscences of travel* been lost to us, simply
because of a mistaken " pledge not to write a new book " on
her recent European trip. We assure the author, with all
theological certainty, that she need be troubled by no
scruples as to the legality of her dispensation from that pledge,
for it is most undoubtedly a bonum melius to have written such
a book as New Footsteps in Well-Trodden Ways, than to have
left it unwritten.

These reminiscences are so interesting in themselves, and
the telling of them is so happily managed, as almost to compel
the reading of every line of their 252 pages at one sitting.

The quasi-apology contained in the title is hardly necessary,
for though the " ways " Miss Conway has taken are "well-
trodden " indeed, they yet become new and fresh under her
pleasant treatment ; so that those who have themselves trodden
therein will be grateful for being reminded of happy experi-
ences, and those who have never yet partaken of the privilege
of a European tour will, for the time at least, gladly accept
such delightful narrative as Miss Conway's as the next best
thing.

For Catholic readers, especially, the volume in hand must
be enjoyable, for the author has in her journeyings taken the
very route that every Catholic would like to follow when in
the old countries, and she writes of all her experiences with
an exquisite Catholic sympathy. Her enthusiastic admiration,
by preference, for persons and places and practices connected
with the life of the church is most refreshing, as indicative of
a loving Catholic instinct. Yet Miss Conway is Catholic as
well in the other and broader sense of the term : she shows a
kindly sympathy for all classes with whom she comes in con-
tact. Her short chapter on " Jerusalem in Rome " makes
manifest her rather novel yet altogether praiseworthy feeling
of interest and concern in the unfortunate religious condition
of the Jews. We wish there were more of such Catholicity.

The grouping together in one chapter of remarks and inci-
dents illustrating Italian devotion to the Blessed Virgin is par-
ticularly felicitous. The author, almost unconsciously and with
perfect unostentation, champions the cause of such warm-hearted

* New Footsteps tn Well-Trodden Ways. By Katherine E. Conway. Boston: The
Pilot Publishing Company.

844 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

and ingenuous piety towards the Blessed Mother of God as is
peculiarly Italian ; and she does not fail to make her point that
such devotion is, in all reason, natural, and cannot be offensive
to any one but the hypercritical.

There is many a bit of anecdote and comment and criticism
and historical narrative to enliven these pages of Miss Con-
way's, and prevent them from becoming a mere guide-book or
a record of sights and facts. In fact, it is the constant inser-
tion of these snatches of history, and these touch-and-go com-
ments on literature and art, that fastens the reader's attention
and makes him hurry along from page to page with that con-
tinuous interest that is generally given only to the best of
novels.

Outside of Rome, and its multitude of churches great and
obscure, England and Oxford seem most to have stirred our
writer's emotions. And truly those who have read much of
the story of Catholicism in England must feel, with Miss Con-
way, that there is nothing like Oxford " to make the Catholic
heart prouder and sadder, aught more abounding in wild con-
tradictions, more moving to heart-sinking and to hope." But
we must feel that hope shall predominate, the " new spring "
of Catholic life in England shall merge into glorious summer,
and the true faith again be found throned in her ancient
citadel, the great English University. It were pleasant to speak
at length of these and many other hopes and memories aroused
by the words of a true Catholic enthusiast, but in lieu of this we
must content ourselves with thanking " The Bostonian " for her
delightful little work and again recommending it as an extra-
ordinarily successful and interesting volume.

This is a number of tales,* partly allegorical, in which the
opinions of the author, Selma Lagerlof, on facts of the moral
consciousness are offered to the public in a translation by
Pauline Bancroft Flach.

The shell of the teaching, the outer covering, is attractive,
as it ought to be in writing of the kind, while the strong sym-
pathy with the loveliness and grandeur of external nature im-
parts the principal charm to the characters that are associated
with the scenes. In some way these men and women are born
from the scenes ; they are as the atmosphere in which they
live and move and have their being. The terrible outlaw in
the story called "The Outlaws" is the embodied spirit of the

* Invisible Links. By Selma Lagerlof. Boston : Little, Brown & Co.

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 845

wild, fierce as the torrent, black and shaggy as the mountain,
strong, daring, invincible, an incarnation of the forces of
nature ; and yet in all the fury of his spirit, amid the storm
wrack that clouds it, and despite its tumult and disorder,
there emerges from the chaos the sense of the great truth
that justice is the foundation of the world. He himself is at
war with human justice ; he had committed a crime, the mur-
der of a monk, more shocking to the public conscience than
an ordinary murder, and in consequence he fled to the moun-
tains. His companion one who accidentally joins him is a
very young fisherman, a mere boy, who had stolen fishing
nets. Now there began a war of thought and feeling in the
young fisherman when he learned the nature of his companion's
crime. His mind, though undeveloped, was naturally clear and
strong, his affections were generous and manly. He rejected
offers of reward to betray the murderer ; but from the moment
he heard that justice was the foundation of the world, and
heard it from the murderer's lips, influences internal and ex-
ternal worked upon him, tortured him, wrung him, appalled
him, until at length he could find no peace except by satisfy-
ing external justice through its representative, human justice.
This was by surrendering the murderer to its power, or, as it
may appear to the unsophisticated mind, by the betrayal of
his friend. He justified himself for his treachery by the dread
of the spirits that haunted him, and in the opportunity for re-
pentance afforded to the murderer. So far as this "link" has
a purpose in accounting for the motives which influence con-
duct in a crisis, it is, doubtless, in this that a comparatively
untainted mind will see the enormity of a crime to which the
criminal himself is blind, and the latter may realize it by the
anguish which the thought of it causes to a beloved soul. It
is a very roundabout way of reaching a fundamental principle
of human nature, that the esteem of one loved is valued.

"The King's Grave" is a sketch intended to illustrate the
growth of the mind in primitive conditions and the way in
which the untutored imagination confers power and intelligence
on natural objects having some resemblance to the human face
and form. The suggestion is that fetichism is the religion of
nature, and the first religion. The conception is wrought out
without much verisimilitude, but the purely literary part of the
task is performed with ability ; that is to say, the descriptions
of scenery and the portraiture are animated. This is also an
allegory ; but the philosophy which underlies the fiction leads

346 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

to the same goal as fatalism or determinism of a theistic
kind. Why grieve for what you have done, compelled by the
immortal gods?

There are several other sketches, and in all a search is car-
ried on for the links which form the chain of life ; that is, for
the circumstances and moods which use the raw material of
character, and the relation of the will to these, which is the
loom for ever active until the character is made. But in hardly
any instance can we discover the reality of the process. It is
like nothing we are acquainted with ; and yet we are inclined
to think the reader of "A Fallen King" will judge that he
has had experience himself, and others have had the same, of
a conversion effected with like violence and tearing asunder of
the soul as that portrayed in Matto Wik's rising out of de-
spair and degradation, under the singing and praying, the
charitable deeds, and more charitable sympathy, of the Salva-
tion Army captain and her two companions. Extraordinary
effects, either of good or evil, were produced in the early " re-
vivals " in England and Ireland ; but these we can some way
understand, as the product of great excitement in minds hardly
developed but devotional. The act of Wik, which is presented
as a sacrifice of himself to secure the happiness of his young
wife is either an act of insanity or else the result of an ill-
conditioned and unmanly jealousy. The wonderful power of
moving audiences as long as he carried his grief locked in his
heart, and the loss of the power when by his wife's confession
he regained his good name, are a bad blending of a natural
fact and a supernatural result into the implication of one sin-
gle miraculous effect of Salvation Army missionary labor.
There is, indeed, one admirable sketch in which, as the silver
lining of the cloud when the moon is about to issue renders
the black pall beautiful, so the high thoughts which are sancti-
fied by death make death beautiful as they made life noble and
this is the fanciful vision of the ghosts which Frederika Bremer
saw before she closed her eyes in death to open them in life.

In his retirement at the Catholic University Professor
Stoddard is displaying a most commendable literary activity.
Catholic writers of his stamp are too few, and universal thanks
must be awarded his publisher, his friends, his students, or
whoever is responsible for his steadiness at the pen. The
present volume,* indeed, is a reprint from the pages of the

* Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska. By Charles Warren Stoddard. St. Louis :
B. Herder. '

i goo.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 847

Ave Maria, but its advent gives us hope that we shall soon
have in book-form the other very charming series of sketches
now appearing in that clever and well-edited magazine.

Hail-storms of the Rockies, Pueblo and its infernal heat,
streams brawling through lovely vales, the quiet inland sea,
the steamboat-deck at 10 P. M. these are some of the varied
visions framed in the cheery, familiar style now so popular
with thousands of readers, and said by able critics to be quite
beyond rivalry. A lagoon amid mountain-steeps like a watery
way in a giant Venice, a ball by the ladies of Juneau, Sitka,
the jumping-off place, and the towering rock of Katalan all
these are among the new slides of our friend's marvellously
furnished stereopticon, and you may be thankful to sit by at-
tentive as he describes. His old charm is still his own. We
can voice no better comment on his latest work.

In the February issue we commended strongly M. Sepet's
admirable life of Saint Louis. The present volume,* being of the
same series, is to some extent in rather disappointing contrast.
Perhaps this is felt all the more because we have expected
much from the new series and have cherished hopes of well-
nigh faultless perfection. Strict criticism of defects, it seems
to us, has been invited by the prospectus of these new " Lives,"
and by the choice of eminent men for their composition. Yet
the present volume gives evidence of many shortcomings, some
not remediable, except by a change in plan and tone. We
mention them, however, in the hope and the expectation of
deterring no one from procuring this new Life of St. Ambrose,
for it is worth purchasing both for its own sake and for the
sake of the series to which it belongs.

To speak first of the larger and more fundamental matters
of general conception and treatment. The whole work mani-
fests a lack of what we may call, for want of a better word,
" sympathy " ; that is, such a real appreciation in the writer's
mind of the peculiar grandeur and heroic qualities in the
character of the saint as would influence the writing of every
page and make itself felt on the reader's mind. This quality,
we say, is, to our thinking, absent from the biography, because
in the reading of it our former conception (we believe a true
one) of the outstanding nobility of the figure of the great
bishop of Milan is neither enlarged nor accentuated. The failure
to produce this effect is perhaps due to a failure on the author's

* The Saints : "St. Ambrose," by the Due de Broglie. Translated by Margaret Mait-
land. New York : Benziger Brothers.

848 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

part to present the romantic and dramatic events of his
hero's life in striking, picturesque narration, even where this
could have been done without violence to historical accuracy.
For example, the celebrated incident of the humiliation of
Theodosius after the massacre of Thessalonica is told with
unnecessary diffuseness, with too much attention to Ambrose's
motives for severity, too much explanation of what the author
seems to consider the bishop's delay in confronting the em-
peror. A blow was struck by Theodosius against the church
and against God ; Ambrose braved the imperial sinner, and
struck a return blow that brought him to his knees to beg
pardon of the church and of God. That is the story. Let it
be told quickly and briefly ; then, if necessary, let Ambrose's
letters be brought forward to explain his emotions and motives.
Other instances might be given, but the fault we speak of is a
general one, noticeable rather in the tout ensemble of the work
than in any particular part.

Furthermore, one might well ask, what is the author's
opinion of the miracles that attested the finding of the bones
of the saints, Gervasius and Protasius ? He seems only reluctant-
ly to admit that " cures were said to have taken place," and
is there not an apparent discountenancing of these cures in
the manner of the statement that " greater are the miracles
grace effects in the soul than are such miracles as these"?
(p. 84). The miraculous events accompanying the discovery of
the bones of these martyred brothers are mentioned by St.
Ambrose himself and recounted by St. Augustine, and it would
take little space to declare the fact. Indeed, we confess a
dislike of the apparent desire to exclude miracles from this
book. No other is mentioned, if we except the heavenly
phenomena which surrounded the death of St. Ambrose ; we
hope that the omission of the account of the divine witnesses
to sanctity that followed his demise is made from carelessness
rather than from design.

We have hinted that the book is not faultlessly written.
Sometimes the author, sometimes the translator, sometimes we
know not who, is to blame. For example, " inconsequent " (p.
30) is good French, but not the best English for " inconsistent " ;
"directly" (pp. 28,98, 100) cannot mean " as soon as"; "not
now shall lead our armies the military eagles " (p. 23), and " is
it likely that him whom alive the soldiers deserted, they will
defend now he is dead?" are Latin, not English constructions;
"fish fpr compliments" (p. 45) has almost too colloquial a

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 849

sound for a literary work ; " no one thought it incumbent on
them to tell him " (p. 58) is hugely ungrammatical, and to trans-
late " Invitum nolitis colere quod nolit " into " Force no one
to practise a religion they" etc. (p. 59), is to do the Latin an
injustice, and to disgrace the English; "tore down their
standards floating over the capitol " (p. 60) leaves room for doubt
as to the final disposition of the standards. " Protaeus " for
" Protasius " (p. 83) may be allowable, but is hardly familiar ;
to say (p. 96) that Domnin showed a puerile inability as a
diplomat, and then aver that "it did not take the astuteness of
a Domnin," etc., is a trifle inconsistent ; " Valeus " for " Valens "
on two successive pages would reflect on any proof-reader;
and to come back to our syntax " the mob, having person-
ally insulted the emperor, repressive measures naturally fol-
lowed," is decidedly poor ; and so the errors accumulate. It
is a pity they are so numerous, but we repeat that, despite
its faults, the book contains much that is worthy, and will
repay its price to the buyer.

Mr. Keightley shares the feeling which draws so many
writers of fiction at this moment to the life of the eighteenth
century for the materials of their work. We are not quite sure
that obedience to the demand, the fashion, or the craze is the
wisest course; at least, if a novelist intends to reproduce the
manners and mind of that century, he requires something more
than acquaintance with one or two social facts like smuggling
and kidnapping, and something more than the knowledge that
men dressed differently _from the style of the present day.
Whatever may be the source of the attractien to the period
when the original thirteen States of the Union were still
colonies with the treatment of crown dependencies, or conquered
provinces as an alternative policy, we are at liberty to say
that writers proposing to treat of that time in fiction should
remember their rivals. ^

Mr. Keightley gives us an entertaining book* we think
that he is a man of talent, though somewhat deficient in taste
and knowledge but the book no more belongs to the time in
which the events are supposed to be laid than it belongs to
the period " when Adam delved and Eve span," or the period
" when Pan to Moses gave his pagan horn." We should have
liked to see the influence of dress, a particular etiquette, and
a particular opinion on the formation of character and conduct.

* Heronford. By S. R. Keightley. New York : Dodd, Mead & Co.
VOL. LXX. 54

850 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

The mere shadowy vicar does not belong to the church which
Fielding and Marlin, Swift and Sterne have made familiar to
us. Lord Heronford, the elder, is borrowed from the myster-
ious white-coated gentleman in The House by the Churchyard,
and made purposeless in the appropriation ; the younger one is a
very poor personation of the reformed rake who fills so large
a place in the novels, the plays, and the matchless little papers
little essays on men and manners of that century when
English prose reached a perfection which places it nearest to
the Attic of Plato and Xenophon. We have said the book is
an entertaining one. We repeat this, and we add, the tone is
honest and healthy ; but to us it is perfectly plain the writer
is not an Englishman, though he professes to be one.

Two recent books * of practical religious import deserve
kindly mention. Father Cafferata has supplied us with a book
of instruction which will be of great advantage in aiding con-
verts to obtain clear primary notions of Christian doctrine.
Its best feature is its being so adapted as to supply lay
workers with all the requisites for thoroughly explaining such
points as are likely to obtain most notice from inquiring non-
Catholics. The simplicity of language, the clearness of detail,
the frequent use of the Book of Common Prayer, and the sym-
pathetic tone, make the volume a heartily welcomed addition
to our growing list of *' convert literature."

The explanation of the Mass, in the other volume men-
tioned, is likewise satisfactory. Its handy form, its cheap
price, its thoroughly enjoyable paper and type serve as addi-
tional recommendations to the series of devout instructions on
the meaning of the Holy Sacrifice. If any suggestion were to
be advanced it might, perhaps, be that the deep personal sig-
nificance of the great act of adoration may be somewhat
obscured in the simple reader's mind by the detailed account
of single parts and ceremonies.

Father Rickaby has brought together in this volume,f with
some slight revision, the Conferences given by him to the
Catholic undergraduates of Oxford and of Cambridge in the
years 1897, 1898, 1899. We have already given notices of

* The Catechism Simply Explained. By Rev. Henry T. Cafferata. London : Art and
Book Co.; St. Louis: B. Herder. The Christian at Mass. By Rev. Joseph L. Andreis.
New York : Christian Press Association.

t Oxford and Cambridge Conferences^ iSq-j-iSqq. By Joseph Rickaby, S.J. London :
Burns & Gates, limited; New York : Benziger Bros.

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 851

some of these Conferences as they appeared separately, and
now welcome the publication of the complete collection. The
only fault they have is their brevity. They appear to be
rather notes than fully developed discourses. On this account
they are the better suited for the studious, and for such they
will be very useful ; especially^the Oxford Conferences, which
treat of questions at present much discussed.

Father Rickaby shows intimate acquaintance not only with
Catholic philosophy and theology but also with current writings,
and seizes upon with a sure hand their real tendency and
bearing. The following extract on the " subjective method of
proof" gives a good idea of his attitude towards what is called
modern thought, and his way of dealing with it: "What I
call the * subjective method of proof consists in observing the
sequence of ideas current among mankind, and arguing thence
the sequence of events thereto corresponding, as though to
know the ideas and the state of men's minds at any given
epoch was to know the facts about which the ideas are con-
versant. On this method, if we wish to know whether a thing
be right or wrong, we have only to inquire whether men nowa-
days generally hold it to be right or wrong : the conscience of
mankind at this rate being the standard of morality. . . .
We have but to mingle in society and read the literature of
the day, and this knowledge of ideas will prove to be a knowl-
edge of things. There are great advantages about this method ;
it is a vast saving of research, it enables us to make up our
minds with little trouble. For instance: past ages believed in
witchcraft ; the present age does not believe in witchcraft ;
therefore there is no such thing as witchcraft. It will be ob-
served that this method entirely dispenses with objective proof ;
. . . no science has demonstrated that such a thing as a
real witch is an impossibility ; the disbelief is declared to be
the result, not of any series of definite arguments or of new
discoveries, but of a gradual, insensible yet profound modifica-
tion of the habits of thought prevailing in Europe. It is, it is
said, a direct consequence of the progress of civilization, and
of its influence upon opinions. ... If we ask what new
arguments were discovered during the decadence of the belief,
we must admit that they were quite inadequate to account for
the change. Still we have heard of rude awakenings of in-
dividuals, and even of whole classes and nations of men, facts
breaking in upon them quite contrary to their established
ideas. There is always danger in trusting to an idea, because

852 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

it is an idea, however common. It is not a scientific confi-
dence. . . . It is not safe."

We commend this volume, and especially this Conference
on the Subjective Method, to the attentive study of studious
readers.

One of the articles in our last issue offers us the occa-
sion for a few words about the appearance of Sir John Seeley's
famous book.* 1882 was the beginning of the first formal teach-
ing of a creed which since then has been repeated and varied
in many places and under diverse forms, always maintaining its
position as the Gospel of Natural Christianity. Vague and in-
definite though it be, this new religion has won to itself some
of the cleverest and most cultured of modern minds. It claims
to be the Faith of the Future, and whether propagated under
the title of Worship of Nature, Religion of Beauty, or the
New Humanism, it professes a doctrine which in the main is
ever the same. To know its tenets thoroughly, and their bear-
ing on formal religion, as we term it, one has but to consult
the classical pronouncement mentioned above.

In outline the creed is as follows : Science, it teaches, far
from being hostile to true religion, is but a most admirable
means to free it from bonds and shackles and exhibit it in its
native grandeur. The God revealed to the modern worshipper
is Nature, conceived as the grand totality of phenomenal ex-
istences. Faith in the progress of humanity and admiration of
the visible world, these are the cardinal points in its profession,
and the only infidelity it recognizes is lack of enthusiasm or
an idle, selfish narrowness which refuses to contribute to the
common treasury of united effort. This religion, its adherents
maintain, is a real religion, its God an actual God, its bearing
on human welfare an eminently practical one. In it, and in it
alone, the artist and the scientist can find that common meet-
ing-ground furnishing place for a world-wide religion which
will be to all humanity what the Mosaic Dispensation was to
the Jewish people. This, the Spiritual City of the universal
civilization, is to be, as it were, a restored Hellenic culture,
purified by Christian adaptation, elevated and widened and
made lasting by the shaping hand of Science.

Now, the main point at issue in all this matter is the
existence of the " supernatural " as commonly conceived. As
commonly conceived, we say, because, under a cloud of phras-

* Natural Religion. By the author of Ecce Homo. Boston : Roberts Brothers. 1886.
Third edition.

1 900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 853

ing and amid a dust of terms, the word supernatural is often
presented as possessed of a meaning quite different from that
in use among Christians. But it will, perhaps, make the issue
clear if we specify as the precise points to be adjudged these
two, the personality of God and the individual immortality of
the human soul. These doctrines assented to, Natural Reli-
gion can be dismissed as a mere misnomer for a believing sect.
This is not the place to examine the pro and con. of the
controversy concerning these matters. We allude to them as
the really important considerations in the question at issue,
that the inquirer may not be deceived by specious ambiguities,
but may at once fix his eye upon the keystone of the edifice
he is called upon to admire. His Christian integrity is un-
harmed, though in company with Neo-Pagans ; he should love
water and pine-trees, and the gleam of the rising moon, though
he join in praying for "The Parliament of man, the federation
of the world " ; though he condemn as futile and untrue the
childish notions of superstitious imaginations which some would
represent as the kernel of Christian faith. But the forbidden
ground wherein no Christian can tread securely is the discus-
sion of the Divine Personality, and the character of the union
held up as the final destiny of men. Therein, as Martineau
has pointed out in comment on the volume before us, lies the
negation of real religion. Given the truth of Christian teach-
ing on these points, it is not a far cry to the building up of
a complete system of Catholic doctrine. Hence it has seemed
worth while to indicate the landmarks that stand at the part-
ing of the ways, and to mention Natural Religion as the
authoritative exponent of the system, giving us plain evidence
of its characteristic weaknesses.

The author of this book,* although it was originally
written in French for French readers, is an Englishwoman.
The original has just received the singular mark of distinction
of being crowned by the Academic Frangaise. The style of
the original is thus vouched for, while the translation is so
well made that it does not seem to be a translation. The
work is not the product of research in the same sense as
Father Gasquet's Eve of the Reformation. Lingard has been
followed in the general plan, and Challoner's Missionary
Priests -and Brother Foley's Records have furnished the
matter for the account of the sufferings and lives of the

* The Condition of English Catholics under Charles II, By the Comtesse R. de
Courson. Translated and amplified from original sources by Mrs. F. Raymond-Barker.
London : Catholic Truth Society.

854 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.,

secular priests and of the Jesuits. For minor matters the
author made use of old family papers to give the finishing
touches to the picture, while the translator has made so much
more extended a use of this hitherto unpublished material as
to be able to say that the substance of the work has been
gathered from many a quarry not always accessible.

So far as our knowledge goes this is the first continuous
account of the sufferings of Catholics during the reign of
Charles IT. ; the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles
have been fairly or completely treated of by Father Morris and
others. There is, unfortunately, an abundant record of suffer-
ing. The hopes of Catholics on the accession of Charles II.
were dashed to the ground. Of the ten chapters seven are
devoted almost completely to the account of trials and execu-
tions and persecutions of one kind or another. But it is a
record calculated to animate the Catholic heart to work for
the good of his country. Sometimes we hear of the better
condition of Protestant when compared with Catholic countries.
England was then more of a Protestant country than now.
And yet immorality not only prevailed, but was practised with
more ostentation and brought less disgrace than at any other
period. " In all classes habits of gambling, intemperance, and
profanity were rife, and in the political world there prevailed
falsehood, intrigue, corruption. Alone, in the seclusion of
their dilapidated manors, the impoverished Catholic recusants
maintained intact, together with the ancient faith, their in-
herited tradition of fortitude and honor, the fear of God, and
their own self-respect" (p. 218).

In the way of personal reminiscences and anecdotes of
Cardinal Newman it is hardly possible to say too much, for
his character was as fascinating as his writings. He seems to
have lived in an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual dignity
that gave tone and beauty to his daily life, while it secured
his habits and characteristics from the public eye. The world
knew him well, indeed, through his soul-expressive writings, but
could scarcely catch a glimpse of the domestic attractiveness
that shone in his conversation and manner. Gladstone said of
him that he illustrated better than any one else the truth of
the saying, " The world knows little of its greatest men."

Some attempts have been made since his death to reveal
his closer personality; the volume in hand* approaches the

* Personal Reminiscences of Cardinal Newman. By Caroline Vinton Henry. Illustrated.
Chicago : T. S. Hyland & Co.

1900.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. . 855

pleasant task with greatest sympathy and reverence. Mrs.
Henry has learned her stories mainly from the lips of her
husband, who enjoyed a particularly friendly relation with the
great Oratorian, and her appreciation of her subject partakes
evidently of the great affection and devotion that sweetened
the intercourse between Mr. Henry and his spiritual patron,
Dr. Newman.

For the sake of a possible future edition of the work, it
may be remarked that the present edition is somewhat marred
by careless proof-reading, Latin words and quotations having
particularly suffered at the hands of the reader or printer.
Otherwise the volume is very well and pleasantly prepared.
The illustrations are particularly worthy of commendation.

AN ESTIMATE OF VOLTAIRE.

On the title-page the author of a History of Modern Phil-
osophy in France * appears as maitre de conferences in the Sor-
bonne and professor in the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques.
His plan gives much place to men like Voltaire, who are not
usually grouped among the " philosophers." The principle on
which he has made his selection is the influence which a
writer has had on the French Revolution either by promoting
it, checking it, or deducing consequences from it. In such a
method Joseph de Maistre must have a place. We regret that
the author has not given due effect to the "reasoning which led
De Maistre to criticise the philosophic thought which led to
the Revolution. Whether M. Levy-Bruhl has intended it or not,
the impression produced is that De Maistre was a passionate
declaimer. He was very far from this. He had indeed a
scorn for shams, for intellectual vanity, for the superficial
judgment that condemned as of no value everything that had
been done for the enlightenment of mankind before the
eighteenth century. He saw a philosophy which had led to
anarchy as its practical results ; but he was not content with
looking at this consequence, he proved that it was impossible
that anything but that consequence, anything but the dis-
orders of the Revolution, could have sprung from the doctrines
of the " philosophers." Now, this is in the highest sense the
scientific treatment of that event. The necessary connection
of causes and effects is seen and stated, and this adequate con-
sideration marks the contrast between De Maistre and French-

* History of Modern Philosophy in France. By Lucien Levy-Bruhl. Chicago: The
Open Court Publishing Company ; London : Kegan Paul & Co.

856 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar.

men like Guizot and Carrel, Englishmen like Macaulay and
the Whigs of the Edinburgh Review. The fury of the Revo-
lution these men looked upon as the best proof of the evils of
the old authority in France, spiritual and temporal ; and they
took as a test of the correctness of their judgment the modera-
tion of the revolution in England which began in 1641, and of
the event usually called the Revolution which took place in
1688.

The fact is, that in England in 1653 God still ruled, even
though as the Calvinistic Zeus of Milton, while in France there
was no God, no influence except a fearful parody of the gro-
tesque disorders of mediaeval Abbots of Unreason. To all of
the ." philosophers " of the eighteenth century, in a greater or less
degree, must be attributed the tragic mummeries performed in
France in that awful time. Foremost among the pernicious
influences were the scoffs of Voltaire. The author has given
to Voltaire an exceptionally large place in his work. We do
not think that because his philosophy was not reduced to a
system he should be disentitled to the name of a philosopher.
If it appears, though diffused over novels, historical works,
plays and essays, it would entitle him to a place among
philosophers; but even then there must be principles from
which conclusions are deduced, if nothing constructive, at least
a consistent criticism. There is nothing of the kind. Voltaire
is throughout a free lance of the press, the greatest there ever
has been, but a man who served one standard to-day, another
to-morrow, like the condottieri of the middle ages, like the
soldiers of fortune of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In his Traite 1 de Metaphysique he insists upon the freedom of
the will ; in the Philosophie Ignorant, later on, he denied it.
If this were the result of an unfortunate, though an honest,
change of opinion, one could only regret it ; but Voltaire had
no regard for truth. Whenever he assailed Christianity he
employed falsehood with an effrontery so confident that inex-
perienced readers thought his statements final. His ribaldry
when he dealt with sacred subjects was of a piece with the
loathsomeness of his private conversation. Pope, who had a
tolerably strong stomach for indecency, was compelled to fly
from a Dinner-table in London on account of the grossness of
Voltaire. It was more than suspected that Voltaire used to
sell the secrets of the Jacobites, who trusted him because they
thought he was a Catholic.

Before, his religious and philosophical opinions could have
an influence on Contemporary judgment, he affected a regard for

i goo.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 857

authority, he exhibited Christian piety in an amiable light, and
his sentiments were so just and delicate that the Pope conde-
scended to accept the dedication of his " Mahomet." But he was
biding his time ; and when it came that matchless sarcasm of
which he was possessed was directed against the most valuable
truths, the most venerable institutions, the most generous senti-
ments. Therefore we are prepared to hear that " there is not
a single ancient philosopher who now serves to instruct young
people among enlightened nations," that the Middle Ages are
a time of " Samoyeds and Ostiaks " who had " read Aristotle
and Avicenna," that the Catholic religion is the soul of those
ages, and they are described in the words ignorance, misery,
and theology; that scholasticism, religious wars, plagues,
famines, autos-da-fe are all branches of the same tree and, like
branches, share the same life.

It has been said that Voltaire cannot be regarded as a for-
midable enemy of Christianity; that his recklessness, dishonesty,
and utter disregard for truth prevented him from doing the
harm done by such men as Hume, Gibbon, and Strauss. M.
Levy-Bruhl does not seem to have seen that Voltaire was an
unscrupulous liar ; he seems, on the contrary, to regard him as
a humane and singularly enlightened man, and that the reason
he was not so successful an antagonist of Christianity as he
might have been, is because he was a Theist. The fact is,
Voltaire was as dangerous, through that withering irony which
in his day blighted everything it fell upon, as any enemy of
religion. The mind would have been a clear one and the will
a strong one which, in a period of unexampled shallowness
and irreverence, could be insensible to the mockery of -that
Mephistophelian smile.

It was no wonder when the reaction came that pure-minded
men would strike at the wickedness, the folly, the inconsistency
and pretension of a school the central figure of which was a
man like Voltaire. They had before them, as we said, the ex-
cesses of the Revolution, its saturnalia of blood and lust, the
hollow mouthings of its heroics, its unspeakable shames. That
philosophy which stands in the eternal pillory of the crimes of
1793, that constructive power with its hundred constitutions
living the life of summer flies that philosophy even in its
method was a false pretence. Nothing but experiment, ex-
periment, experiment ! And yet not one of the whole line or
tribe or conspiracy against God and reason not one had the
patience to practise the experimental method.

THE deepest sentiment that prevails with us,
as we lk back over the Mivart case, is that of
profound pity for the old man, with the feeble-
ness of seventy years in his step, as he goes out from the
church of his strength and maturity to wander alone among the
stranger, with no priest to shrive him and no sacraments to
comfort him. Not a few will offer up their prayers that he
may bend the knee in submission before the end comes.

It is significant in this deplorable affair with what unanim-
ity the non-Catholic religious press commended the church's
strong attitude in favor of dogmatic truth. The Outlook, how-
ever, was an exception. Because Cardinal Vaughan required,
in the name of the church, "a hearty and intellectual accept-
ance " of her teaching, the Outlook declares that this is requir-
ing of Mivart " nothing less than an abdication of* reason." It
is not so ; the act of faith is a highly intellectual act. It is
the belief in divinely revealed truth, as presented by an un-
erring messenger, and it is the highest act of reason to yield
submission to One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
This of a necessity places the final authority in matters of faith
and morals not within the individual, but without him. To be
consistent the Outlook must applaud Roberts in his polygamy,
and consider him a martyr to his private judgment when the
American nation turned him out of its legislative halls.

The discussion on the school question is again in an acute
state. With more and more urgency are the professional educa-
tionists insisting on a religious element in education, and they are
gradually familiarizing themselves with the idea of some way
or other incorporating the religious feature into the common
school. It is necessary that they solve the problem for them-
selves. They will not take our solution, labelled as ours, but
if we give them time enough they will come around to it in
their own way. We call special attention to the two school
articles in this issue. The Regents stand for a feasible solu-
tion of the difficulty.

1900.] SUPREME COURT AND SECTARIAN INSTITUTIONS. 859

THE SUPREME COURT AND SECTARIAN
INSTITUTIONS.

WE venture to publish the full text of a recent decision of
the Supreme Court of the United States which, in our opinion,
is destined to have a far-reaching effect in shaping the policies
of the various states and municipalities towards the eleemosy-
nary institutions within their gates.

Under the influence of a recent wave of bigotry many
charitable institutions, which have been organized to do a purely
humanitarian work of relieving distress or of succoring misery,
though under religious auspices, have been often placed in sore
straits through the refusal of the civil authorities to grant them
the financial help they have needed to do the work of the
municipality. And this refusal has been because they have ven-
tured to call to their aid the comforts and. consolations of re-
ligion, though they have secured the results the municipality
has asked. This movement originated largely among some ar-
dent Evangelical spirits, and was taken up by the Evangelical
Alliance and continued by the soi-disant " League for the Pro-
tection of American Institutions."

The true inwardness of this movement was " shown up " by
Rev. Alfred Young in a scathing article, entitled " The Com-
ing Contest with a Retrospect," published in THE CATHOLIC
WORLD MAGAZINE of January, 1894. The promoters of the
movement, under a very thin disguise, first attempted to make
Protestantism a state religion by securing an amendment to the
National Constitution, the second section of which read as fol-
lows: " Each State in this Union shall establish and maintain a
system of free public schools adequate for the education 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"
Failing in this, they determined to completely secularize every
school, hospital, or eleemosynary institution, or else deprive it
of municipal or state aid. In order to secure this latter end
the following clause was submitted : " 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 authorize either to be used, for
the purpose of founding, maintaining, or aiding, by appropria-

S6o THE SUPREME COURT AND [Mar.,

tion, payment for services, expenses, or otherwise, any church,
religious denomination, or religious society, or any institution,
society, or undertaking which is wholly or in part under
sectarian or ecclesiastical control," In this too they failed,
but in their most desperate attempt to succeed they did create
a whirlwind in which many institutions that were doing useful
humanitarian work suffered. But now the end of all their
machinations has come. The Supreme Court of the United
States has for ever settled the matter in declaring it entirely
lawful for the District of Columbia to enter into contracts
whereby it can pay out moneys to institutions to do a certain
work in accordance with its charter, notwithstanding the fact
that the Directors of such an institution are clothed in a re-
ligious garb, and profess the tenets of a definite religious faith.
Justice Peckham, writing the decision, says that ' Whether the
individuals who compose the corporation under its charter
happen to be all Roman Catholics, or all Methodists, or Pres-
byterians, or Unitarians, or members of any other religious or-
ganization, or of no organization at all, is of not the slightest
consequence with reference to the law of its incorporation, nor
can the individual beliefs upon religious matters of the various
incorporators be inquired into."

The complete decision should be carefully read. It is based
on the most impartial reasons, and animated by a perfect sense
of justice to all shades of religious sentiment. It constitutes
the closing chapter in the history of one of the bitterest perse-
cutions the Catholic Church has suffered at the hands of men
who made it their boast that they were American citizens.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STAGES.
No. 76. OCTOBER TERM. 1899.

Joseph Bradfield, Appellant, "j

vs. I Appeal from the Court of Appeals of

Ellis H. Roberts, Treasurer of j the District of Columbia,

the United States. J

[December 4, 1899.]

This is a suit in equity, brought by the appellant to enjoin the defendant
from paying any moneys to the directors of Providence Hospital in the city of
Washington, under an agreement entered into between the Commissioners of
the District of Columbia and the directors of the hospital, by virtue of the author-
ity of an act of Congress, because of the alleged invalidity of the agreement for
the reasons stated in the bill of complaint. In that bill complainant represents
that he is a citizen and tax-payer of the United States and a resident of the
District of Columbia, that the defendant is the Treasurer of the United States,
and the object of the suit is to enjoin him from paying to or on account of
Providence Hospital, in the city of Washington, District of Columbia, any moneys

i goo.] SECTARIAN INSTITUTIONS. 861

belonging to the United States, by ^virtue of a contract between the Surgeon-
General of the Army and the directors of that hospital, or by virtue of an
agreement between the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and such di-
rectors, under the authority of an appropriation contained in the sundry civil
appropriation bill for the District of Columbia, approved June 4, 1897.

Complainant further alleged in his bill:

" That the said Providence Hospital is a private eleemosynary corporation,
and that to the best of complainant's knowledge and belief it is composed of
members of a monastic order or sisterhood of the Roman Catholic Church, and
is conducted under the auspices of said church ; that the title to its property is
vested in the ' Sisters of Charity of Emmitsburg, Maryland'; that it was incor-
porated by a special act of Congress approved April 8, 1864, whereby, in addition
to the usual powers of bodies corporate and politic, it was invested specially
with ' full power and all the rights of opening and keeping a hospital in the city
of Washington for the care of such sick and invalid persons as may place them-
selves under the treatment and care of said corporation.'

" That in view of the sectarian character of said Providence Hospital and
the specific and limited object of its creation, the said contract between the same
and the Surgeon-General of the Army and also the said agreement between the
same and the Commissioners of the District of Columbia are unauthorized by
law, and, moreover, involve a principle and a precedent for the appropriation of
the funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies,
contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that Congress shall
make no law respecting a religious establishment, and also a precedent for giv-
ing to religious societies a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil
duty which would, if once established, speedily obliterate the essential distinction
between civil and religious functions.

"That the complainant and all other citizens and tax-payers of the United
States are injured by reason of the said contract and the said agreement, in
virtue whereof the public funds are being used and pledged for the advance-
ment and support of a private and sectarian corporation, and that they will suffer
irreparable damage if the same are allowed to be carried into full effect by means
of payments made through or by the said defendant out of the Treasury of the
United States, contrary to the Constitution and declared policy of the Govern-
ment."

The agreement above mentioned, between the Commissioners of the Dis-
trict of Columbia and the directors of Providence Hospital, is annexed to the
bill, and is as follows:

" Articles of agreement entered into this sixteenth day of August, in the
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven, by and between
the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and the. directors of Providence
Hospital, a body corporate in said District, whereby it is agreed on the part of
the Commissioners of the District of Columbia

" That they will erect on the grounds of said hospital an isolating building
or ward for the treatment of minor contagious diseases, said building or ward
to be erected without expense to said hospital, except such as it may elect, but
to be paid out of an appropriation for that purpose contained in the District
appropriation bill approved March 3, 1897, on plans, to be furnished by the
said Commissioners, and approved by the health officer of the District of Co-
lumbia, and that when the said building or ward is fully completed it shall be
turned over to the officers of Providence Hospital, subject to the following
provisions :

" First. That two-thirds of the entire capacity of said isolating building
or ward shall be reserved for the use of such poor patients as shall be sent
there by the Commissioners of the District from time to time through the
proper officers. For each such patient said Commissioners and their succes-
sors in office are to pay at the rate of two hundred and fifty dollars (250) per
annum, for such a time as such patient may be in the hospital, subject to annual
appropriations by Congress.

" Second. That persons able to pay for treatment may make such arrange-

862 THE SUPREME COURT AND [Mar.,

ments for entering the said building or ward as shall be determined by those in
charge thereof, and such persons will pay the said Providence Hospital reason-
able compensation for such treatment, to be fixed by the hospital authorities,
but such persons shall have the privilege of selecting their own physicians and
nurses, and in case physicians and nurses are selected other than those assigned
by the hospital, it shall be at the expense of the patient making the request.

" And said Providence Hospital agrees to always maintain a neutral zone
of forty (40) feet around said isolating building or ward and grounds connected
therewith to which patients of said ward have access.

" As witness the signatures and seals of John W. Ross, John B. Wight, and
Edward Burr, acting Commissioners of the District of Columbia, and the cor-
porate seal of the said The Directors of Providence Hospital and the signature
of president thereof, this sixteenth day of August, A. D. 1897."

The contract, if any, between the directors and the Surgeon- General of the
Army is not set forth in the bill, and the contents or conditions thereof do not
in any way appear.

The defendant demurred to the bill on the ground that the complainant
had not in and by his bill shown any right or title to maintain the same ; also
upon the further ground that the complainant had not stated such a case as en-
titled him to the relief thereby prayed or any relief as against the defendant.

Complainant joined issue upon the demurrer, and at a term of the Supreme
Court of the District of Columbia the demurrer was overruled and the injunction
granted as prayed for. (26 Wash. Law Rep. 84.) Upon appeal to the Court of
Appeals of the District the judgment was reversed, and the case remanded to
the Supreme Court, with directions to dismiss the bill. (12 App. D. C. 453.)
Whereupon the complainant appealed to this court.

Mr. Justice Peckham, after stating the facts, delivered the opinion of the
Court :

Passing the various objections made to the maintenance of this suit on ac-
count of an alleged defect of parties, and also in regard to the character in which
the complainant sues, merely that of a citizen and tax-payer of the United States
and a resident of the District of Columbia, we come to the main question as to
the validity of the agreement between the Commissioners of the District and the
directors of the hospital, founded upon the appropriation contained in the act of
Congress, the contention being that the agreement if carried out would result in
an appropriation by Congress of money to a religious society, thereby violating the
constitutional provision which forbids Congress from passing any law respect-
ing an establishment of religion. (Art. I. of the Amendments to Constitution.)

The appropriation is to be found in the general appropriation act for the
government of the District of Columbia, approved March 3, 1897. (29 Stat. 665,
679.) It reads: "For two isolating buildings, to be constructed, in the dis-
cretion of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, on the grounds of
two hospitals, and to be operated as a part of such hospital, thirty thousand
dollars." Acting under the authority of this appropriation the Commissioners
entered into the agreement in question.

As the bill alleges that Providence Hospital was incorporated by an act of
Congress, approved April 8, 1864 (13 Stat. 43), and assumes to give some of its
provisions, the act thus referred to is substantially made a part of the bill,
and it is therefore set forth in the margin.*

* An Act to incorporate Providence Hospital of the City of Washington, District of

Columbia.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America
in Congress assembled, That Lucy Gwynn, Teresa Angela Costello, Sarah McDonald, Mary
E. Spalding, and Mary Carroll, and their successors in office, are hereby made, declared, and

igoo.] SECTARIAN INSTITUTIONS. 863

The act shows that the individuals named therein and their successors in
office were incorporated under the name of " The Directors of Providence
Hospital," with power to receive, hold, and convey personal and real property,
as provided in its first section. By the second section the corporation was
granted "full power and all the rights of opening and keeping a hospital in the
city of Washington for the care of such sick and invalid persons as may place
themselves under the treatment and care of the said corporation." The third
section gave it full power to make such by-laws, rules, and regulations that
might be necessary for the general accomplishment of the objects of the hos-
pital, not inconsistent with the laws in force in the District of Columbia. Noth-
ing is said about religion or about the religious faith of the incorporators of this
institution in the act of incorporation. It is simply the ordinary case of the in-
corporation of a hospital for the purposes for which such an institution is gen-
erally conducted. It is claimed that the allegation in the complainant's bill, that
the said " Providence Hospital is a private eleemosynary corporation, and that
to the best of complainant's knowledge and belief it is composed of members of
a monastic order or sisterhood of the Roman Catholic Church, and is conducted
under the auspices of said church ; that the title to its property is vested in the
Sisters of Charity of Emmitsburg, Maryland," renders the agreement void for
the reason therein stated, which is that Congress has no power to make " a
law respecting a religious establishment," a phrase which is not synonymous
with that used in the Constitution, which prohibits the passage of a law " re-
specting an establishment of religion."

If we were to assume, for the purpose of this question only, that under this
appropriation an agreement with a religious corporation of the tenor of this
agreement would be invalid, as resulting indirectly in the passage of an act
respecting an establishment of religion, we are unable to see that the com-
plainant in his bill shows that the corporation is of the kind described, but on
the contrary he has clearly shown that it is not.

The above-mentioned allegations in the complainant's bill do not change
the legal character of the corporation or render it on that account a religious or
sectarian body. Assuming that the hospital is a private eleemosynary corpora-
tion, the fact that its members, according to the belief of the complainant, are
members of a monastic order or sisterhood of the Roman Catholic Church, and
the further fact that the hospital is conducted under the auspices of said church,
are wholly immaterial, as is also the allegation regarding the title to its property.
The statute provides as to its property and makes no provision for its being
held by any one other than itself. The facts above stated do not in the least
change the legal character of the hospital, or make a religious corporation out

constituted a corporation and body politic, in law and in fact, under the name and style of
the directors of Providence Hospital, and by that name they shall be and are hereby made
capable in law to sue and be sued, to plead and be impleaded, in any court within the county
of Washington, in the District of Columbia ; to have and use a common seal, and to alter or
amend the same at pleasure ; to have, purchase, receive, possess, and enjoy any estate in
lands, tenements, annuities, goods, chattels, moneys, or effects, and to grant, devise, or
dispose of the same in such manner as they may deem most for the interest of the hospital :
Provided, That the real estate held by said corporation shall not exceed in value the sum of
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the said corporation and body politic shall have
full power to appoint from their own body a president and such other officers as they may
deem necessary for the purposes of their creation; and in case of the death, resignation, or
refusal to serve, of an^y of their number, the remaining members shall elect and appoint other
persons in lieu of those whose places may have been vacated ; and the said corporation shall
have full power and all the rights of opening and keeping a hospital in the city of Washing-
ton for the care of such sick and invalid persons as may place themselves under the treat-
ment and care of the said corporation.

SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the said corporation shall also have and enjoy
full power and authority to make such by-laws, rules, and regulations as may be necessary
for the general accomplishment of the objects of said hospital : Provided, That they be not
inconsistent with the laws in force in the District of Columbia : And provided, further, That
this act shall be liable to be amended, altered, or repealed, at the pleasure of Congress.

864 SUPREME COURT, ETC. [Mar., 1900.]

of a purely secular one as constituted by the law of its being. Whether the in-
dividuals who compose the corporation under its charter happen to be all
Roman Catholics, or all Methodists, or Presbyterians, or Unitarians, or mem-
bers of any other religious organization, or of no organization at all, is of not
the slightest consequence with reterence to the law oi its incorporation, nor can
the individual beliets upon religious matters oi the various incorporators be in-
quired into. Nor is it material that the hospital may be conducted under the
auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. To be conducted under the auspices
is to be conducted under the influence or patronage of that church. The mean-
ing of the allegation is that the church exercises great and perhaps controlling
influence over the management of the hospital. Jt must, however, be managed
pursuant to the law ol its being. That the influence of any particular church
may be powerful over the members of a non-sectarian and secular corporation,
incorporated for a certain denned purpose and with clearly stated powers, is
surely not sufficient to convert such a corporation into a religious or sectarian
body. That fact does not alter the legal character of the corporation, which is
incorporated under an act of Congress, and its powers, duties, and character
are to be solely measured by the charter under which it alone has any legal ex-
istence. There is no allegation that its hospital work is confined to members
of that church or that in its management the hospital has been conducted so as
to violate its charter in the smallest degree. It is simply the case of a secular
corporation being managed by people who hold to the doctrines of the Roman
Catholic Church, but who nevertheless are managing the corporation according
to the law under which it exists. The charter itsell does not limit the exercise
of its corporate powers to the members of any particular religious denomination,
but on the contrary those powers are to be exercised in favor of any one seeking
the ministrations of that kind of an institution. All that can be said of the cor-
poration itself is that it has been incorporated by an act of Congress, and for
its legal powers and duties that act must be exclusively referred to. As stated
in the opinion of the Court of Appeals, this corporation " is not declared the
trustee of any church or religious society. Its property is to be acquired in its
own name and for its own purposes; that property and its business are to be
managed in its own way, subject to no visitation, supervision, or control by any
ecclesiastical authority whatever, but only to that of the government which
created it. In respect then of its creation, organization, management, and
ownership of property it is an ordinary private corporation whose rights are
determinable by the law of the land, and the religious opinions of whose mem-
bers arc not subjects of inquiry."

It is not contended that Congress has no power in the District to appropriate
money for the purpose expressed in the appropriation, and it is not doubted that
it has power to authorize' the Commissioners of the District of Columbia to enter
into a contract with the trustees of an incorporated hospital for the purposes
mentioned in the agreement in this case, and the only objection set up is the
alleged " sectarian character of the hospital and the specific and limited object
of its creation."

The other allegations in complainant's bill are simply statements of his
opinion in regard to the results necessarily flowing from the appropriation in
question when connected with the agreement mentioned.

The act of Congress, however, shows there is nothing sectarian in the cor-
poration, and " the specific and limited object of its creation " is the opening and
keeping a hospital in the city of Washington for the care of such sick and
invalid persons as may place themselves under the treatment and care of the
corporation. To make the agreement was within the discretion of the Com-
missioners, and was a fair exercise thereof.

The right reserved in the third section of the charter to amend, alter, or
repeal the act leaves full power in Congress to remedy any abuse of the charter
privileges.

Without adverting to any other objections to the maintenance of this suit,
it is plain that complainant wholly fails to set forth a cause of action, and the bill
was properly dismissed by the Court of Appeals, and its decree will, therefore,
be Affirmed.

(True copy.)

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