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Bound 
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THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE 



OF 



General L(Iterature and Science 



POBLISHED BY THE PAULIST FATHERS. 



VOL. LXXXVI. 
OCTOBER, 1907, TO MARCH, 1908. 



NEW YORK : 

THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD, 

120 West 60th Street. 



1908. 



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JESUS Grucified 

READINGS ON THE PASSION OF 
OUR LORD. 

By FATHER BI^LIOXT, Paulist 



''This is an extreme! j devotional and edifying: series of meditations on the 
Passion of our Lord, the ripe fruit of a life-long devotion to Christ Crucified. It 
is well adapted for readings to the people during the Mass in the Lenten season." — 
^m. Catk. Quarterly. 

** The pious faithful will find it an admirable book for spiritual reading, and it will 
kelp priests both at the prie-dieu and in the pulpit. The treatment of the subject is 
fresh and interesting." — TMe Irish Monthly, 

"It has the power of drawing one close to the cross. It broadens and deepens 
one's understanding of the great mystery of suffering." — Th§ New Century, 

" There is a clearness and simplicity in Father Elliott's treatment of his subject 
that is very attractive. The child as well as the mature adult may read it with profit.'^ 
""Catholic Advance, 

" How beautiful, indeed, are the meditations on the divine passion found on 
nearly every page in this book, so full of love for our dear Lord — true pearls beyond 
price." — Intermountain Catholic, 

"This volume carries with it the fervor and conviction of a messenger who has 
received his inspiration close to the cross." — Catholic Universe, 



Price, S 1 .OO. Postage, 10 cents extra. 



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CONTENTS. 



AUies, Thomas William.— JTi^riV/ fVi7- 

berfarce^ ...... 318 

ArDOul the Englishman. — Francis Ave- 

limg^ D,D., 18, 157, 303, 443, 5^9» 12P 

Aubrey de Vere in His Prose Work. — 

Kaikerine Brigy^ , . . . i 

Bacon*Sf Lord, Charges against Scholas- 
tic Philosophy. — Michael Hogan, 
S./> 779 

Bin^et, Saint, and his Biographer. — 

Herbert Thurston^ S./.^ . . 289 

" Bettering One's Position," The Falla- 
cy of. — /oAm a. Ryan^ D,D,y , . 145 

Catcchirm, A Crusade of \\i^.— Edward 

A, Gilligan 433 

Catholicism, The Crises of. — Cornelius 

Clifford^ ...••. 198 

Catholism, The Obediences oi.^ Corne- 
lius Cl'jff^ord, .... 385.506 

Christian Living, The Cost of. — John 

A. Hyan, D.D., .... 575 

Columbian Reading Union, The, 142, 284, 
429, 571, 7*4» 857 

Current Events, 131, 274, 420, 561, 705, 846 

Foreign Periodicals, 123, 264, 414, 552, 

697. 837 
Glastonbury. — Bllis Schreibtr^ . . 332 

Helen Keller's French Sister. — Countess 

ae CoursoHy 57 

Huysmans, Joris Karl — Virginia M, 

Crawford^ 177 

International Catholic Library, The. — 

fames /. Fox^ D.D., . . 378 

Kelvin. l^OTd.—lames /. Walsh, M.D., 

Ph.D., LL.D., 757 

Letter to the King, K.^ Katharine Ty- 
nan, 651 

Liberalism and Faith.— fT. II. Kent, 

O.S.C, 719 

Lisheen ; or, the Test of the Spirits. — 

Canon P. A, Sheehan, DM,, 68, ao8, 342, 

489 



Miss Felicia's Garden, In. — Christian 

Reid, .... . . 366 

Modernism : 
The Rights of the Supreme Pontiff. — 

fosepH F. Mooney, V.G., . . . 519 
The Errors Condemned. — Thomas F. 
Burke, U.S. P., . . . . 524 

The Causes of Modernism. — Joseph 
W. Daily, C.SS.R,, . . . .645 

Mr. Charles Johnston on Modernism. 
— George M, Star le,C.S. P., . . 636 
Mountain Griselda, A.-^/eanie Drake, 763 
Native Sing-Song, A. — M. F, Quinlan^ 479 
New Books, 109, 244, 398, 532, 680, 816 

Overlanding. — M. F, Quintan, . 748 

Patrick, Saint, A Legendary Life of. — 

fosesph Dunn t/i,D , . . .461 
Priest, The, In Caricature and Idea. — 

Cornelius Chffvra, .... 663 

Psychical Research, The Recent Results 

oi,— George M . Searle, C. S.P., . 232 
Puck and Ariel.— -«4. W, Corpe, . . 97 
** Ransomers," The, A Catholic For- 
ward Movement.— (?. Blltot Ans- 

truther, 630 

Sanctity and Development. — Thomas 

/. Gerrard, 39 

Shakespearian Clown, The.— ^. W, 

Corpe, ...'.. 803 

Thompson, Francis.- /N«/A^r Cuthbert, 

O.S.F.C, 480 

Thompson, Francis, A Note on. — Edi- 
tor C. JVf, 629 

Thompson, Francis, Poet. — Thomas J. 

Gerrard, 613 

Uncivil Engineer, An. — Jeanie Drake, 189 

Walworth, The Late Father. Life 
Sketches of.— Walter Elliott, 
C'S.P. 359 

Z06 and the Prince. — Mary Catherine 

Crowley, 791 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



Acta et Dicta, ; 836 

Activities Sociales, 113 

Ailey Moore : A Tale of the Times, • 263 
Allies, Thomas William, . .258 

American Revolution, The, . . . 399 

Ancient Irish Civilisation, The Story of, 406 

Anglican Ordinations, The Question of, 836 
Back in the Fifties. A Tale of Tractar- 

ian Times, 685 

Back Slum Idols, 821 

Benedicenda, 261 

Beside Still Warers, . . .117 

Bibliotheca Ascetica Mystica, . 696 

BilUart, The Life of the Blessed Julie, 546 
Boulogne-Sur-Mer : St. Patrick's Native 

Town, 406 

Bninhilde's Paying Guest, . 820 

Catherine of Siena, St. , and Her Times, 254 
Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue of the^ 

Seraphic Virgin, 687 



Catholic Chaplain, The, at the Secular 

University, 109 

Catholic Church, The, and Modern So- 
ciety. The Sacramental Life of the 

Church, 684 

Catholicisme en France, L'Avenir Pro- 
chain du, .... . ii» 
Catholic Sunday-School, The, Some 
Suggestions on its Aim, Work, and 

Management 405 

Catholic Worship, Ritual in, • . 544 

Celtic Verse, A Little Garland of, . 413 

Character Treatment in the Mediaeval 

Drama, 691 

Children of Mary. The Book of the, . 122 
Children's Crusade, The, . . . 413 
Christian Doctrine, Letters on. — The 
Seven 'Sacraments, .... 403 

Christian Science, 244 

Christian Science, A New Appraisal of, 246 



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IV 



Contents. 



Christian Unity, The Gospel Plea for, . 246 

Christ, The Virgin Birth of, . . . 822 

Churches Separated from Home, 1 he, . 831 

Church in English History, 1 he, . 255 

Congo and Coasts of Africa, The, , 823 

Conquests of our Holy Faith, . . 263 

Consecranda, a6i 

Corelli, Marie, The Writings of, . . 836 

Credibility, La, et L'ApoIogetique, . 542 
Crise Religieuse, La, et L'Action Intel- 

lectuclle des Catholiques, . . . 250 
Daily Mass ; or, the Mystic Treasures of 

the Holy Sacrifice, . . . .551 

Days Off 551 

De Sacrificio Missae, .... 696 

Ecclesiastical Year, The, . 836 

Education Question in England, The, . 836 

Essays Out of Hours, .... 692 
Essentials and Non- Essentials of the 

Catholic Religion, .... 539 

Famous Irish Women, .... 835 

Famous Painters of America, . . 404 

Father Damien, 4r3 

Folia Fugitiva, 828 

Footprints of the Good Shepherd, In 

the, US 

Forty-Five Sermons Written to Meet 

the Objections of the Day, . . . 263 
Fountain of Living Water, The ; or. 

Thoughts on the Holy Ghost for every 

Day in the Year, 402 

Francis of Assisi, St., and Mediaeval 

Catholicism, 836 

Giles of Assisi, The Golden Sayings of 

the Blessed Brother, .... 255 

Greatest of Centuries, The Thirteenth, 532 

Great Schism of the West, The, . . 680 

Hamlet, A Review of, . . . . 693 
Handbook of Ceremonies for Priests and 

Seminarians, 546 

History of Commerce, A, ... . 548 
History of the German People at the 

Close of the Middle Ages, . . .818 
History of the Society of Jesus in North 

America, Colonial and Federal, . 816 

Holy Scripture, Alleged Difficulties in, 836 

Home for Good, 412 

Hymns of the Marshes, .... 550 
Index Legislation, A Commentary on 

the Present, 818 

Irish Songs, 696 

Irish Songs and Lyrics, The Golden 

Treasury of, 120 

Isaac Pitman Shorthand, Course in, . 835 
Is One Religion as Good as Another ? . 683 
Israel's Historical and Biographical Nar- 
ratives, 539 

King of Rome, The. A Biography, . 8.u 

L'America del Nord, .... 2(53 
Lammenais and Lamartine, . . .116 

Latin Pronounced for Catholic Choirs, 836 

L'Avenir de TEglise Russe, . . . 833 

Legend of Saint Julian Hospitaler, . 413 

Legends of the Saints, The, . . . 259 

Life Around Us, The, .... 263 
Life of Christ. The, . . . .3^ 

Little Book of Twenty-four Carols, A, 413 
Little City of Hope, The, . . .550 

Love of Books, 'I he, . . . . 536 

Lummis, Madame Rose, . . . 408 

Manuale Vitas Spiritualis, . . 696 
Margaret Bourgeoys (The Venerable), 

The Life and Times of, . . . 252 
Martyr of Our Own Day, A, . . . 121 
Mediaeval and Modern History : Its For- 
mative Causes and Broad Movements, 817 



Meditationes ex Operibus St. Thomae 

Depromptae, 686 

Meditation on the Incarnation of Christ, 
A. Sermons on the Life and Passion 

of our Lord, 686 

Meditations for the Use of Seminarians 
and Priests. The Fundamental 

Truths, 402 

Meditations on the Sacred Heart, . . 688 
Meditations, Short, for Every Day in the 

Year, 687 

Memoriale Vitae Sacerdotalis, . . 696 

Mirror of Shalott, A 257 

Moral Training in the Public Schools, . 824 
Mozart the Man and the Artist, as re- 
vealed in his own words, . . .411 
My Brother's Keeper, . .821 
New Testament, '1 he, . . . .551 
New Theology, The ; or, the Rev. R. J. 

Campbell's Conclusions Refuted, . 405 

Orthodox Eastern Church, The, . 832 

Pantheism, .- 836 

Pascal, Blaise, . . ' . ^6 

Penance in the Early Church, . . 535 
Pdres Apostoliques, Les. — I. Doctrine 

des Apotres. Epitre de Bamab6, . 549 
Philosophers of the Smoking-Room, 

I he, 259 

Prince of the Apostles, The, > i'3 
Protestant Reformation, The. How it 

was Brought About in Various Lands, 684 
Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, . 691 
Psychic Riddle, The, . . .253 
Quiet Hour, The. And Other Verses, 549 
Religion and Amusements, . . 836 
Religion and Historic Faiths, . . 543 
Religion and Society, .... 836 
Religious Life, etc.. Thoughts on the, . 538 
Reordinations, Les. £tude sur le Sacra- 
ment de rOrdre, 247 

Repertorium Oratoris Sacri, . . . 835 

Rhymed Life of St. Patrick, The, . 406 
Rome's Witness Against Anglican 

Orders, 836 

Roosevelt, Camping and Tramping with, 825 
baint«, Les. Le V^n^rable Pere Eudes 

(1601-1680), . . . • . 410 

School of Death, The, .... 688 

Sicily ; The New Winter Resort. . . 253 
Sodality of Our Lady : Hints and Helps 

for those in Charge, .... 122 

Sorceress of Rome, The, . . . 834 

Stars of Thought, .... 4x3 
Synopsis Theologiae M oralis et Pastor- 

alis, 826 

Sweet Miracle, The, . , . .4x3 

Tents of Wickedness, The, . . *. 403 
Theologie du Nouveau Testament et 

TEvolutioQ des Dogmes, La, . 827 

Thomas d Kempis : His A ee and Book, 118 

Toiler, The. And Other Poems, . . 550 
Tributes of Protestant Writers to the 

l>uth and Beauty of Catholicity, . 263 

Tuscan Penitent, A, .... 8ai 
Tyronibus. Commonplace Advice to 

Church Students, .... 405 
Valeurs des Decisions Doctrinales et 

Disciplinaires du Saint Sidge, . . 688 
Vatican Council, The Decrees of the, . 53.^ 
Way of Truth. . . •. .836 
Webster's Modern Dictionary of the En- 
glish Language, Adapted for Inter- 
mediate Grades, 835 

Welding, The, 695 



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SEP 07 1907 J 
lillS 



^^fatholietorld 



Aubrey de Vera ia his Prose Work 



Arnoul the Englishman 
Sanctity and BsTeiopment 



Helen Seller's French Sister 



Lisheen ; or. The Test of the Spirits 



Puck and Ariel 



Katkerine Btigy 



Francis Aveling^ D.D. 



Thomas J. Gerrard 



Countess de Courson 



P. A^ Sheehan^ D.D. 



A:W. Carpe 



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tHE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

Vol. LXXXVI. OCTOBER, 1907. No. 511. 

AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK. 

BY KATHERINE BRfiGY. 

^T has frequently been proclaimed, and still more 
convincingly demonstrated, that the writing of 
verse is the best possible recipe for a good prose 
style. We find in the poet's use of prose not 
only an habitual delicacy and picturesqueness 
(that we should have foreseen), but also a notable precision and 
sense of proportion — as though the use of wings had taught 
him all the possible graces of walking. It was thus with Au- 
brey de Vere; whose venerable head shared the glory of a 
great prose epoch as it had that of a rare poetic revival, and 
perhaps even more transcendently. We do not claim for him 
the superb distinction and vitality of Newman's unforgettable 
prose; nor the musical and emotional qualities of Ruskin; nor 
the stimulating if pugnacious vigor of Carlyle. But we do sub- 
mit that his intellectual breadth and seriousness, his poetic sen- 
sibility and critical acumen, coupled with his infallibly pure 
and strong English, and that gracious versatility which we think 
of as Irish (when we know it is not French), render Aubrey 
de Vere worthy of a throne beside any one of them — when 
they shall come to judge the scribes of their Island- Israel ! 

It was very characteristic of the de Vere household that, 
at eighteen, Aubrey and his beloved sister used to drive about 
the woods of Curragh Chase in their pony cart, reading the 
poetry of Keats, Coleridge, and Walter Savage Landor. CuU 

Copyright. Z907. The Missionary Society op St. Paul the Apostle 
IN THE State or New York. 
VOL. LXXXVI,— .1 

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2 AUBREY DE Verb in his Prose Work [Oct., 

ture bad become a tradition of the family. But an older and 
even higher tradition was patriotism — which in Ireland meant 
love of the people. And so it was eqjually characteristic that 
young de Vere's first prose work should have been upon no 
literary or speculative theme, but upon the pressing political 
needs of the day. " English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds^ Four 
Letters from Ireland addressed to an English Member of Par^ 
liament** appeared in 1848, while the famine was still an ap- 
palling reality, and English relief measures had about proved 
their inefficiency. The book is probably little known in these 
days, although it roused much comment, both favorable and 
adverse, at the time of its issue. 

We should look far indeed for a calmer yet more burning 
statement of Irish wrongs, or a more masterly arraignment of 
that baser side of England, which for six centuries ''kept vigil 
for Ireland, while for the rest of the world it generally slept.'' 
There is nothing melodramatic in these letters; although that 
heart- stirring outburst upon the causes of Irish poverty in Let- 
ter II, and the later apostrophe to England, with its reiterated 
burden: "It was your duty — It was your duty — " are noble 
examples of political eloquence. But for the most part the 
volume is a simple if impassioned statement of conditions, an 
inquiry into causes, and a series of suggestions for bettering 
those conditions. These eleven recommendations of de Vere 
— including as they do a plan of State-aided Emigration and 
Colonization, Amendment of the Poor Law, Agricultural Edu- 
cation, improved Sanitation for the Towns, et cetera — prove 
how practical an idealist the poet and litterateur could be upon 
occasion. But he was no partisan. He believed in union (pro- 
vided that union meant equality) and be wrote as one " at- 
tached profoundly, reverentially, and sorrowfully to both coun- 
tries" — and as nowise disturbed if his statements excited the 
hostility of either side. Year after year he continued these po- 
litical writings: pleading as he knew so well how, upon philo- 
sophical as well as sentimental premises, against the seculari- 
zation of Ireland's Church Property; discussing Proportionate 
Representation (1867, 1868), Constitutional and Unconstitutional 
Political Action (1881), and so on. 

De Vere had from youth been an apostle of Edmund Burke, 
and in his later years he was no doubt considered rather ultra- 
conservative. He believed neither in Home Rule nor the Na- 



Digitized by VjOOQI^ 



1907.] Aubrey de Vere in his Prose Work 3 

tional League; and while he still decried injustices to Church 
property or in the representation of the higher classes, he 
looked forward hopefully in the conviction that '^ the great 
wrongs of Ireland exist no more." In a man so large-minded, 
the tendency was ever toward the general and away from the 
particular — toward the sunlight which endures and away from 
shadows. Doubtless his own personal conviction was best ex- 
pressed in this singularly beautiful and unworldly passage: 
" One great Vocation has been granted to Ireland by many 
great qualifications and many great disqualifications. When 
Religion and Missionary Enterprise ruled the Irish Heart and 
Hand, Ireland reached the chief greatness she has known with- 
in historic times, and the only greatness which has lasted^ 
When the same Heart and Hand return to the same task, Ire- 
land will reap the full harvest of her sorrowful centuries. She 
will then also inherit both a Greatness and a Happiness per- 
haps such as is tendered to her alone among the Nations."* 
Besides this aim, the practical designs of his more radical com- 
patriots were bound at times to seem unworthy and transitory. 
In 1850 appeared the first of de Vere's purely descriptive 
writings — his Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey. They 
are admirably named, and show throughout an unfailing appre- 
ciation, not only of beauty in every form, but of beauty's inner 
and less obvious significance. We note this quality alike in his 
dreamful description of the Tragic Theatre at Athens, in his 
comment upon the *' hilarity " of Parnassian scenery, and in 
his contrast between the domestic mountains of England — with 
their herds and cottages and fruitful orchards — and those 
southern heights, black with pine forests at their base, while 
their summits soar into regions of perpetual snow. '' It is sim- 
ply the di£ference between poetry and poetical prose," de Vere 
summarizes. The author's tribulations at the Syrian Lazaretto 
are recorded with that genial Irish humor which winds like a 
sunlit stream through the story of his wanderings. The '' sub- 
lime tranquility" of his English traveling companions — '^ suffi- 
cient of itself to keep the ship steady in a storm " — was a con- 
stant marvel to de Vere; while the absence of enjoyment at a 
London evening party suggested to him a possibility that the 
guests were '' fashionably repenting, in purple and fine linen," 
for the sins of their merrier youth. 

» Preface to Inisjail, 1877. 



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4 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct., 

But Aubrey de Vere's keenly philosophic and religious ten- 
dency was equally manifest. The Eleusinian Mysteries, those 
inost deeply spiritual of Greek devotions, roused his critical 
and reverent interest; they also brought him face to face with 
A possible problem. ** How are we to account for the extra- 
ordinary analogies between truth and fiction — between the 
guesses of pagan intelligence and the Christian Revelation?'* 
he demands, after acknowledging the many resemblances, both 
in rite and doctrine, between these ancient mysteries and the 
faith which succeeded them. '' In all these matters there is 
but one question for a reflecting mind,'' he answers squarely; 
''namely, was the later Religion a patchwork of those which 
had preceded it; or were the early religions of the world, on 
the contrary, attempts to feel after a truth congruous with 
man's nature, and intended from the first to be revealed to 
him ? " Such, on all grounds of philosophic reasoning, de 
Vere deduces as the true solution. ''Whatever was deepest in 
the human heart, and highest in the human mind, sympathized 
with and inspired after that Religion, which (human only be* 
cause Divine) is the legitimate supplement of human nature, as 
well as its crown. To infer that Christianity is but a combina- 
tion of human inventions, because it satisfies the more elevated 
human instincts, is about as reasonable as a moral philosophy 
would be which accounted for the maternal affection by con- 
cluding it to arise from a recollection of the pleasure the child 
has found in her doll." 

De Vere's Recollections^ published almost half a century 
later, are his sole return to this form of narrative description 
— unless we include those charming touches scattered through 
his correspondence. The varied and voluminous letters in- 
cluded in Mr. Ward's Memoir are indeed a study in themselves : 
as a record of friendships, of nascent criticism upon art and 
literature, and of progressive spiritual experience they are quite 
indispensable. It cannot be said, however, that they reveal 
any unexpected phase of de Vere's thought; and many pas- 
sages were later expanded in his more formal works. To re- 
turn to the Recollections: The chapters upon Manning and 
Newman, with their intimate pictures of England during the 
Oxford Movement would alone make the book one of absorb- 
ing interest. Then there is that memorable description of the 
Great Irish Famine. In one vivid snap-shot we see de Vere 



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1907. J AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK 5 

and the shrewd, kind« practical Father T in charge of the 

relief depot — a crowd of hungry, excited peasants without. 
The problem was how to insure those scant rations of Indian 
meal reaching the most destitute families. One following an- 
other, as long as daylight held, the suppliants streamed into the 
room, each with his proper tale of woe; de Vere working in* 
defatigably over the lists, the priest using his superior knowl- 
edge of the neighborhood, and indicating that they were being 
'' tricked " by an ominously whispered Jranseat. Another time, 
riding over to Rathneale, where his brother Stephen was in 
charge of the relief work, Aubrey was met by a mob of peas- 
ants, " rushing out of the town like men flying from an invading 
foe." The only information he could gain was that they were 
<< speeding somewhere to kill cattle." Dismounting, he climbed 
to the top of a near-by wall and began to reason and plead 
with them — being soon joined by a neighboring priest. The 
people listened, hesitated, and were persuaded to forego the 
plunder. De Vere warned us in his Preface that recollections 
were very different from an autobiography, yet we are tempted 
to find the self-abnegation of these pages more than desirably 
consistent. After all, the man's character may be divined from 
what he hides as well as from what he reveals — and merely to 
look out upon life through his eyes is a benediction. 

" More than anything else," de Vere once wrote,* " a great 
and sound literature seems to be now the human means of pro- 
moting the cause of Divine Truth." It was thus that all art — 
and more particularly that literary art with which his relations 
were personal and intimate — became to him a vocation of al- 
most sacerdotal responsibilities. Queen herself of the '' fair 
humanities," and handmaid of that holier regent faith, litera- 
ture possesses no divine safeguard against prostitution. And 
as the multitude both of books and of readers is increased, 
de Vere recognized that this prostitution becomes not only 
more menacing but infinitely more dangerous. In that admir- 
able lecture on ''Literature in Its Social Aspects" (originally 
delivered, at Cardinal Newman's request, before the Catholic 
University of Ireland), he treats extensively 6f those ''moral 
relations" which letters must, for better or worse, establish 
with man. Upon their soundness or their corruption, he de- 
clared prophetically, the peace alike of rural village and mighty 

♦ To Mr. Andrew J. George, cf. Atlantic Monthly, No. 89. 



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6 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct, 

city must one day depend. To none was culture a more cher- 
ished and sacred thing than to Aubrey de Vere; yet we find 
him, fn a passage full of nobility, declaiming against that spe- 
cious extravagance which, by deifying literature, would divorce 
her from human life : " The hero comes before the poet and 
is the greater poet of the two ; for he is the poet in act, not 
in word alone. He does not lift up his voice, but he lifts up 
his being; it is his life, not his song, that ascends and draws 
up many to it. . . . Great men are more than great writers, 
for their greatness is more inwardly theirs and more diffused 
throughout the whole of their being. The true poet projects him- 
self forward through the power of imagination, and for the 
time leaves behind him the meaner part of his nature; the true 
hero retains the full integrity of his being, and in an unbroken 
unity of soul is that which the other aspires to be." 

Happily for us, de Vere brought to the service of these 
exalted standards a critical equipment almost ideal. Widely 
read and widely traveled, from boyhood a passionate lover of 
all that was best in classical and modern literature, he pos- 
sessed two characteristics still more essential — a genius for sym- 
pathy, and sound judgment. Poetry was the favorite, almost 
the sole, theme of his critiques : poetry ranging all the way 
from Spenser to Shelley and Coventry Patmore. 

Wordsworth he ^:onsidered pre-eminently the greatest poet 
of modern times; although he was quick to recognize in Lan- 
dor's verse much of the '' clear outline, the definite grace, and 
the sunny expansiveness of Greek poetry, and not less its aver- 
sion to the mysterious and the spiritual " ; while in the " Gaelic 
string '' of Sir Samuel Ferguson's music he took real delight. 
De Vere's exquisite sensitiveness to beauty is almost as evident 
in these pages as in his verse, illuminating at every turn their 
philosophic solidity. His passing comments upon the " unob- 
trusiveness of true poetry " and the " sweet and large " genial- 
ity with which Shakespeare's own nature mediates between the 
contrasting natures he describes; or his more formal analysis 
of realism and idealism, those two great offices of literature, 
'' distinct though allied — the one, that of representing the actual 
world, the other, that of creating an ideal region, into which 
spirits whom this world has wearied may retire" — these reveal 
the subtlety of the true critic. But in his definition of sympa- 
thy as "bat versatility of heart," and of the song^ so fragmen- 



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1907.] Aubrey de Vere in his Prose Work 7 

tary and so difficult, ''a mass of closely charged feeling sud- 
denly finding vent catching in its passage a stream of imagina- 
tive thought — melting into it, and scattering itself abroad in 
harmonious words" — we recognize the voice of the poet too. 
All authentic literary criticism is at least half poetic intuition; 
and Aubrey de Vere is one among a '' great cloud of witnesses " 
to this truth. 

The critic's choice of subjects, when voluntary, is vastly sig- 
nificant of his own character. What, for instance, turned the 
current of de Vere's affections back to that gentle and now 
neglected bard of Elffand, Edmund Spenser ? In part, the 
symbolic pageantry of his pages ; their glamour of romance and 
other- worldliness; the poet's high and chivalrous ideals; but 
far above all, the underlying soundness and spirituality of his 
philosophy. And the Elizabethan's servility to royal favor, his 
petty partisanship, his occasionally acrid hostilities, seemed to 
de Vere accidental, not essential — referable to the spirit of his 
age, or to 'Mnvincible " youthful prejudices. ''In many a man 
there are two men," he tells us sagely, " and in the two there 
is not half the strength there would have been in one only." 
Thus in Edmund Spenser he detected the man of the Renais- 
sance, but the poet of the Middle Ages — painting in his '' House 
of Holiness " an almost perfect vision of higher Christian teach- 
ing, at once "doctrinal, practical, and contemplative." It was 
but one more evidence of that profound and gracious sympathy 
which raised Aubrey de Vere to such heights of critical, as of 
vital, understanding : '' He could find the ultimate tendencies of 
the philosophy of men whose lives closed without their becom- 
ing aware of the consequences of their teaching " ; * as Mr. 
Walter George Smith has so suggestively pointed out. 

That the mediaeval attraction was exceedingly potent, de 
Vere's poetry must already have revealed. The Preface to his 
Medieval Records and Sonnets is a valuable little commentary 
> upon what he loves to call the '' Ages of Faith," pointing out 
as it does their childlike simplicity in fault and virtue, their im- 
aginative vigor, their reverence for the unseen world, and with- 
al their unconscious joy of life. " To the mediaeval mind life was 
a deep thing — but a light hearted thing also," de Vere notes, 
"and if Dante, their great Italian representative, was the most 
spiritual of poets, Chaucer, their great English representative, was 

* Aubrey de Vere, The Messenger, December, 1904. 



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8 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct., 

the most mirthful and human* hearted." And there was another 
attraction, the force of which we should less easily have antici- 
patedy in those strenuous centuries. We are apt to picture 
Aubrey de Vere dreaming among the sunny fields and stately 
forests of Curragh Chase, or lovingly immersed in the ** heritage 
of the ages " in his spacious study : noble, serene, and gracious, 
he becomes to us a half- unearthly figure. All this he was; 
yet we shall know him very imperfectly if we forget his in- 
sistence upon the vigorous, objective side of life. In his Greek 
Sketches there was an eloquent defense of just warfare, not 
merely because of its inevitability in any but a sainted com- 
munity, but also because it tends to rouse the heroic virtues 
and to '' break the chains of conventional littleness," effeminacy 
and commercialism. In a later essay he declares that '' If mod- 
ern society has reached a higher average of decorous virtue^ 
yet individual robustness — and therefore character — ^like intel- 
lectual greatness, is rarer than it was in ruder times." So it 
was that the physical prowess of mediaeval manhood, its lively 
sensibility to grief and joy, to love and hate, its power of 
moving out of itself (because ultimately it may thus rise above 
itself), formed, apart from any moral qualities, a very real at- 
traction to de Vere. He had grown impatient of the tameness 
of modern life— of its conventions and concealments; no doubt 
he felt with Patmore, although perhaps less radically, that 
'' The power of the Soul for good is in proportion to the strength 
of its passions. Sanctity is not the negation of passion, but its 
order." 

A critical delight in the English drama came to de Vere 
almost as a birthright. His father's Mary Tudor and his own 
St. Thomas of Canterbury must be numbered among the worth- 
iest examples of latter day dramatic poetry, while the philoso- 
phic criticisms scattered through his essays are, in their own 
fields, equally valuable. Aubrey de Vere loved the drama be- 
cause of its large inclusiveness ; because it presented a field for* 
almost every variety of poetry ; and most of all because charac- 
ter was conceived in it ''by the intuition of a passionate sym- 
pathy" and with a vital comprehensiveness appealing at once 
to the scholar and the man in the street. Conflict was, indeed, 
essential to it — but the outcome of this conflict must, in poetic 
justice, harmonize with the great moral laws of the universe. 
•' A perfect tragic theme," he points out, " is one that presents 



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1907.] Aubrey de Vere in his Prose Work 9 

us with greatness in all forms. There must be great sorrows, 
but there should also be great characters; there should be a 
scope for great energies '' — and the catastrophe comes '' as a 
result of great, even though of erring, passions, not of petty 
infirmities and base machinations." And in historic drama de 
Vere saw a still more instructive, because a calmer and broader 
picture of human life: ''In Tragedy the problem of life is 
pressed upon our attention : in the Historic Play it is solved " ; 
and in place of that grim, inevitable Fate which dominated the 
tragedies of Greece, the over- ruling idea is that of Providence 
— "a Power from above, not a hand from the Shades — a Pro- 
vidence, not oppressing and subduing man, but working with 
his strivings while it works beyond them; and thus while it 
unconsciously vindicates the ways of God, the Historic Drama 
instructs us likewise in the philosophic lore of nature and of 
man." 

A great deal of terse sense underlies many of these criti- 
cisms, as when he observes: ''True dramatic genius includes, 
besides a philosophic insight into character, a certain careless 
feficity in dealing with externals. This tact is a thing which 
we always find among our dramatists in the reigns of Elizabeth 
and James the First, and which in our modern drama — the 
tradition having been broken — we almost always lack. . • • 
The soundest philosophic analysis will not serve as a substitute 
for a shrewd, sharp observation, and that vividness of handling 
analogous to a hasty sketch by a great painter." 

But Aubrey de Vere was too deep and too discerning a 
critic not to recognize more fundamental reasons for the decay 
of the literary drama. He attributed this not solely to the 
sway of science and industrialism in the present age, but to 
moral deficiencies as well — to its lack of simplicity and earnest- 
ness, and of "that intrepid and impassioned adventurousness 
which desires to watch and join the great battle of the pas- 
sions on the broad platform of common life"; and again, of 
" that elasticity of soul which makes renewed vigor the natural 
recoil from suffering, and a deeper self-knowledge with a firmer 
self-government the chief permanent results of calamity. These 
are the heroic virtues of our nature; and the Drama is the 
heroic walk of poetry. . . . Everything else we may have, 
things better or things worse, but not this. . . . Dramatic 
poetry we shall aim at in vain, unless we appreciate those 



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10 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct., 

manly qualities which are the firm foundation of real life, and 
therefore of imaginative art." 

It was in no small measure because of this splendid virility 
that Sir Henry Taylor's poetry roused our critic's enthusiastic 
interest. In no less than five serious and appreciative essays, 
de Vere has pointed out his friend's ** union of vigor with 
classic grace," his blending of passion and imagination, and 
particularly his *' vivid and practical reality ^^ both in character- 
drawing and poetic treatment. The solidity of that noble tragedy, 
Philip vxn Artevelde^ stood to him as a wholesome corrective 
of the too prevalent ** Art- Heresy," which would exalt the 
imagination ''as the one great poetic faculty, disregarding the 
relations between it and the moral and intellectual faculties," 
or the great, vital world of nature. " Reality of thought is ever 
connected with sympathy for the realities of life," de Vere in- 
sists ; and his essay upon this drama proceeds to reveal in def-' 
inite terms his theory of art. It was, briefly, an insistence 
upon the moral ethos, upon " truth in the form of reality," and 
upon a sound poetic imagination, which scorns cheap vagaries 
and all "sensationalism," because it finds eternal freshness and 
beauty in the springs of a spiritualized human life. ''Poetry, 
though an art, is more than an art; and forms of beauty, if 
indeed they could be shaped out of a fiuent material instead 
of the everlasting marble, would be worthless as bubbles. 
Poetry must have a vital principle. Shakespeare, not only our 
greatest poet, but also, notwithstanding his careless spontaneity, 
our deepest artist, tells us that 'there is no art, but nature 
makes that art.' • . . Again, poetry has its relations with 
moral science as well as with life, and the highest beauty is 
connected, directly or indirectly, with those deep immutable 
truths which, however wide the compass they describe, have 
their anchorage in the lowly ground of veracity and fact. • • • 
' I believed, and therefore I spoke,' will ever form part of a 
poet's credentials, whether his song be secular or sacred." 

The most affectionate and perhaps the most memorable of 
de Vere's critical achievements remains to be considered. "It 
is indeed as a friend of Wordsworth, and as one who from 
youth to age has endeavored to make known to others the 
transcendent value of his poetry, that I should wish to be 
remembered, if remembered at all,"* he wrote, with that pro- 

• Cf. AilanHc, No. 89, ut supra. 



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1907.] Aubrey de Vere in his Prose Work n 

found and unconscious humility which we note again and yet 
again. Among those who prize the heritage of "whatsoever 
things are true, whatsoever lovely," Aubrey de Vere could not 
soon be forgotten, even had he penned no line upon his great 
contemporary. None the less, this Wordsworthian affinity is 
rightly conspicuous. He was able to interpret the poet and 
seer, not solely because of his long and close friendship or his 
critical appreciation, but because of a remarkable similarity of 
temperament. De Vere undirstood where another equally capable 
critic must have guessed, and in the older man's work he saw 
many of his own poetical and spiritual ideals fulfilled. His two 
great Wordsworthian essays (there are various minor ones) are 
those upon the Genius and Passion of the poet's work, and 
upon its Wisdom and Truth.^ The former is probably the 
more valuable, because its premises are less obvious. Scarcely 
any one will care to question the high and philosophic truth- 
fulness of Wordsworth — ''neither the wisdom of the schools 
nor of the world, but of life " ; while his genius, and especially 
bis passion, are less recognized by readers of an opposite 
temperament. '' No quality belongs to his poetry more eminently, 
if we exclude from passion all that might more properly be 
termed either sensuous instinct or sensational energy," de Vere 
protests; and it must be admitted that he makes good his case. 
Pointing out the imaginative passion of Wordsworth's Nature 
passages, the intellectual passion of many of his patriotic and 
philosophic poems, and the profound and subtle emotional in- 
sight of poems like " Michael " or " Margaret," our critic con- 
cludes that the whole, hot a part merely, of Wordsworth's nature 
was impassioned ; that in his truly inspired moments he attained 
''that white heat of passion which to colder natures appears 
but as snow." 

All this is high and original criticism, and a very real ser- 
vice to students of English poetry. 

Throughout de Vere's appreciation of Wordsworth's poetry 
there runs a personal element both charming and explanatory. 
There is, for instance, the story of his first vital intercourse 
with the master through the pages of " Laodamia " : "a new 
world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far 
away into serene infinitudes," he tells us, and bis boyish en- 

♦ This essay, " The Wisdom and Truth of Wordsworth's Poetry," appeared first in The 
Catholic Woeld. Vol. XXXVIII. Pp. 738 sq. Vol. XXXIX. Pp. 49. aoi. 335. 



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12 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct, 

thusiasm for Byron fell away "like a bond broken by being 
outgrown." From this allegiance he never wavered; and when, 
in 1841, de Vere visited the English Lake country, he and 
Wordsworth became close friends. The memories of his visit 
at the poet's simple home; of their mountain walks together, 
when the "high priest of Nature" discoursed of life's great 
realities— of Christian faith, of friendship and poetry and the 
beauty of earth and sky — were ever after among the most pre- 
cious of de Vere's possessions. The old poet's egotism was 
utterly ingenuous, yet it seldom excluded a just appreciation 
of others. " I have hardly ever known any one but myself who 
had a true eye for Nature — one that thoroughly understood 
her meanings and her teachings," he once exclaimed to de Vere, 
"except one person, ... a young clergyman called Fred- 
erick Faber, who resided at Ambleside. He had not only as 
good an eye for Nature as I have, but even a better one ; and 
he sometimes pointed out to me on the mountains effects which, 
with all my great experience, I had never detected." It was, 
of course, the future convert and Oratorian to whom this ref- 
erence was made. 

At another time de Vere learned the secret of that " vetac'- 
ity " and " ideality " which characterized Wordsworth's Nature 
descriptions. He took no picturesque inventories; but as he 
walked he noted all that surrounded him " with a reverent at- 
tention " and a joyous, understanding heart ; after several days 
much would indeed have been forgotten, but the " ideal and es- 
sential truth of the scene " would remain fixed in his memory. 
" It was because he was a true man," de Vere concluded, " that 
he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him with* 
out being reminded of this. ... It was plain to those who 
knew Wordsworth that he had kept his great gift pure, and 
used it honestly and faithfully for that purpose for which it 
had been bestowed." 

All great thoughts are ultimately related, and a passage like 
the following indicates how near literature, well and wisely 
studied, may bring the student to fields of higher because holier 
knowledge. "Thought without truth is but serious trifling" 
de Vere writes, in splendid contradiction of some recent phi- 
losophies : " There is no subject which will not suggest innu- 
merable thoughts to as many different minds, or to the same 
mind in its various moods. Of these thoughts, while many are 



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1907.] Aubrey de Vere in his Prose Work 13 

perhaps at first equally imposing, nine out of ten will too prob- 
ably prove unsound. It is by the inspiration of genius, and oi 
a right mind, that a poet is drawn toward the true thought, 
and warned away from the rest. One of his chief functions is 
to vivify the True, and so to strengthen and cleanse the minds 
of men by the inbreathed virtue of imagination as to raise them 
above the illusory. Our intellectual strength is in proportion 
as we realize true thoughts." 

Truth was indeed that Holy Grail of which Aubrey de Vere's 
life was one long quest, and divine truth was as the blood with- 
in the chalice. From early youth his religious sensibility seems 
to have been profound ; and while his logical faculties may al- 
most be called sleepless, he never fancied them competent to 
usurp the place of a higher power. '^ It is the whole vast and 
manifold being of man — his mind and his heart, his conscience 
and his practical judgment, his soul and his spirit — that Divine 
Truth challenges,'' he asserts in one of his most masterly essays.* 
The appeal of spiritual verity was to the will and the intuitive 
sense, and to that '' spiritual discernment " which must be added 
to the understanding before it can apprehend what is above its 
comprehension. Thus mystery is inseparable from religion, since 
religion is a presentment of the Infinite to the finite mind of 
man; but faith, in the last analysis, "so far from being belief 
on compulsion, is in the highest sense a spiritual act, and an 
eminently reasonable act, though also more than reasonable." 

" Revelation," he tells us in another essay ,t " is not, as some 
fancy, a bond half-broken and hanging loose about us, but a 
supreme hope rich in gifts still in store for us. . . . For 
four thousand years and more, man was allowed to put forth 
all the strength of his faculties, and to show to what he could 
attain, and what was his limit. Then the primal promise, that 
of the Incarnation, was fulfilled, and the gates of a spiritual 
universe were flung open before him." 

Although we may trace in it the influence of Coleridge, 
most of the above was written not in de Vere's youth; but when 
he had become a master of Catholic theology. How he came 
into citizenship of that " city not made with hands " is a vi* 
tally interesting story ; and while his Recollections maintain a 
certain delicacy on this, as on all personal topics, they deal 
with it frankly and simply. He had been educated as a mod- 

* Subjective DiJlculHes in ReligioH. t The Great Problem of the Nineteenth Century^ 

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14 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct, 

erate High Churchman ; and from boyhood on through the great 
Tractarian Movement his attachment to the Anglican Church 
was as ardent and absorbing a thing, he tells us, as the patriot- 
ism of Wordsworth. But as events wore on, when the prohi- 
bition of Tract 90 and the Gorham decision upon Baptism had 
begun to frustrate the return to ancient Catholic teaching — a 
conviction grew upon de Vere that his English Church was but 
a fallible and incomplete school of thought^ national at best, and 
in no true sense a '' branch " of Universal Christendom. Equiv- 
ocations, compromises, evasions, would not do for a mind of his 
temper. He saw but two alternatives — to discard the whole 
Church idea in its nobility and sacred beauty, or to submit in 
honest loyalty to Catholic authority. De Vere gave two whole 
years to this final consideration ; and although his studies were 
pursued without anxiety or excitement, the opposition of many 
among his closest friends imparted a sacrificial loneliness to the 
period. At last a glory as of full sunlight broke upon the pil- 
grim's way, and his conclusion was reached. It was that " Church 
Principles were an essential part of Christianity itself and not 
an ornamental adjunct of it; and that they were external, not 
as our clothes are, but as the skin is external to the rest of 
our body. The Apostles' Creed had affirmed three supreme 
doctrines which included all others — namely, the Trinity, the 
Incarnation, and the Church. What God had joined it was not 
for man to separate. God's Church was created when God's 
revelation was given. • • . She is the temple of the Holy 
Spirit who descended upon her at the Feast of Pentecost. That 
Pentecost was no transient gift. ... It is the witness of 
that Divine Son to His whole revelation; and that witness 
which alone can be borne to the successive generations so long 
as a Church, organically and visibly as well as spiritually one, 
affirms the one Truth through the one Spirit. This is what 
makes schism a grave ofifence ; apart from this the charge would 
be unmeaning." Another and equally illuminating thought is 
referred to in one of de Vere's letters to Sara Coleridge — the 
suggestion that certain degrees of spiritual understanding were 
attainable, not by the individual mind, but by "that collective 
unity which is called the Church." To make use of this sup- 
plemental consciousness of Christendom '' no more involved the 
suppression of the individual mind than the use of the telescope 
involves the loss of one's eyesight": to reject it "reduces the 



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1907.] Aubrey de Vere in his Prose Work 15 

Church to the littleness of the individual, instead of imparting 
to the individual the stature and the faith of the whole mystic 
body." • 

Aubrey de Vere's most important theological essays have 
been collected in a little volume called Religious Problems of 
the Nineteenth Century. Besides these there are a few less 
formal pieces of devotional and philosophic prose — his discourse 
on sainthood for instance, and on The Human Affections in the 
Early Christian Time, This very beautiful prose- poem purports 
to be an epistle written, A. D. 410, by the Eremite Ambrosius 
to Marcella, a young virgin about to become a wife. Some- 
thing of its charm may be gathered from these fragments: 
*'On all sides Infinitude doth gird us in; and all virtues are 
infinite. By nature the terrestrial life is the lower; but grace 
consecrateth nature and raiseth the low. • . ^ Faith keep- 
eth vigil on the mountain; and again, in the valley Faith lieth 
down and taketh her rest, because the Lord sustaineth her. 
From innocence thou goest, but unto innocence. Thou ad- 
vancest from virtue to virtue — from the virginal honors unto 
the matronly . . . from the straiter commune with God to 
the wider commune with God. . . . The ties of mortal life 
image the ties of the life immortal — for what else mean we 
when we say that God is our Father, and Christ our Brother ? '* 
If more than one of de Vere's poems may be called theologi- 
cal disquisitions, this modest little '' epistle " should certainly 
rank as an epithalamium of surpassing grace and loveliness. 

It was a strange providence that during the same years of 
the century just passed, English-speaking peoples beheld three 
powerful yet vastly different apologists, working for the ad- 
vancement of Catholic truth. They were all converts: John 
Henry Newman, Isaac Hecker, and Aubrey de Vere. New- 
man's appeal was to the past: to Patristic evidences, to the 
unity (including of course, the development) of primitive Chris- 
tian faith. Father Hecker's appeal was to the present : to the 
natural laws upon which the supernatural rest, to that '' heart's 
hunger and soul's thirst'' which vital Catholic truth alone can 
satisfy. To Aubrey de Vere there seemed no past or present 
in religious experience. In theology, as in all departments of 
thought, he was a psychological critic. His appeal was to the 

* This same theory is expanded in de Vere's essay on Tkt Philosophy oj the Rule of Faiths 



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I6 AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK [Oct., 

intuitive sense and " spiritual discernment " first of all ; and 
then, because Catholicity included these, to authority and to 
human nature. And he regarded life and art from a stand- 
point equally soulful. His own intensely spiritual nature, and 
long habits of analytic thought, necessitated this. We find him 
making fine and delicate distinctions in words (which are al- 
ways at the same time distinctions of thought) as between rea- 
soning and reason, pleasure and enjoyment ; we find him point- 
ing out how *' in Coleridge's poetry the reasoning faculty is 
chiefly that of contemplation and reflection; in Wordsworth's 
the meditative and discursive prevail *' ; we find him weighing 
the Elizabethan drama by psychological standards, where Rus- 
kin would have used ethical, and Arnold esthetic values. And 
throughout his entire critical work, we notice the moral and 
artistic elements constantly interpenetrating. All minor veri- 
ties, whether of sense or intellect, resolved themselves into one 
immutable and comprehensive truth; and man, however mi- 
nutely studied, became a symbol of mankind. De Vere has 
observed that the Greek knew no landscape, although he de- 
lighted in detached objects of natural beauty. He himself saw 
all details as part of some glorious whole; nor could his view 
stop short of the distant horizon. In a measure, this compre- 
hensiveness is part of all criticism, but with de Vere it was a 
distinct characteristic. It almost became the measure of his 
''personal equation"; and it goes far toward explaining why 
he could so thoroughly interpret Spenser or Wordsworth, while 
of Patmore's poetry he was merely appreciative and not illumi- 
nating. De Vere was unusually quick to recognize traces of a 
solid, universal greatness; he was less sefasitive to beauties of 
an exotic or esoteric character. 

We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love; 
And, even as these are well and wisely fixed, 
In dignity of being we ascend — 

These words, loved by de Vere and chosen as the text of 
his Essays Chiefly on Poetry, strike the keynote of his attitude 
towards letters and toward life. His criticism as a whole was 
overwhelmingly constructive; and while ever fearless in de- 
nouncing ''sensual" or "sensational" literature, materialistic 
and unsound philosophies, and whatever wars against the soul's 



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I907-] AUBREY DE VERE IN HIS PROSE WORK l^ 

life, he still and to the end ''enjoyed praising as inferior men 
enjoy sneering."* 

In the matter of style, de Vere's prose is almost impecca- 
ble. Its charactetistic merit is one of philosophic dignity and 
cleamessy but it possesses lesser merits as well, as in the pas- 
sives where we are reminded of the elusive nicety of Walter 
Pater— or those others (notably at the opening of Literature in 
its Social Aspects) where the splendid musical harmonies of Sir 
Thomas Browne seem floating about us. Always it is noble, 
and even its merriment has a note of the sedate. This comes 
less from self- consciousness — which, indeed, would have cor- 
rected it — than from a scrupulous preoccupation with the mat- 
ter rather than the manner of his discourse. 

We have earlier spoken of Aubrey de Vere's versatility. 
If we consider this as a temperamental quality — as a practical 
form of sympathy and imagination — we recognize its presence 
as very real, and in one sense an explanation of his close and 
varied friendships. But still, it is less notable than his earnest- 
ness or his consistency or his unworldliness. If we refer to 
his literary work — in itself only part of his life — it is far 
otherwise. We find this one man bequeathing us eloquent po- 
litical briefs, literary and theological criticism of the first order, 
delightful reminiscences, and a whole body of high and noble 
poetry. And instead of rejoicing (after the fashion of some) 
in his own plenitude of power, de Vere seems to have been 
so absorbingly interested in other things and other people that 
he scarcely thought of himself at all. His genius was almost 
as unconscious, and almost as spacious, and altogether as soar- 
ing, as one of the gfeat English cathedrals. It is difficult to 
describe him briefly, save by transposing Steele's immortal tri- 
bute and declaring: To have known him was a liberal edu^ 
cation I 

* This was de Vere's own comment on Landor. 



VOL. LXXXVI.— 2 



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ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN. 

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY • 
BY FRANCIS AVELING, D.D. 

Chapter I. 

PROLOGUE. 

the sheep all folded, Brother?" 
The voice was a strong and masterful one ; 

little rasping, perhaps, in its decided accent of 
lorman- French ; the speaker, a powerful, well- 
^ roportioned man in the prime of life. His brown 
habit, of a coarse woolen material, hung straight from the 
shoulder to ankle, with a narrow strip of the same cloth before 
and behind, and was held in at his waist by a leathern girdle. 
The keen moorland air had given a patch of color to either 
cheek; otherwise his face, like his voice, proclaimed him what 
he was — a Frenchman. His eyes were dark and restless, his 
nose aquiline, his bearded lip and chin of such a stamp that it 
needed his dress, as well as a certain habitual placidity and 
repose in his bearing, to proclaim him a lay brother of the 
famous Cistercian house of St. Mary of Buckfast. 

In sharp contrast to him was the brother whom he addressed. 
A little, wizened old fellow, whose wrinkled and puckered face, 
tanned like a skin by long exposure to wind and sun, spoke 
of the wild moors, of yellow gorse, and purple heather. His 
twinkling eyes looked over the stone walls of the fold and rested 
with a certain pride and afifection upon his flock. It was his boast 
that he had never lost a single lamb ; that he knew every inch 
of the vast moorland pastures belonging to the Abbey ; that he 
could lead his sheep through fog and mist, straight as the bird's 
flight, from point to point of the desolate expanse, until they 
were safely enclosed in the great fold of Brent Moor. And there 
was something in his boast, too. The brothers told strange tales 
of Brother Peter, this quaint little lay brother whose patched 

• Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society of St. 
Paid the Aposde in the State of New York. 



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1907.] Arnoul the englishman 19 

and repatched habit hung always awry, and whose shrewd eyes 
twinkled under a rugged thatch of eyebrows and hair that had 
once been red, but were now bleached to a nondescript sandy- 
gray. 

''He had a familiar . . ." ''Not so pious as he might 
be, . . . and had dealings with the little folk of the moor/* 
So some of them said. But Brother Gregory was nearly right 
when he said, in his sing-song drawl, that Brother Peter knew 
his sheep as well as if they were Christians. He told them 
where to go, to be sure, and there they went, obedient to their 
shepherd, just as Brother Gregory's bees obeyed him, staying 
in their hives when he whispered to them that a monk of the 
Abbey was dead. 

Brother Gregory was a man of the soil, too, like Brother 
Peter. 

He tended his bees behind the Abbey Church, in the fair 
green meadows that slope down gently to the Dart ; and he, if 
any one, ought to know. For, like Brother Peter, he was very 
close in touch with Nature, and understood a great many things 
that the wise choir- monks could not learn, try as they mighty 
from the great tomes in the Scriptorium. But Brother Peter 
lived closer to Nature even than Brother Gregory. Up in the 
great heart of the moor, where Nature herself breathes and 
palpitates, he had lived from his boyhood — save when he went 
down to the great Abbey to learn his Paters and his Aves 
and to make his novitiate as a lay brother of the Cistercian 
Order. He knew where the speckled trout lay in the shallows 
of the little rivers that purl and dash and bubble over the 
bosom of Dartmoor, and when the silver salmon were coming 
back again from their journey to the sea, to flash and leap 
from pool to pool until they reached once more the sandy 
gravel beds where they first wriggled out of the egg. He knew 
— none better — the favorite haunts of the red deer, and where 
the bees went to find the sweetest honey. Every beast and 
plant and stone of the moor he knew — and loved. He was a 
moor- man born and bred. But he loved none so well as his 
own sheep. They were, for him, part and parcel of the whole 
— just as he was himself. So, perhaps. Brother Gregory was 
not so far wrong when he said that Peter's sheep understood 
him. 

"Yes, Brother"; he answered simply. 



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20 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct., 

" And none of them missing ? " queried his interlocutor. 

*^ None, Brother " ; replied the little man dreamily, as if in 
answer to a catechism. And indeed he had the same questions 
to answer whenever he brought the sheep home to Brent. 

''Then, Brother, be in and eat and get what rest you can. 
To-morrow is the feast-day of our Lord the Abbot; and all 
the brethren are bidden to the Abbey. Gyst, the cotter, will 
stay here with the serfs. But we must be up betimes, for it 
is a long cry from Brent to the monastery in time for Mass. 
All the country-side will be there to-morrow to do honor to 
the Lord Abbot; and they say the Bishop himself will come 
from Exeter to be present. Haste thee, Brother 1 Thy sheep 
have no further need of thee — now." 

''Yes, Brother"; said the little man meekly, as he turned 
to enter the low stone building that served as a cell for the 
monastic grangers and shepherds of Buckfast sojourning on 
Brent Moor. 

Brother Basil, for it was he who had charge of the settle- 
ment on the moor, stood for a few moments looking out over 
the sloping hills that billowed away from the height on which 
he stood. The setting sun cast long black shadows across the 
moor. Here a vivid patch of yellow caught its rays and flamed 
into a golden prominence ; and there the shaded purples of the 
heather faded in sombre contrast. In the far distance a rugged 
tor stood out, black and defiant against the mantling glory of 
the spring sky; erect and solemn, like a sentinel guarding the 
outposts of the world. A silver stream, gilded by the yellow 
rays, wound in and out among the hills; here and there lost 
in the shaded greens of the breaking foliage where the trees 
that leant over its surface grew the thicker, but always reap- 
pearing in a shimmer of ripple and fall as it descended to the 
ocean. 

Brother Basil drew a long sigh. Not that he was at all 
sentimental, for he was as devoid of sentiment as the great tor 
standing out before him in the paling light. But he had been 
taught that Nature reflected its Maker; and he always sighed 
when he composed himself to his prayers. Where Brother 
Peter's eyes would have sparkled all the more, and the curves 
and puckers deepened upon his weather-beaten face in a con- 
tented smile. Brother Basil looked grave and sighed. But then, 
Peter was in touch with Nature and mixed up his religion with 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 21 

his herdiog. He had the faculty of seeing the beauty of the 
world and of seeing beyond it as well; whereas Brother Basil 
had to make a conscious effort of faith when his mind traveled 
from what he saw to what he was taught lay behind it. Hence 
the sigh. 

The hum of the bees was growing less and less audible. 
The sheep, settling down for the night, ceased wandering aim- 
lessly around the fold. The sunlight paled; and a rosy glow 
heralded the cold, clear twilight of the moor. A little bell 
rang out from the gable of the cell ; and Brother Basil, cross- 
ing himself as he did so, turned to enter it. For a short time 
a murmur was heard, monotonous and soothing. The brothers 
and their serfs were at their night prayers. Then silence and 
the night descended together; and the tor kept solitary watch 
in the moonlight, as the world whirled on towards another day. 

Chapter II. 

In the fairest valley of the fair land of Devon lay the Ab- 
batial house of Buckfast. The Dart, born of the rills and rains 
far up on the head of the moor, to which it gives its name, 
here brought its turbulent career to a close ; and flowed gently 
and peacefully through the green meadows that showed evi- 
dence of monastic toil and care. Save when the melting snows 
or a summer freshet goaded it to fury, and it rose black and 
angry to gnaw at the roots of the great trees that lined its 
western bank, its placid flow laved shelving earth carpeted with 
violets and primroses and shaded by coppices of noble oaks 
and beeches. 

It had seen the beginning of the famous monastic house. 
Long before the monks came to Devon its bosom had mirrored 
other human forms than those that now walked up and down 
beside it, clothed in cowl and scapulary. The rude cave- 
dwellers from the south, the strange inhabitants of the stone 
circles hidden away high up in the fastnesses of the moor, had 
hunted and fished along its banks from source to estuary. 
Their wild eyes had peered into its glassy pools; they had 
waded across its shallow fords, tracking the deer and the otter, 
and thrust their barbed spears into its waters where the salmon 
lay, rank on rank, their tails all pointing to the sea, long, long 
before. They had hunted and slain each other, and then they 



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32 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct, 

had been slain themselves, or gone away ; for a new race, with 
dark, matted locks and wild, hunted eyes, came, flying, from 
the east. They wore the skins of wild beasts and were streaked 
and pied with paint, and they fled ever westward, through the 
bracken and the heather, towards the land of the setting sun. 
Then came others in their wake, speaking a strange language 
— a dogged, warlike race, sturdy and strong, armed with stout 
javelins and shields, and wearing helmets on their heads. And 
they, too, fished and hunted and trapped and snared — but sel- 
dom, for they were few and had the town of Exeter to hold; 
and they warred with those that had gone before whenever 
they rose against their conquerors and held the country for 
themselves and for the honor of their g^eat, far-off city. Then 
they withdrew, peaceably enough, and fair- haired men came to 
fish and hunt along Dart. Last of all came the monks, a quiet 
and peaceful race. They did not carry bows or javelins; but 
they sang songs as they cut down the branches of trees and 
wove little dwellings for themselves on the flat land that bor- 
dered Dart. Nor did they make war. Always singing, they 
hewed out the gray rock from the hillside, and built, or tilled 
the fertile soil and sowed and reaped ; until a tiny stone church 
was built and a house for the black monks of St. Benedict. 
And so they worked and built and died for over three hundred 
years — never making war, never slaying, but always singing — 
till they, too, passed away and the gray monks of Savigny came 
to take their place. And the gray monks did the same things 
as the black monks. They toiled and quarried and built and 
sang; for they were peaceful- minded too, and had no thought 
of war. And the people round about ceased from slaying, also, 
and from all desire of war. Last of all, a hundred years be- 
fore our story opens, the gray monks of Savigny disappeared 
and the sons of St. Bernard came from Citeaux, in white robes 
and black scapulars to build and plow and sing just as their 
predecessors had done. Old Dart had seen it all and remem- 
bered it [all. As abbot had succeeded abbot, it saw the state- 
ly pile of masonry rising, the house and its dependencies grow- 
ing, towers and buttresses and walls springing from the green- 
sward up to the blue sky ; the great arched gateway built, and 
the heavy, iron-studded gates bung; and bells brought and 
blessed and set in place in the tower. And then at night time, 
when the river slept under the cold moon, and in the early 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 23 

morning and throughout the day, it heard the silver tones peal- 
ing out across woodland and moorland, and the rise and fall of 
the monks' voices in the Abbey Church, and the lowing of the 
kine in the higher meadows, and the ring of steel upon stone, 
and the click and whirr of looms. 

What it could neither see nor hear, the bees told it, or the 
swallows, as they came skimming over its bosom from the 
monastery eaves. The bees sang, and the swallows whispered 
of the flocks and herds on the far-off moors of Holne and 
Buckfast and Brent, and of the great wealth of the Abbey and 
the number of its retainers, of stately ceremonial and gorgeous 
pageant, when the incense clouds rose and drifted out through 
the open windows of the church to mingle with the incense of 
the flowers without, and when the tapers twinkled like stars on 
the altar of St Mary. 

All these things Dart knew, and more; for it was very old 
and wise. But it knew and loved best the peace and quiet 
that reigned in the valley since the monks had come; and it 
murmured a vow to the flowers and grasses as it passed to do 
its best to be peaceful and quiet too. Only when the waters 
came together on the Moor, Dart rose hissing and angry; and 
tore down the valley a solid wall of sullen, moor-stained water, 
carrying away with it branches and whole trees, and sometimes, 
when it claimed its human heart, a dead man; tearing pebbles 
and boulders from the bank, chafing, gnawing, grinding at its 
stony bed, wearing away the rock in polished grooves and 
strange, deep cauldrons, as it rushed, mad with rage and cruel 
in its forgetfulness, away from the sodden moor. Still, Dart 
did not often forget its promise; and when it did, it was not 
so much its own fault as the moor's. 

This morning the sun rose over a peaceful river. The high- 
est branches of the trees just stirred in the gentle breeze. Not 
a ripple ruffled the calm water. The monastery bells were call- 
ing the brethren to the first hour of prayer. The cows were 
gathered at the gate of the byre, their udders swelling with 
rich Devon milk, waiting for the cow-herd. By the riverside 
stood a boy, his whole being, for the moment, intent upon the 
fish in the pool beneath him. 

Arnoul de Valletort was a near relation of the Abbot of St. 
Mary's; and since the death of his father, eight years before 
— his mother had died shortly after his birth — had lived and 



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24 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct., 

studied at the Abbey. Save when he stayed with his only 
brother^ the secular priest of Woodleigh by the Avon, or went, 
as he had only once or twice done, to the episcopal city of 
Exeter, he knew no other world than Buckfast; and he desired 
no other. When his father died, the Abbot had placed him 
among the alumni of the order. It was no less the wish of his 
brother than that of his monastic kinsman; for what was Sir 
Guy to do with a young boy to look after, when he had his 
parish to claim all his time ? He had lived the life of study 
and routine that the others lived — rising with the sun, working 
his allotted hours in the fields, learning his task of grammar 
or plainsong, and lying down on his hard pallet, healthily tired 
and sleepy, as soon as he had kissed the Abbot's hand and 
got his blessing with the rest, when the last office of compline 
was over. 

And so from a pale-faced, timid boy of ten, he had grown 
into a hearty, strong, and well-knit lad, ready either to become 
a novice or to leave the precincts of the Abbey for the great 
world without. 

Abbot Benet, his kinsman, had watched over him with an 
especial care. He had long been studying him for signs of a 
vocation to the monastic life; but, though he was undoubtedly 
of a happy, industrious disposition, and gave evidence of a very 
real affection for both the house and the brethren, he seemed 
to have no very great wish or inclination to become a monk. 

And so, on his sixteenth birthday, the Abbot sent for him 
to the chapter house, and, in company with his brother. Sir 
Guy, reasoned quietly with him about his future. It was then 
decided, by both the Abbot and the priest, that he should leave 
the alumnate forthwith and go to live with one of the secular 
dependants of the Abbey. He should go daily to Mass and to 
the school in the cloister, where he should finish his grammar, 
dialectic, and rhetoric, and begin the studies of the quadrivium. 
In the meantime, his future would be thought of. He might, 
perhaps, be sent to Oxford or to Paris, if he proved himself 
studious and worked well. There was sufficient patrimony, at 
least, coming to him from his father's estate, to enable him to 
study and fit himself for some benefice or other, or for some 
good position in the world. But he could hope for little more 
than that. And so the Abbot gave him his blessing, and his 
brother spoke kindly to him, as he always did, and encouraged 



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1907.] Arnoul the engushman 25 

him to do his best, and he took his few belongings from the 
alumnate, and went out through the Abbey gates with a little 
sadness of heart, as being no more one of them, and yet with 
a strange and exulting sense of freedom and expectancy, as 
having at least stepped over, once for all, the threshold of the 
great world. 

The two years that he had lived with Budd, the granger, 
had added maturity to his form and bearing. He had been 
faithful to his brother's wishes and to the Abbot's commands; 
regular and painstaking in his studies; and he had made con- 
siderable progress in them all. But it had not been all books 
and studies. He had found time, too, to roam about the woods 
and along the streams, to ride far up past Holne by the bridle 
tracks that led across the sky- girt moorland, to race, with his 
great deerhound — a gift to him from Sir Guy — from Buckfast 
to the still black pool that lies, silent and mysterious, under 
the overhanging branches of its solemn trees, a mile above 
the Abbey, and throw himself, the dog following him, into its 
refreshing coolness. Budd had taught him how to snare the 
rabbits that had their warrens in the waste ground over the 
river, and showed him how to bait the otter traps with fish. 
He had learnt the habits of many of the moorland creatures 
and knew how to lie full-length on the bank of the stream, his 
arm plunged shoulder deep in the cool water, his fingers mov- 
ing gently under the belly of some great trout that lay, all un- 
suspecting of his danger, with his head pointed up stream. 

As he stood, this bright spring morning, bending low over 
the silvery salmon pool, he was a perfect picture of health and 
strength. Lithe and agile, with muscles hardened by healthy 
exercise, face, throat, and arms tanned to a deep brown, he 
looked much older than his eighteen years. His head was bare, 
and his dress, of some loosely fitting homespun, open at the 
throat, reached only to his knees. He bore a curious resem- 
blance to his kinsman the Abbot, save that his brown hair was 
long and straight, carelessly thrown back from his broad fore- 
head, whereas the Abbot's head was shaved in the monastic 
fashion, so that only a crown of short, curling hair was left 
above his ears. But the features were the same; large gray 
eyes that looked out frankly and fearlessly from under strongly 
marked brows, a regularly formed, but rather prominent, nose, 
and a squarely cut chin that spoke of resolution and courage. 

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26 Arnoul the englishman [Oct, 

The expression of his face in repose was, perhaps, a trifle 
too serious. Only when be spoke he habitually smiled, and his 
parted lips showed two pearly rows of regular teeth. 

''Well, there's no getting another," he said to himself, as 
he saw the great bar of silver he was watching flash up to the 
head of the pool, ''and Father Abbot must be contented with 
one. But it's the finest fish taken this year, and fit for the 
table of the Lord Pope himself." 

He lifted aside a little heap of bracken as he spoke, and 
discovered a noble salmon, fresh run and still palpitating with 
life, beneath it. 

"A fine fish, indeed," he went on, as he lifted it and turned 
to go towards the abbey, "and worthy of St. Benet's Feast. 
The Abbot will eat you, my beauty ; and the nobles sitting at 
the high table will eat you ; and the Bishop will lift up his two 
fat hands and declare he never saw so fine a fish ; and he will 
eat you, too. That's worth living for, isn't it — and worth go- 
ing down to the sea and up to the moor and growing and fat- 
tening for, and being caught, too — to be eaten on the Feast 
Day of St. Benet and to be praised by the Bishop?" 

As he neared the cluster of buildings, outhouses, barns, and 
workshops, that crowded about the gateway of the Abbey, he 
saw the first- comers straggle in, and, taking his fish straight to 
the kitchen, he gave it to the cook, with express injunctions as 
to how it was to be dished and served at the repast. Then, 
retracing his steps, he sat down beside the porter's lodge and 
watched the stir and bustle of the gathering crowd. First came 
the cotters and grangers, peasants from the outlying districts 
and brethren from the moorland farms and folds — on foot for 
the most part, though some of them rode astride shaggy po- 
nies; peasants coming singly, or in groups of three or four, 
some of them with their wives and daughters — the kerchiefs of 
the women lending further color to the assembly; peasants in 
black and gray and green ; and monks in their habits of brown 
and white ; Cistercians and black-robed Benedictines ; and there 
were two Franciscans who had been preaching a pardon nearby, 
with bare feet and knotted ropes about their waists. The ap- 
proaches to the monastery and the space within the gates took 
on the appearance of a fair. A pedlar stood just outside the 
gates chaffering and bargaining over his wares. Buxom maidens 
smiled and blushed at their bashful swains, who nudged each 



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1907.] ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 27 

Other and blushed and grinned back in their turn. Cider was 
flowing already, and hydromel, that sweet, stinging drink that 
the old monks knew so well how to make. Brother Gregory 
tramped up, hot and dusty from his long walk, though be had 
set out from the cell on Brent well before the sun appeared 
over the eastern hills. Little Brother Peter was at his side, 
dusty, too, but as fresh and cool as ever. The lines about his 
pursed up little mouth were cut deep as with a chisel, and his 
eyes danced and twinkled as they (ell upon the motley crowd. 
Arnoul knew most of the newcomers well. He had lived among 
these simple folk since he was a child, and had a kindly word 
and jest for all. 

Then the knights and nobles began to arrive to the tune of 
jangling bits and trampling hoofs. Pomeroys and Cliffords and 
Tracys — all had some brother or nephew professed at St. Mary's, 
and came to grace the feast and do honor to the Lord Abbot. 

There rode Sir Robert de Helion, bland and smiling as ever, 
one of the greatest friends and benefactors of the house; and 
there, on his great black war-horse. Sir Sigar Vipont, Knight 
of Moreleigh, his brow contracted and his thin lips pressed 
closely together ; beside him rode his only child, Sibilla ; the 
Sheriff of Devon, with his lady; Guy de Briteville and his son- 
in-law, Ralph de Chalons, of Challonsleigh, were there; Sir 
William Hamlyn of Deandon, who for twenty years had never 
missed riding in to the feast from his home up by Widdecombe 
on the great moor; and who, with his customary generosity to 
the Abbey, was even now providing the greater part of the 
cost of enlarging the church, already crowded by the growing 
community, brought with him his near neighbor, Michael de 
Spitchwick. Knights and nobles with their ladies, squires with 
their dames — Arnoul knew them all and named them all but 
Vipont, against whom he had a grudge ; for the knight, quick 
tempered as he was handsome, bad beaten him sorely years be- 
fore for some boyish trespass in the woods of Moreleigh. Sibilla 
he had not seen since first he had come to the monastery ; but 
now she burst upon his sight like a vision, and he thought he 
had never looked upon anything half so beautiful before. For- 
getful of his dislike of Vipont, he turned and followed them 
with his gaze into the courtyard of the Abbey. It was invol- 
untary, unconscious. He hardly knew what he did, or doubt- 
less his former monastic training would have brought the quick 



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28 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct, 

blushes to his brow. But he saw the gracefully poised head, a 
mass of dark chestnut hair held in by a simple fillet, the smil- 
ing brown eyes and the happy, sunburnt face of a maiden not 
much younger than himself; and he stood and gazed through 
the vaulted gateway, until a hand upon his shoulder and a rough 
voice in his ear brought his mind back from the land of visions. 

'' How now, lad ? Have you no voice to speak to a com- 
rade, that you stand there moonstruck ? Here have I and Budd 
been calling to you these two minutes, and all you do is to 
g^pe, gape, gape, through yonder gateway, as though you had 
caught sight of a ghost in the broad daylight ! '* 

'' Roger ! and so it is I *' cried Arnoul. " And what do you 
here away from your boats and nets? And where is my 
brother ? And — and — and — " 

'' Softly, lad," replied the man. '' One question at a time^ 
an't please you! Your brother. Sir Guy, is well and had his 
Mass to read at Woodleigh ere he could set out for Buckfast. 
He will be here anon. He was on his way to church before I 
set out. I have traveled through the breaking of the mom — 
in good company, too, i' faith I A palmer I picked up on the 
road, and two vinegar-faced ruffians in brown, with cords about 
their waists and books in their hands. I have just got rid of 
them. Never a village did we enter to quaff a cup of sweet 
Devon cider for the house's good, but they straightway opened 
their jaws by the roadside and were droning away at their 
psalms. At every halt they warned me of the wrath to come ; 
and they so frightened the good palmer that he nearly caught 
the palsy from overmuch crossing of himself. And all, forsooth, 
because I drink the good juice that God gives to Devon men 
and speak, as I was taught, without benedicite or ave.^^ 

Why did they journey with you then, good Roger, if they 
thought so hardly of you?" asked Arnoul. 

''Faith, they thought it wiser to walk with the devil, than 
to risk a cracked pate by themselves. 'Twixt here and Wood- 
leigh there be many making merry ; and — But, soft I out of 
the way there I Here is my Lord Bishop and his train." 

Comparative silence fell upon the crowd. Even the pedlar 
stopped crying his wares as the Bishop rode forward on his 
white palfrey. Preceded by four men mounted on stout beasts, 
wearing livery and carrying arms, a sort of cross between body- 
servants and soldiers, he was the central figure in a little group. 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 29 

made up, save one, of ecclesiastics. The white- robed Premon- 
stratensian prior of Torre, with whom he had lodged the pre- 
vious night, and his own chancellor, I^doswell, rode upon his 
left. To the right was Walter de Bathe» Lord of Colnbrooke, 
with whom his lordship was engaged in deep and animated con- 
versation. Behind them rode a canon and the Bishop's chap- 
lain, with two or three lesser clerics carrying a cross and books. 
These were followed by three pack-mules, on whose backs were 
strapped and bound huge cases and bundles. And lastly, fin- 
ishing as it began, the cavalcade came to an end with four of 
my Lord of Exeter's liveried men-of-arms riding abreast. My 
Lord Bishop himself was a plump, rosy-cheeked man apparently 
about fifty years old. Clad in the purple robes of his high 
station, and wearing on his breast a golden cross, he jogged 
along slowly on his white steed, interrupting his evidently pleas- 
ant talk now and then to stretch out his jewelled hand in co- 
pious blessings over the monks and peasants who devoutly fell 
on their knees as he passed. 

As he reached the gateway he caught sight of Arnoul, and 
leant from his saddle, stretching out a podgy hand, over the 
glove of which glistened an enormous ring, to be kissed. It 
was a somewhat difficult feat to perform; for, as has been said, 
the Bishop was portly, and the beast he strode, the fattest of 
its kind, gave evidence clear and indisputable of the richness 
of its pasture and the excellence of the fare provided in the 
episcopal stables. His effort made the good cleric purple in 
the face; but he managed to capture the young man's hand in 
his own and bring himself into the perpendicular once more. 

" And how is my brother Poacher, my brother Bird-snarer ? " 
he questioned, his smile- wreathed visage beginning to assume 
its normal color again. ''My Lord Abbot has a brave handful 
in you, Sirrah I By'r Lady, you are as like him as the one 
tower of my cathedral is like the other ! And what is the last 
mischief you have been up to? By the Mass, Sir Walter, the 
last time I was here, the young rascal had the whole refectorium 
in an uproar by reason of the wasp's nest he hung up at the 
kitchen window for grubs ! For grubs, mark you I He had the 
impudence to hang it up for grubs! But that is a long story, 
and 'twill bear telling another time." 

The chaplain, the canon, and the clerics, as was their bounden 
duty, tittered in chorus. If they had heard it once, they had 



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30 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct., 

heard the tale from the Bishop's lips three score times at least, 
since last he had honored Buckfast with his presence. Arnoul 
hung his head; and the Bishop continued in good-humored 
banter: ^''Tis a good thing thy brother purposes sending thee 
to France when my Lord Abbot next goes to the chapter at 
Citeaux." This was news to Arnoul, who was somewhat taken 
aback by its suddenness. '' Aye, and hand thee over to the 
friars, who, God wot ! are sticklers for their observance. None 
of thy lax Cistercians there, my lad ! No more snaring and 
trapping when thou art in the schools of the University of 
Paris I No more running wild — but books and schools and 
bread and water and pulse! No more of thy poaching — ^yes; 
I had the tale from Vipont himself — ' Tu virga percuties eum 
et animam ejus de inferno liberabis* — yes, poaching, I said, 
poaching I And that reminds me, Sir Walter " — once the Bishop 
started it was as difficult to stop him as to dam the Dart in 
full flood — " that reminds me of my own deer park. The 
ruffians ! They have pillaged and ravaged and ravened 1 They 
have chased my deer and snared my hares. But I have over^ 
reached them. ' Quern Deus vult perdere / ' I have thundered 
against them I ' Quodcumque ligaveris super terram / ' I have 
scourged them with a whip of scorpions! I have unsheathed 
the sword of excommunication against them ! Henceforth, 
whosoever, prompted thereto by the evil one, shall dare to 
violate—" 

But the Bishop, having dropped Arnoul's hand as he warmed 
to righteous indignation over the profanation of his preserves 
and the slaying of his deer, was now passing through the great 
stone gateway ; and his excited voice was lost in the clanging 
of the bells and the bustle of the crowd making ready to enter 
the church. 

With the aid of his chaplain, and one of the men-at-arms, 
his Lordship dismounted at the door of the Abbey ; and leav- 
ing his baggage to follow him, he walked forward to salute the 
Lord Abbot, who came towards him from the monastery. The 
two prelates embraced and entered the cloister together. The 
crowd surged forward through the great western portal into the 
church ; and Arnoul, having lost Budd and Roger in the press, 
managed to find a place before a pillar, whence he could see 
the sanctuary not far from the spot where Vipont stood, with 
his daughter Sibilla at his side. 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 31 



Chapter III. 

The gorgeous ceremonial of the Pontifical Mass had come 
to an end, and the voices of the monks in choir were rising 
and falling in the office of Sext. Both the Bishop and the 
Abbot were removing the cloth-of-gold vestments that they 
had worn during the ceremony. Arnoul had noticed little of 
the detail. His kinsman had worn a new mitre. One of the 
altar candles was out of plumb and guttered; and some of the 
alumni had shuffled with their feet as, clothed in little white 
Cistercian habits with short black scapulars, they sang, stand- 
ing around the huge graduale on its stand in the centre of the 
choir. Vipont's lips were still hard set. It was curious that 
he should have noticed that. The people had joined with the 
monks in singing the common portions of the Mass; and he 
himself had sung the " in terra pax hominibus '' with the rest, 
though he hardly knew that he was singing. Strange that his 
thoughts should wander so. He was going to France — to Paris. 
Was he going to Paris ? And why had not his brother or the 
Abbot told him so before? Some one might have told him. 
The sweet sticky odor of the incense drifted down the nave 
and wrapped him round. The monotonous rhythm of the plain- 
chant fascinated him : " et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum.^* So 
that was old Vipont's daughter ? Of course he knew that there 
was a daughter. He had known her as a tiny child ; but he 
had never imagined — And Vipont? Vipont had probably for- 
gotten all about him — but how he hated him — and he had once 
beaten him and his hound 1 The memory of the childish injury 
burned and rankled. So he dreamed on, and distraction 
multiplied — Paris; and the hound; and Vipont's daughter; and 
Paris; and the new mitre; and Vipont — until he found himself 
singing the Trisagion, *^pleni sunt casli et terra gloria tuaT* 
He pulled himself together with an effort and bowed his head 
before the shrouded mystery. The Bishop came down from his 
throne and, laying his precious mitre aside, had knelt like the 
meanest serf in all the church, through the pregnant silence. 
And then the burden of triumph was taken up again: ** Bene- 
dictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis^^ ; and 
the stately ceremony hastened towards its end. Now it was 
done. The church was fast emptying — the people making their 



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32 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct, 

way towards the long tables spread for the feast, under the 
trees leading to the river. Vipont had disappeared, and Sibilla 
with the ladies who had come in with their lords for the feast 
of St. Benet. They could not enter the cloister and eat in the 
refectory with the other bidden guests. No woman could cross 
the threshold of the Abbey. But no doubt she would find a 
place with the other dames of birth and station in the guest 
house. And so he would not see her again. At least it was 
not probable. 

As he left the church he was pounced upon by Roger, who 
had been lying in wait for him at the door, and hurried o£f to 
greet his brother, the priest of Woodleigh, whom he feared 
less and loved far more than his more distant kinsman, the 
Abbot of St. Mary's. 

Meanwhile the lay brothers were hastening their prepara- 
tions for the feast in refectory and kitchen. Great trenchers 
heaped with wheaten bread and jugs filled to the brim with 
white ale and cider and thin red wine were placed at regular 
intervals upon spotlessly clean tables of wood. At the high 
table where the Abbot sat, though not before his own place, 
was spread a cloth for the Bishop and several persons of rank. 

The refectory was a spacious, rectangular room built in 
stone, and designed to seat, at the tables ranged lengthwise 
against three of its walls, a community of fifty monks. It was 
divided down the centre by two stone pillars, from whose 
capitals sprang the arches of a plainly vaulted ceiling. One 
side was pierced with a row of Norman windows. The other 
was a blank wall, save for a door leading directly to the cloister. 
At the foot of the room where no tables stood, except a small 
one for the convenience of the servers, was an arched aperture, 
through which the dishes were passed from the adjoining kitchen. 
The furniture was plain and simple in the extreme. A large 
wooden cross hung behind the Abbot's seat. A sort of desk 
or pulpit for the reader was raised in the centre of the southern 
wall, between the windows. Apart from these, there was usually 
nothing in the room but the tables, upon which lay, for each 
of the brethren, a dish for salt, a wooden ladle or spoon, and 
a two-handled cup. To-day, on account of the number of the 
guests, and even though most of the lay brothers would be 
occupied in serving both in the refectory and at the impromptu 
tables laid under the trees, long boards had been brought in 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 33 

and set upon trestles, down the centre of the room. The whole 
looked delightfully white and cool and clean ; and the steam of 
the good fare coming from the kitchen whetted the already 
keen appetites of the guests as they came, headed by the 
Bishop and the Abbot, through the cloisters to the refectory. 

After grace, chanted by the assembled community, the 
brothers brought great steaming platters of savory viands to 
the tables. There were thick brown soups of lentils and dried 
peas, stewed eels brought that morning from the Dart by Totnes, 
and carp from the stew- ponds of the Abbey, seethed in wine; 
a pottage of garden herbs flavored with salt and rosemary and 
thyme, and a mess of roots and succulent leaves, the composi- 
tion of which was only known to Brother Paul, the chief cook, 
himself. Lastly, there was the salmon, borne in upon a great 
platter by a smiling, red- faced server, and set before the Father 
Abbot himself. 

Arnoul, whose place was far down the refectory below the 
lay brothers looked to see the Bishop's plump hands go up in 
admiration and astonishment; but he contented himself with 
raising his eyes from the fish to the vaulted roof and stretch- 
ing out his hand for the generous portion served him by the 
Abbot. 

The meal proceeded in silence, save only for the somewhat 
monotonous voice of the reader recounting the life of an early 
martyr for the faith ; for the Cistercians practised the rule of 
St Benedict, in which the custody of the tongue, as well as 
abstinence from flesh-meat, is especially enforced. At last the 
reading ended. The honey and the fruits and a sweet cake 
provided for the occasion had gone their rounds. The long 
Latin thanksgiving had been sung and the Miserere intoned. 
The monks left the refectory, each turning and bowing to him 
who followed as he passed through the door on his way to the 
church; and Arnoul, leaving the line of hooded figures that pre« 
ceded him, made his way through the cloister and past the 
guest-house to his friends Roger and Budd, who were still 
seated at the tables spread beneath the trees. There he stood, 
leaning against the gnarled stem of a great oak. The monks 
would leave the church in a moment and the Abbot himself 
would come to say grace for the people — his own people of 
Buckfast — before they betook themselves to their wives and 
daughters and to their games on the green outside the Abbey 

VOL. LXXXVI. — 3 

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34 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct., 

precincts. Then there would be laughter and fun, much inno- 
cent sport, and some rougher horseplay until vesper time. 

The talk and the laughter grew suddenly hushed as the tall 
form of the Abbot was seen coming towards the merrymakers. 
He was not alone. Lagging behind him was the Bishop, a lit- 
tle more ruddy, a little more smiling than before. Then the 
chancellor, the priors of Torre and Buckfast, the chaplain and 
the clerks. The knights came too — Sir Roger de Helion whis* 
pering something to the vicar, at whose side he walked; and 
then, in a long white line, the brethren of the house and the 
converse* brothers in their coarse brown habits. They stood 
ranged in an irregular semi- circle, around the tables, while the 
thanksgiving was being said, the monks' hands, for the most 
part, hidden under their black scapulars, their eyes bent upon 
the earth. They were not the least striking figures in the as- 
sembly. Monks tall and short, monks scraggy and lean, monks 
with the deep lines of asceticism worn into their pale faces, 
and monks whom their pulse and potherbs left, like the three 
children of old, fatter and fairer than before. There were old 
monks whose listless eyes spoke of a long pilgrimage nearly 
done, of other sights hoped for than feasting and revelry; 
young monks in whose faces shone the fires of enthusiasm and 
zeal ; all types of men filling in the gap, from Brother Peter of 
the Brentmoor grange to Brother Gregory who asked him ques- 
tions about his beloved sheep. 

Grace was finished and the Abbot lifted his hand for fur- 
ther silence. 

" My children," he said, in a low, full voice, strongly French 
in its accent, though, for the occasion, he spoke in fluent Eng- 
lish, so that all, even the serfs, might understand him. ''My 
children, you are come to do honor to our Lady of Buckfast 
and to St. Benet, our holy Father, on his feast day." It was 
characteristic of the Abbot that he never spoke of himself. 
" Our Lady, surely, and St. Benet, our Blessed Founder, are 
glad. They are pleased with your devotion. I trust you have 
eaten well. What means our poor community lacks is made up 
by the generosity of our good friends. And that word * friends * 
brings me to my point. Among our most noble benefactors " — 
and the Abbot inclined his head towards the Bishop and the 
knightly friends of the house — " there is none more open-handed 
than Sir Roger de Helion. He has given to God and to the 



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1907.] Arnoul the englishman 3$ 

Abbey of St. Mary freely in times past. He has a gift to make 
to-day. I do not know the tenor of his wishes; but his deed 
of gift shall be read before you all." 

The vicar came forward with a roll of parchment in his 
handy from which depended a heavy leaden seal. '' It is fitting, 
continued the Abbot, '' that you should honor — all of us should 
honor — the benefactors of the Abbey. Are you not all chil- 
dren of St Mary's ? Therefore, shall you all hear the reading 
of his deed and honor the noble donor, Roger de Helion, knight 
and associate of our order."' 

The vicar cleared his throat and stepped forward again. He 
held the parchment close to his nose and gabbled the first few 
lines in a quick and almost inaudible voice. Helion covered his 
mouth and his chin with his hand. A mischievous smile lurked 
in his kindly gray eyes. 

" Hem I Hum 1 * Omnibus et singulis^* et cetera — My Lord," 
he whispered aside to the Abbot, ''must I read all the legal 
jargon set out here at the beginning? No? To all and every 
man, then : — and the rest that follows in due form.'' 

" My Lord," he whispered again. ** It is better that I par- 
aphrase. The serfs have little scholarship." 

The Abbot smiled and nodded his assent. He knew the 
pompous little man's weakness in the matter of Latinity. 

But Helion interfered. "No"; he said, ''the vicar shall 
read it as it stands, or some one else shall read it for him." 
And then, turning to the vicar himself, he added in an under- 
tone : 

" Did I not explain it all to thee as we came together from 
the refectory? Read it as it stands. Sir Priest, and see that 
thou read it aright. It was drawn up by the best Notary in 
Totnes : and he is here to listen to you read it." 

" Yes, yes " ; answered the wretched vicar, " I shall read it 
as it stands. But a paraphrase. Sir Roger — And you told me 
what it all was. Nevertheless I shall do your bidding. It shall 
be read as it stands — word for word— I promise you." 

He cleared his throat again and began, making a singularly 
bad translation of the notarial terms. At last he got to that 
part of the document that had been impressed upon his mind 
with so much care by Helion. His translation became freer; 
his emphasis more marked; his speech slower; and he made 
a decided pause at each telling point. " — 'for the good of 



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36 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Oct, 

my soul — and in token of the especial devotion which I bear 
to our Lady of Buckfast and the Abbot and monks of the 
community there, I do give and convey to God and to Blessed 
Mary of Buckfast and to the monks who serve God in that 
place, all my land of Hosefenne, which is in the manor of 
South Holne — free from all exaction and service except of our 
Lord the King — which is the fortieth part of a knight's fee — 
the Lord Abbot to pay to me and to my heirs a pound of 
wax every year upon the feast of the Assumption of our 
Lady — 

*^ * And from the rents and revenues of the said land of 
Hosefenne the Lord Abbot is to provide every year sixty- four 
gallons of wine to be drunk by the community of monks at 
Buckfast — in the following manner ; to wit, sixteen gallons upon 
tho feast of the Nativity of our Lord; sixteen gallons on Can- 
dlemas Day; sixteen gallons on Pentecost; and sixteen gallons 
on the Assumption of our Lady."' 

At this point the vicar was interrupted by the delighted 
amusement of the assembly. 

The Abbot looked serious. Several of the monks raised 
their eyes and hands towards heaven in their astonishment. Sir 
Robert de Helion beamed. 

The vicar cleared his throat again and proceeded to read. 

''Hem! Hum I 'But should it ever happen that the Fa- 
ther Abbot of Citeaux, or the Visitor, or the Abbot of this 
place, at any time, should have the presumption to take away 
or diminish this allowance of wine, after the truth of the mat- 
ter has been inquired into — and the seniors and graver monks 
of the whole community have been heard — I — or my heirs — 
shall have the power, without any contradiction, to resume the 
said land — to their own use — 

" * That this my gift may remain firm and inviolate forever 
— I have confirmed this writing by adding my seal.' " 

The vicar stopped. He had come to the end of the paper. 
The Abbot still looked grave; but Helion stepped forward, 
and taking the parchment from the vicar's hands passed it over 
to the notary to procure the signatures of the more noteworthy 
persons who were present. 

It was not much to be wondered at that the good Abbot's 
face had lengthened as the reading of the charter continued. 
It was hardly what he had expected. An annual rent for 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 37 

tapers to be burnt at the shrine, or a grant of new pasture 
land, up on the moors, would have been more to his liking. 
But he accepted the gift of the kind-hearted donor in the same 
spirit as that in which it was so freely given ; and, making 
nothing of his embarrassment at so public a reading of the 
document, he thanked the knight in appropriate words. 

"Ah, yes. Father Abbot"; Hclion replied to his little 
speech of thanks, ''better far what you use than what you 
hoard. You think only of the glory of the Abbey and toil 
and build for those who are not yet born. I see that you have 
a little creature comfort ; and, by St. Benet I 'tis the best deed 
I have ever done you I But look to it, Father Abbot, that no 
stingy cellarer cuts short the wine, or Hosefenne comes back 
to me and mine again." 

The good knight pointed his words with little nods and 
beamed with pleasure at his gift and the success of his joke; 
and as the people rose at a sign from the Abbot to make their 
way to the green, he had his thanks paid in the ringing cheers 
of lusty throats. 

His brother beckoned Arnoul to him aside. *'I have scarce 
seen you to-day, to speak to, Arnoul," he said, ''and now I 
must go in and talk matters over for the last time with Father 
Abbot and the Bishop. You are to go abroad to study after 
all. The Bishop says it will be far better for you to go to 
France than to stay in England, and the Abbot seems to think 
so too." 

" But, brother, this is so sudden," stammered the boy ; who, 
as neither his brother nor Abbot Benet had said anything upon 
the subject to him, had begun to think the Bishop's remark of 
the morning might be no more than pleasant banter. "01 
course, I am pleased to think I am to go abroad, but — " 

"But there is no time now, my dear Arnoul, to say more. 
The Abbot will explain all to you. He bade me tell you to 
go to him in his cell as soon as Vespers are over. I must 
join him now, and 1 shall be well upon my road to Wood- 
leigh before Magnificat is sung. I have business with Sir 
Sigar to arrange. Good-bye, Arnoul. You will come to me 
anon at Woodleigh, before you go. 'Tis all arranged with 
Father Abbot; and he will tell you all after Vespers. Good- 
bye, lad, good-bye!" 

"Good-bye, brother," answered the boy wondering at this 



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38 Arnoul the Englishman [Oct. 

sudden turn of events, mildly amazed at the guarded silence of 
his brother and the Abbot, thinking what all his friends at 
Buckfast would have to say to it. 

The priest turned and followed the two dignitaries who 
were, by this time, making their way back again towards the 
cloister. The knights and nobles had already passed out under 
the great gateway to their ladies ; and the monks were making 
o£f in different directions through the grounds for their hour 
of silent recreation. 

Lay brothers began to clear the tables and carry them away ; 
and Arnoul, still wondering and speculating as to whether Vi- 
pont had yet left, followed the rearmost through the gateway 
into the bright sunlight and dancing and laughter of the vil- 
lage green. 

Vipont was nowhere to be seen — nor Sibilla. A few of the 
knights were standing apart, looking on at the rustic merry- 
making; but, search as he would, he could catch no glimpse 
of her. 

So he turned his thoughts to Budd and Roger — only to 
find that they too, had disappeared. If they did not turn up 
till Vespers, the great news would have to wait until after his 
interview with the Abbot. Well, after all, perhaps, it was just 
as well; though he certainly should like to tell some one now. 
He would know all the plans when he had seen Abbot Benet. 
In the meantime, he would just keep his news to himself; 
and, until the Vesper bell rang a pause to the dancing, he 
would amuse himself as best he might 

(to be continued.) 



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SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT. 

BY THE REV. THOMAS J. GERRARD. 

fE of the primary principles of the theological 
science is« as I endeavored to draw out in a 
previous article, that our knowledge of God in 
this life is strictly analogical; that between the 
spirit world and its analogical expresMon there 
is a transcendental difference; that compared with the beatific 
vision our present sight is but an enigmatic vision, that now 
we see as through a glass in a dark manner, but then face to 
face. So very crude, however, is our nature; so intimately 
commingled is the spirit with the flesh; so dependent is the in- 
tellect on imagination, that; in spite of the essential distinction 
between mind and seomtion, we cannot classify and utilize even 
our analogical knowledge without the use of further analogies. 
And through the failure to recognize the nature and function 
of these adjumentary analogies there has arisen much of the 
present confusion concerning that phenomenon of religious life 
known as the development of Christian doctrine. There is the 
analogy taken from architecture, the growth of a building; there 
is that taken from botany, the growth of a seed into a tree; 
and there is that taken from biology, the growth of a child 
into a man; all of which are helpful, but all inadequate. And 
their chief inadequacy lies in their inaptitude to convey a 
sufficiently clear idea of the distinction between that which 
grows and that which remains the same. Then from the conse- 
quent confusion there arises a further confusion of the respec- 
tive values of certain factors in the process of development, the 
functions of intellect, will, and sentiment ; and also an obscura- 
tion of the chief factor in the process; namely, the operation 
of the Holy Spirit. 

I propose, then, in the following study^ firsts to state clearly 
what grows and what does not; and, secondly, to indicate the 
assimilative factor in the process of growth. 

At the outset I assume that above this natural cosmos there 
is a mystical cosmos of such a kind as to be unknowable to us 



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40 SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT [Oct., 

unless manifested by some Power who is Lord over both. And 
just as this natural world constitutes one organic whole, so the 
mystical world also constitutes one organic whole. The whole 
of the mystical world has not been made known, but only so 
much as God in his wise economy has thought fit to make 
known. In general outline it is recognized as a Blessed Trinity, 
an Incarnation, and a system of grace ; the Blessed Trinity be- 
ing the source as well as the end of man, the Incarnation being 
the mediation between God and man, and grace and glory be- 
ing the means by which the perfect communion between God 
and man is brought about. We look upon these as separate 
truths, but we may not forget that they are organically con- 
nected, and instead of being so many isolated mysteries they 
are rather different aspects of the ''one dispensation of the 
mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God who 
created all things." 

By the same wise economy, God has disclosed the mystic 
world partly by means of our natural knowledge and partly 
by means of a supernatural knowledge. And the difference 
between the two kinds of knowledge cannot, at the present 
juncture, be emphasized too strongly; for it is precisely by 
this distinction that we are able to discern the radical difference 
between Catholic development of doctrine and rationalist evolu- 
tion of dogma. 

The rationalist theologian, denying any sort of supernatural 
revelation, is quite free to apply the Darwinian theory to his 
theology, to regard it strictly as a natural growth in a natural 
environment, with a survival of the fittest. But the Catholic 
theologian must insist that, in addition to a natural revelation, 
there has also been a supernatural one, which has been pre- 
served by a supernatural life. This supernatural revelation has 
undergone a certain growth. It did not spring into existence, 
whole and complete* straight from the mind of Christ. God, 
who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times 
past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all in these days 
hath spoken to us by his Son. The revelation of the Old 
Testament was preparatory to its perfection in the New. The 
portion revealed to the patriarchs pointed out the coming of 
a Redeemer and the royal line whence he was to be bom. 
The portion revealed to Moses and the prophets was a real and 
objective development of the dogma of a Reedemer. It was, 



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I9Q7-] SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT 41 

moreover, a preparation for an organized Kingdom of God on 
earth — the Synagogue was a foreshadow of the Church. In 
this stage, too, there was a positive objective development of the 
dogma of atonement for sin, though as yet God's chastisement 
was that of a hard taskmaster and not that of a heavenly Father. 
Finally, this development and growth was completed by the 
perfect revelation of Christ. He who was the very word of 
God, he who had lived through eternity in the bosom of the 
Father, he who had heard the things of God directly, he came 
to speak them in the world. He spoke them gently, some- 
times in very dim analogy, unfolding them according as his in- 
finite wisdom dictated. First, the bread of God is that which 
Cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world; next, 
he is the bread of life; finally, when his hearers murmur, he 
speaks the bold truth: "The bread that I will give is my flesh.'' 
At length the whole of the revelation was completed and closed 
forever. The Apostles received it, and henceforward the only 
thing to be done was to guard it and to teach it, even unto 
the consummation of the world. '' The rule of light is, to keep 
what thou hast received without adding or taking away." 

The Apostles, however, could not reveal this mystic world 
again just as they had seen it. They must needs embody 
their knowledge in a system of analogies and thought- forms 
which the general body of the faithful could understand. And 
since this system of analogies was the only means by which 
the faithful could get at the divine truths thereby humanly ex- 
pressed, it was necessarily an integral part of the deposit of 
faith. The Church could not guard the revealed mystic cosmos, 
unless she also guarded the analogical expression thereof com-: 
mitted by the Apostles to tradition. She need not necessarily 
guard the identical words of the Apostles; for in one of the 
most vital formulas of the deposit, namely, the form of eu- 
charistic consecration, the words vary. But she must maintain 
the same ideas and categories. What was committed to the 
Church, therefore, was an orderly collection of analogies express- 
ing the eternal truths revealed to the Apostles. Their sense 
was unmistakable. And it was that identical sense, the truth 
as intended by the Apostles, which was to remain unchanged 
and unchangeable until the end of time. This is what is un- 
derstood by supernatural revelation. This is what is meant by , 
sacred dogma. This is what was intended by the Council of 



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42 Sanctity and Development [Oct., 

Trent when it said that the *' sacred dogmas must ever be un- 
derstood in the sense once for all declared by Holy Mother 
Church; and never must that sense be abandoned under pre- 
text of profounder knowledge." 

Here is a clear, authentic declaration of that which does 
not change. It is the sense of the sacred dogmas. Whatever 
the sense was that was understood by the Apostles^ that also 
was the sense understood by the Council of Nice, by Trent, by 
Vatican, by any other general council, or by any pope speak- 
ing ex cathedra between now and the end of time. The sub- 
stance of the dogma as it exists in itself does not grow, does 
not develop, does not evolve. ''He who is able to talk much 
about the faith,"' says St Irenaeus, "does not enlarge it, nor 
yet does he who can say less about it, lessen it.'' * 

What, then, is it that does grow ? Evidently there is at 
least more bulk in the Athanasian Creed than in the Apostles' 
Creed ; more bulk in the collected dogmatic decrees of the 
Church than in the Creed of St. Athanasius; more bulk in the 
vast tomes of theology than in the collected dogmatic decrees 
of the Church. What is it that grows ? 

Here I must be very careful not to be mistaken. Through 
familiarity with the growth of natural, patriarchal, and Mosaic 
revelation ; through the all-pervading influence of the analogy 
of biological evolution, and its application to the question of 
religion, an impression may be produced that somehow the 
Christian revelation has grown too. Against these confusing 
influences I propose a tessera. It is an epigram of singular 
richness taken from the writings of Albert the Great, in which 
the growth is described as ** potius profectus fidelis in fide ^ quam 
fidei in fideliV Development is a growth of the faithful in the 
faith rather than of the faith in the faithful. 

Development, therefore, is primarily a life. It is the growth, 
in the first instance, of the spiritual life of the faithful. It is 
the ripe experience of the Church in the use of the faith com- 
mitted to her keeping. As the Church becomes more familiar 
with the deposit of faith she understands it better. She is 
able both to explain its meaning more fully and to apply its 
lessons to her life more fruitfully. In order to do this she 
finds it convenient to register the results of her riper experi- 
ence, which registration she makes known to the world in the 

*Iren., I.,c. lo., n, 2. 



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1907.] Sanctity and Development 43 

form of creeds and dogmatic decrees. When these various 
registrations are compared with each other, a gradual process 
of explicitation is observable. Scientific as well as humanistic 
analogies are introduced. Some are taken from the original 
apostolic deposit, some from the natural environment in which 
the faithful have lived. But whatever is adopted is an abstrac* 
tion from the real active life of the Church. 

Since, then, the explicitation of the Church's thought con- 
ceming the deposit follows on the Church's life, the process 
cannot be merely a change of language; not a mere transla- 
tion of the humanist forms of the evangelists into the intellec- 
tual forms of the schoolmen ; nor yet a mere explanation of 
obscure terms such as might be accomplished by the aid of a 
good dictionary ; nor yet again a mere syllogistic development. 
Doubtless there is an implicit logic underlying the process. 
But in the concrete, living body of men who constitute the 
Church, to which the faith in its entirety was delivered, there is 
something more at work than pure reason. And when a ra* 
tional minor premise is chosen with which to draw a conclu- 
sion from a revealed major, or when one revealed minor is 
chosen in preference to another revealed minor, there is some 
influence at work other than mere whim. There is reason at 
work and the mind obeys its laws even in its most implicit 
operations; but that reason is organically connected with will 
and feeling. Just as in the individual the reason, acting in vital 
conjunction with the other faculties, constitutes the illative 
sense, so the combined reason of the Christian body, acting in 
vital conjunction with all the other combined faculties of the 
Christian body, may be said to constitute a collective illative 
sense. 

The collective illative sense, however, is not a *' purely 
natural " faculty ; that is, it does not act independently of the 
spirit world, viewing it from afar, taking an interest in it as an 
astromomer takes an interest in the world of Mars. If there is 
a transcendental separateness between the mystical cosmos and 
the natural cosmos, there is also between them an intimate 
nearness and union. The collective illative sense of the faith- 
ful is informed, vivified, controlled, and guided by the Holy 
Spirit. The same Holy Spirit which illumines the individual 
mind, illumines also the collective mind. The same Holy Spirit 
which inflames the individual affections and moves the individual 



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44 SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT [Oct, 

will, also inflames the collective a£fections and moves the coU 
lective will. It controls with unerring accuracy the whole of 
that stupendous network of emotional, volitional, and intellec- 
tual forces whose combined result may be written down as the 
dictate of the collective illative sense of the Christian people. 
In other words, it enables the Church to reflect on the charge 
committed to her, to gather up her experience in the use of 
it, to form a judgment and to give expression to that judg- 
ment. '' These things have I spoken to you, abiding with you. 
But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send 
in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things 
to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you." 

Here, then, is a clear concept of that which does grow. It 
is the subjective understanding of the dogma which grows. 
The objective body of truth does not grow. The sense of the 
dogma as understood by the Apostles remains the same. It 
were, therefore, somewhat of a misnomer, especially at a time 
when rationalist terminology is so popular, to speak of the de- 
velopment or the evolution of dogma. Understood in the sub- 
jective sense, the terms are permissible. But, owing to their 
liability to be taken in an objective sense, I think it were bet- 
ter to speak rather of the evolution or the development ol the 
dogmatic science. Even then there will be ample room left for 
distinguishing between the authoritative values of the various 
kinds of theological propositions, of saying which express dog- 
mas of faith, dogmas of defined faith, certainties not of faith, 
pious opinions, yes, and opinions which are anything but pious 
and which had better be called corruptions rather than devel- 
opments. 

This brings me to the main point of my inquiry: What is 
the discriminating principle which assimilates the fit expressions 
of dogmatic truth and eliminates the unfit ? Let me call out 
again our tessera: "Development is a growth of the faithful 
in the faith rather than of the faith in the faithful." True, the 
deposit existing in the Church is subject to a natural environ- 
ment. Like every other body of truth, it is subject to intellec- 
tual speculation, politics, economics, yea, even to the influences 
of personal ambition, intellectual pride and lust for power. 
But, unlike every other body of truth, it is also subject to a 
specific charismatic influence which modifies and checks every 
other influence. "The doctrine which God has revealed has 



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I907-] SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT 45 

not been proposed as some philosophical discovery to be per- 
fected by the wit of man, but has been entrusted to Christ's 
Spouse as a Divine deposit to be faithfully guarded and infalli- 
bly declared." • The principle of discrimination, therefore, is 
not merely or even primarily, intellectual acumen, but the spirit 
of holiness. According to the unanimous consent of theolo- 
gians, a definition may be infallible, whilst all the preambles 
and reasons given for it may be fallacious. Development is the 
growth of the faithful in the faith rather than of the faith in 
the faithful. Just as the science of political economy is a record 
of the world's march in civilization, so the science of theology 
is a record of the Church's march in spiritualization. As the 
chartefs, statutes, and legal lore of any given country are to the 
political life of that country, so are the deposit of faith, infalli- 
ble decrees, and unauthenticated theology to the life of the 
Church. And as the charters, statutes, and legal lore are 
framed according to the political needs of a country, so the de- 
posit bf faith, the infallible decrees, and the unauthenticated 
theological lore are framed to meet the spiritual requirements 
of the Church, the deposit directly by God himself, the infalli- 
ble decrees through the instrumentality of Pope and Council, 
the unauthenticated theological lore, in so far as it is sound by 
the Holy Spirit through the instrumentality of men, in so far 
as it is unsound by the theologians' own originality. 

One of the earliest themes in the school of philosophy is 
the axiom: cognitum est in cognoscente secundum modum cog^ 
noscentis et non secundum modum cogniti. Water poured into a 
round bottle becomes round, and into a square bottle square. 
Wisdom spoken to a fool is taken as foolishness. Spiritual 
things in order to be understood must be approached by spiri- 
tual men. Indeed, the necessity of a moral rather than of an 
intellectual force for the discernment of spiritual truth is one of 
the most palpable dictates of Holy Scripture. ''The sensual 
man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God ; 
for it is foolishness to him and he cannot understand; because 
it is spiritually examined. But the spiritual man judgeth all 
these things." '' His unction teacheth you of all things, and is 
truth and is no lie." ''I cease not to give thanks for you, 
making commemoration of you in my prayers, that the God of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you 

* Vatican Council, Sess. III., chap. iv. 



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46 SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT [Oct., 

the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of 
him." " I give thanks, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, 
because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent 
and hast revealed them to little ones.'* 

Our Lord tried to impress this doctrine on Nicodemus, but 
Nicodemus being a psychic man (^^uxixbg) rather than a spiri- 
tual man (xveu^jLaxtx^g) could only wonder and say : ** How can 
these things be done?'' Our Lord then answered him and 
gave him the true philosophy: ''Art thou a master in Israel 
and knoweth not these things ? ... He that doth the 
truth, Cometh to the light." There had been the Old Testa- 
ment revelation, and Nicodemus ought not to have been asking 
such a question. But his spiritual sense had been made dull. 
He had put a veil upon his heart, cultivating the psychic man 
at the expense of the spiritual. 

The same was Christ's theme when, in the sermon on the 
Mount, he said : *' Blessed are the clean of heart ; for they 
shall see God." Purity of heart signifies primarily a certain 
freedom from lust and concupiscence, a certain infused or ac- 
quired perfection in withstanding the disorders of the flesh and 
in keeping the mind clean. Such purity of heart, however, is 
but the beginning of a wider purity of heart which implies 
freedom from all sinful habits,- and especially freedom from the 
sins of duplicity and hypocrisy. We are commanded to do two 
things: to gird our loins and to hold our lamps in our hands; 
which, being interpreted, is : Let us not only keep our vows, 
but also be strictly honest when we write articles for the re- 
ligious press. 

Since, then, a clean mind is the best mirror of the mind of 
God, and since the saints are the great geniuses of moral per- 
fection, the saints must, consequently, be the best instruments 
for the acquisition of a richer knowledge of the spiritual world. 
Development is a growth of the faithful in the faith rather 
than of the faith in the faithful. And it is precisely this growth 
in faith, practical faith, that is, faith informed by love, which 
produces purity of heart. Thus St. Peter can speak of God 
making no difference between Jews and Gentiles, since he gives 
the Holy Ghost to the Gentiles, " purifying their hearts by 
faith." Therefore, just in so far as a man is a saint; just in 
so far as he makes venture in living faith ; just in so far as he 
is living the life of the Holy Spirit within him; just in so far 



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1907.] Sanctity and Development 47 

is he contributing his share to the sound development of Chris- 
tian doctrine. This, at any rate, was the thesis of our Lord 
when he went up into the temple to teach. The Jews won- 
dered, saying: ** How doth this man know letters, having never 
learned ? " Jesus answered them and said : '' My doctrine is 
not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do the will 
of him, he shall know of the doctrine.'' Moral excellence, 
therefore, is the discriminating principle in religious knowl- 
edge. Wherever there is envying and contention, wherever 
men are carnal and not spiritual, the only food that can be 
taken is milk to drink; for meat cannot be assimilated. 

Nay^ depreciation in moral excellence spells depreciation in 
doctrinal excellence. An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit. 
If it be true that holiness fosters doctrinal development, it is 
equally true that sin fosters doctrinal corruption. '* For where- 
as for the time you ought to be masters, you have need to be 
taught again what are the first elements of the words of God; 
and you have become such as have need of milk and not of 
strong meat. For every one that is a partaker of milk, is un- 
skilful in the word of justice; for he is a little child. But 
strong meat is for the perfect ; for them who by custom 
have their senses exercised to the discerning of good and evil."* 

** If any man will do the will of him, he shall know of the 
doctrine." In looking back over the history of the Church we 
must, therefore, expect to find that those who have been most 
proficient in doing the will of God have been most effectual in 
raising the veil from the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. 

First, as regards the inspired records of the deposit, the 
most spiritual of all is that of the virgin disciple, John. He it 
is who leans on the breast of Jesus. Peter, who has a wife, so 
speaks St. Jerome, does not dare to ask what he requests 
John to ask. When the Apostles are in the ship on Lake 
Genesareth and Jesus stands on the shore, they do not recog- 
nize whom they see. Only a virgin knows a virgin, and John 
says to Peter: "It is the Lord." It is John who writes the 
Apocalypse, the book of revelation. It is he who, in a Gospel 
far removed from the others, is the eagle soaring to the high- 
est peaks, there to hold converse with the Father and to learn 
that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God." 

* Heb. V. 13 et seq. 



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48 Sanctity and Development [Oct., 

Next, as regards the science of the deposit, it is the saints 
who have been the leaders in the campaign against error. 
Take the age of the Councils. SS. Augustine and Aurelius 
of Carthage sustain the truth against the Donatists; St Atha- 
nasius, " the Father of Orthodoxy," leads the forces of the 
Church against the Arians ; SS. Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of 
Nyssa, and Cyril of Jerusalem champion the right doctrine at 
the second general council against the Macedonian, ApoUina- 
rian, and Photinian heresies; St. Augustine fights for twenty 
years against Pelagianism, and although he does not live to 
see the heresy extinct, yet he dies in the happy conviction 
that he has pierced it with so many darts that it cannot long 
survive him. The heresiarchs contribute nothing to the devel- 
opment of doctrine; they but furnish occasions for the action 
of the saints. If, therefore, our creeds seem to have been 
called forth by heretics rather than by the direct action of 
saintly doctors, it is only in the same way that Christ's glori- 
ous resurrection was made possible by the wounds and cruci- 
fixion inflicted by the Roman soldiery. The damnatory clauses, 
the anathemas, and the condemned propositions are but so many 
glorified cicatrices in the risen body of doctrinal truth. 

The varieties of religious experience showing individual 
illumination in dogmatic truth as the fruit of holiness might be 
multiplied indefinitely. I must confine myself, however, to a 
few cases illustrative of the chief aspects of my theme rather 
than demonstrative of it. 

The experience of the Blessed Angela of Foligno indicates 
how a revealed truth — in this case it is the Fatherhood of God 
— may remain the same objectively and yet through subjec- 
tive illumination may acquire undreamt-of brilliancy. When 
beginning to say the Lord's Prayer one day, so she tells us, 
''I seemed to see it and every word of it in so clear a light 
and with so new an understanding, that I marveled how little 
I had known it before." 

St. Theresa's description of her experience of the truth of 
the Blessed Trinity shows how a saint may have an insight 
into a dogma transcending all power of reproduction. As she 
''is brought into the seventh mansion by an intellectual vision, 
all the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity discover them- 
selves to her by a certain way of representing truth. She is 
accompanied with a certain inflaming of the soul, which comes 



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1907.] Sanctity and Development 49 

upon her like a cloud of extraordinary brightness. Thfse Three 
Persons are distinct, and by a wonderful knowledge given to 
the soul, she with great truth understands that all these Three 
Persons are one substance, one power, one knowledge, one God 
alone. Hence what we behold with faith, the soul here (as one 
may say) understands by sight, though this sight is not with 
the eyes of the body, because it is not an imaginary vision. 
All the Three Persons here communicate themselves to her and 
speak to her, and make her understand those words mentioned 
in the Gospel, where our Lord said ' that he and the Father 
and the Holy Ghost would come and dwell with the soul that 
loves him and keeps his commandments.' O my Lord I what 
a different thing is the hearing and believing of these words, 
from the understanding in this way how true they are! Such 
a soul is every day more astonished, because these words never 
seem to depart from her; but she clearly sees (in the manner 
above mentioned) that they are in the deepest recesses of the 
soul (how it is, she cannot express, since she is not learned), 
and she perceives this divine company in herself." 

The case of St Lidwine of Schiedam, the saint of the great 
sufferings, affords a contrast to St. Theresa in the fact that 
she is not only enabled to see so deeply into the revelation of 
the Trinity, but that she is able to give an expression of her 
experience in an analogy of singular exactness. Asked by some 
Dominican fathers, she thus stated her concept : " Picture to 
yourself some great sun fixed in the heavens. Streaming forth 
from the sun are three distinct rays, which gradually converge 
and unite to form one ray. They are very great as they 
emerge from the solar body, but taper off towards their com- 
mon extremity like the point of a needle. This point, formed 
by the three shafts of light, penetrates to the inside of a. hum- 
ble cottage and there produces light and life. Now the sun is 
the divine Essence, the three rays are the Persons of the Blessed 
Trinity, the direction of the rays to one and the same end is 
the operation of the Three Persons effecting the Incarnation of 
the Word. The point itself is the Word which completes the 
Incarnation, just as the three Divine Persons operate together 
to the same end. The humble cottage is the womb of Mary 
where the Word deigns to unite to his own substance that of 
the most pure and august Virgin, and this in such a way that 
after the union he still retains his own personality, but at the 

VOL. LXXXVI.*4 



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so Sanctity and Development [Oct., 

same time possesses two natures in one person, the adorable 
Person of the Son of God. There, father, speaking under cor- 
rection, that is my explanation." 

The next case is noteworthy as showing the selective power 
in the uneducated. It almost realizes the hypothetical case of 
St. Thomas' homo sylvestris^ and in some respects is even more 
remarkable. It is that of a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, a shep- 
herd named John McCrae. His mother was originally a Catho- 
lic, but had given up the faith on marriage. She could not, 
however, completely stifle all her Catholic instincts, and so she 
taught her son the ^'Hail Mary," but without any explanation 
of its meaning. It fascinated him nevertheless, and when herd- 
ing his sheep on the hills, he used to repeat it over and over, 
not knowing to whom it referred. One day when he was in the 
kirk — it was in comparatively recent times — he heard an anti- 
popery sermon, in which papists were condemned chiefly on 
account of the honor paid by them to the Virgin. Then he 
understood that the " Virgin " was the *' Mary " of his prayer. 
Hearing from the lips of the Scotch minister that Catholics 
honored her, he at once concluded that they must be right. 
After much labor, including journeys on foot between the west 
coast and the east, he got instruction and became a Catholic. 
He then wanted to learn to read and to write and to acquire a 
knowledge of English. On his way across to the east coast for 
this purpose he was questioned by a Protestant concerning the 
text of the Three Witnesses. Perplexed for an answer, he 
turned aside and said the '^Hail Mary," and then, with the 
help of the Holy Spirit and his Scotch wit, he ventured an 
answer. He got a scruple about it after he had finished, but 
on the first opportunity he submitted it to Holy Church, re- 
presented in the good priest who had instructed him. And his 
answer was this: that, as seemed to him, the text clearly re- 
ferred to the sacraments of Baptism, Holy Eucharist, and Con- 
firmation: the first, water, being the sacrament of the Eternal 
Father, because it makes us children of God ; the second, bloody 
that of the Son; and the third, spirit, that of the Holy Ghost; 
and the three are one because together they make us perfect. 

This case further illustrates the truth of the organic totality 
of dogma. Let the faithful soul take hold only of one corner 
of the seamless robe, and he will have grasped the whole. Let 
him only do what in his power lies, and God will not deny him 



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1 907. J Sanctity and De velopment 5 1 

a sufSciency of the enigmatic vision here and of the beatific 
vision hereafter. Development is a growth of the faithful in 
the faith rather than of the faith in the faithful. To possess a 
part is to possess all ; whilst to deny a part is to deny all. 

My next case shall illustrate how a soul intensely active in 
practical faith, that is, wholly devoted both in heart and in 
mind to the service of God's will, in some way knows the whole 
of God's doctrine. It is the case of Mother Margaret Hallahan. 
After a friendship of twenty- six years, the learned Archbishop 
Ullathorne wrote thus of her : " Her firm faith was so vivid in 
its character that it was almost like an intuition of the entire 
prospect of revealed truth. Let an error against faith be con- 
cealed, under expressions however abstruse, and her sure in- 
stinct found it out. I have tried this experiment repeatedly. 
She might not be able to separate the heresy by analysis, but 
she saw and felt and suffered from its presence."* 

The case is important as being one of the instances, in fact, 
the only instance dealing directly with the province of revealed 
truth, used by Cardinal Newman f to describe the phenomenon 
of natural inference and to prepare for the description of the 
illative sense. It consequently serves as an occasion to fore- 
stall a possible objection to my thesis. In making the discrim- 
inating principle primarily a moral rather than an intellectual 
force, am I not belittling the function of the intellect ? Am I 
not making the will perform the function of the intellect ? Nay \ 
am I not wandering on to the shifting sands of mere sentiment 
and turning the theological science into a method of shrewd 
guess-work ? 

To one who has understood the nature of the illative sense, 
the fallacy of the foregoing objection will be patent. The illa- 
tive sense is not, as some have supposed, an animal function 
like sight or hearing or taste. Nor yet, on the other hand, is 
it the pure reason ; not the isolated white light of intellect act- 
ing by the aid of some mechanical connection with the other 
faculties. But it is the ratiocinative faculty acting in its high- 
est perfection; acting in living organic communication with th« 
other faculties ; acting on the totality of its experience ; acting 
not merely on such explicit testimony which a forgetful mem- 
ory can produce here and now; acting not only on such ex- 
plicit judgment as the mind can at the moment formulate' in 

* Lift of Mother Margaret Hallahan, P. vii. i Grammar of Assent, P. 335. 

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52 Sanctity and Development [Oct., 

correct syllogism ; but acting as the instrument of " the whole 
man " under the spell of the divine Will. 

Perhaps no saint, except St. Augustine, has brought so much 
intellectual force to bear on the development of Christian doc- 
trine as St. Thomas. And perhaps no point of Christian doc- 
trine has been so highly intellectualized as the science of the 
Blessed Sacrament. It may be worth while, therefore, to notice 
the relative values of sanctity and intellectual acumen as brought 
to bear on the science of the Blessed Sacrament by St. Thomas. 
If purity of heart is a necessary disposition for the clear per- 
ception of spiritual truth, it is especially necessary for the dis- 
cernment of truth concerning the Bread of Angels. This was 
assured to St. Thomas at the very beginning of his studies. 
He had made a heroic bid for chastity, so great an effort of 
will-power as to steel himself against all sense of unchaste feel- 
ing ever afterwards, so vivid a conviction of spiritual strength 
within him as to perceive angels girding his loins. What his 
faith accomplished in seeking to understand need not be here 
repeated. But what does need repeating is that his intellectual 
power was brought to its perfection through working in full 
conjunction with the will and affections seeking after God. Had 
he not been primarily a genius for sanctity his high intellectual 
gifts had never been brought to such maturity. His two brothers 
may have had similar gifts potentially and may have failed to 
reduce them to life and action through the absence of that 
gigantic motive power making for God and for righteousness. 
Naturally speaking, St. Thomas' gifts would have led him to be 
very self-centred, a dry-as-dust teacher, absorbed in the hair 
splitting dialectics which were the fashion of his day. He did 
not entirely escape that influence, as is evident from his noto- 
rious article on the dance of the angels. However, he was any- 
thing but limited by that influence. His sanctity developed his 
mystic sense and so threw him out oi himself. At the cost of 
breaking off his own studies he was ready at any time to help 
the students who came to him, and who consequently spoke of 
him as "Our Doctor." It was his mystic sense too that made 
him a poet — not a poet of the technical order, for his techni- 
calities were barbarian — but a born poet who could provide 
Dante with some of his deepest inspirations. 

Yet when everything has been allowed for intellectual acu- 
men, even in its most vitalized and spiritualized activity, there 



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1907.] Sanctity and Development 53 

remains the fact, as St. Thomas said to his companion Reginald, 
that whatever he knew he had not so much begotten it by 
study and labor as he had received it by divine communciation. 
He lived in the spirit world. He made great ventures in faith, 
and in so far as he was able registered his experiences in his 
writings. But as this faithful soul grew in the faith, so keen 
did his perception of the mystical cosmos become, so vast was 
the difference between his power of perceiving spiritual things 
and his power of giving them analogical expression, that he 
seemed to lose all interest in the latter. His Summa is an un- 
finished work. After that marvelous rapture which he expe- 
rienced whilst saying Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas at 
Naples, he could not be induced either to sit down to his desk 
or to dictate. When his affectionate Reginald pleaded: "Why 
hast thou cast aside so great a work, which thou didst begin 
for the glory of God and the illumination of the world ? " his 
only reply was : " Non possum. The end of my labors is come. 
All that I have written appears to me as so much straw after 
the things that have been revealed to me." 

The coming of St. Thomas into the Eucharistic controversy 
marked the salvation of the science from scholastic pedantry. 
True, he was far from exempt from this abuse. But in the 
midst of it all he put forth the restraining power of the will 
and the vitalizing power of prayer. At his disputations in the 
University of Paris it was his wonderful power of restraint which 
maintained the dignity of his doctrine. And although the in- 
tellectualizing of the doctrine had reached its high-water mark 
in his day, yet he saved it from stereotype and petrifaction by 
adapting the developments to the Church's prayer. If theology 
is an abstraction from the divine deposit, as manifested in the 
life of the Church, then the only reason for making such ab- 
straction is that it may be applied to the enriching of the life 
of the Church. 

Here must be noticed the confluence of another stream of 
sanctity which contributed largely to the salvation of the doc« 
trine from pure intellectualism. It is the life and labors of the 
blessed Juliana of Mont Cornillon. The holy religious of Li^ge 
started the movement for the introduction of the Feast of Corpus 
Christi. Amongst other theologians and dignitaries she con- 
ferred with the Archdeacon of Liege, who afterwards became 
Pope Urban IV. She did not live to see the fruits of her en- 

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54 SANCTITY AND DEVELOPMENT [Oct., 

deavors. After her death, however, the cause was led by an- 
other holy woman, Eve. Through the influence of the two wo- 
men, Urban IV. made the feast one of the Universal Church. 
St. Thomas embodied the best of his theological thought in an 
office and Mass, and thus directed the theological developments 
to the further fertilizing of the spirit-life of the faithful. There- 
fore it was that when the Council of Trent came to enact its 
decrees concerning the Blessed Sacrament, it placed on record 
that, by the introduction of the annual feast into the Church, 
victorious truth had led a triumph over lying and heresy, and 
that by the joy of the Universal Church, shown in the magnifi- 
cence of Eucharistic solemnities, its enemies had been broken 
and put to shame. 

A seeming exception to the law is the development of the 
doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The earliest recorded 
expressions of this article of faith are the inspired texts, " Hail, 
full of grace" and ''Blessed art thou amongst women." The 
latest authentic expression is the infallible decree of 1854, Jn- 
effabilis Deus, The history of the development of this truth 
seems to show that the saints, for the most part, have been 
working against it. Throughout the patristic age it remained 
more or less implicit. The first important restatement of a 
more definitely explicit kind was that of St. Ephrem (a. d. 379), 
who says: "Truly it is thou and thy mother only who are fair 
altogether. For in thee there is no stain, and in thy mother 
no spot."* 

The prayer-life of the dogma continued silently. As far 
back as the fifth century the Feast of the Conception of our 
Lady was kept in the East. Not until early in the twelfth cen- 
tury was it introduced into the West. This prayer-life of the 
dogma at length became so forceful as to demand a more defi- 
nite intellectual expression. St. Bernard, of all men in the 
world, led the battle against that definition which eventually 
received ex cathedra sanction. He may in the first instance 
have confused the two ideas of active and passive conception. 
But as the intellectual strife increased, the opposition was di- 
rected against the doctrine in any shape or form. And amongst 
the opponents were counted St. Bernard, St. Peter Damian, 
Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Blessed Albert the Great, 
St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The man who led 

•Hymn 27, strophe 8. 



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jgo?.] Sanctity and Development 55 

the cause which culminated in the definition of Pope Pius IX. 
was the Franciscan, Duns Scotus. Notice, however, what was 
his motive power. It was not a cold intellectual process with 
an explicit perception of consequent and consequence. It was 
the instinctive ^' wish to believe " that Mary was immaculate. 
Only thus did he begin to formulate his opposition to the Do- 
minican theologians. Only then did he bring into action the 
intellect of the Doctor Subtilis to justify, if possible, his felt 
instinct for this particular expression of truth. 

But what must be said of the instinct of the saints who were 
fighting him? Why, they were simply thirsting for the same 
truth, but their intellects being limited, they saw only another 
aspect of it. They were looking at that side of the truth which 
expresses the universality of Redemption ; and in their intellec- 
tual confusion they thought that if Mary did not incur the 
stain of original sin she could not have been saved by Christ 
the Savior of all mankind. Thus although explicitly they were 
arguing against the definition of the Immaculate Conception, 
yet implicitly they were working out its development; for the 
truth of the universality of salvation was necessarily required to 
make the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception complete. 

All, then, are aiming at a clearer statement of the perfect 
sinlessness of Mary, a fact represented in the beginning by the 
vague term ^^full of grace." St. Thomas feels the need of Mary 
being redeemed; Scotus feels the need of her being free from 
original sin. These respective needs are moral, intellectual, and 
emotional, the total result of which expresses itself as a dictate 
of the illative sense. They are the fruits of practical faith. 
St. Thomas, therefore, tends to unfold one part of the Church's 
definition; namely, intuitu merit^rum Christi ; whilst Scotus 
tends to unfold another part; namely, singulari gratia et privi- 
legio. 

Not all the logic in the world could have deduced these 
concepts merely from the intellectual notion "full of grace." 
But saints inflamed with divine goodness and wisdom could 
plunge into the spiritual reality of which "full of grace" was 
the representative analogy, and from that reality derive exper- 
iences of which intuitu meritorum Christi and singulari gratia 
et privilegio were, as afterwards solemnly declared by the Church, 
more definite and clearer representative analogies. The divine 
light given to the saints is a light not merely intellectual, to 



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S6 Sanctity and Development [Oct, 

see of how many transformations of mood and figure a given 
proposition is capable. It may be this, but it is much more 
besides. It is a spiritual sensitiveness and responsiveness to the 
eternal and real truth which lies behind notional truth. It is 
a growth of the faithful in the faith. It is given precisely in 
order to increase the life of faith. Consequently it must direct 
the saints towards those explications and applications which are 
best adapted to the further fostering of the life of faith, and 
which are most useful in enabling man to attain his last end. 

Since, however, individual saints are but individuals and, as 
is seen in the history of the dogma of the Immaculate Con* 
ception, are liable to take inadequate views of truth, we must 
insist on the collective sanctity of the saints as the discriminat* 
ing principle between doctrinal truth and doctrinal error. When 
St. Theresa preferred for a confessor a learned man to a pious 
simpleton, it was not in order that he might look at the ori- 
ginal deposit of faith and give his experience of it ; but it was 
that he might say what had been already registered of the ex* 
periences of the saints and what had been authenticated by the 
charismatic power of the Church. The pious simpleton would 
only have had his own experience upon which to draw, and 
would have found difficulty in giving a clear statement even of 
that. Holiness develops truth, but it is the holiness of the many 
united in one. The saints lead the way, and every man, in so 
far as he is good, in so far as he is a saint, participates in the 
unfolding of the truth. But just as it is needful to emphasize 
the organic unity of the individual man, so it is needful to em- 
phasize the organic unity of the body of the faithful. Devel- 
opment is a growth of the faithful in the faith. The criterion 
of holiness is the holiness of her to whom the Spirit of truth 
was promised, the One, Holy, Catholic Church. 



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HELEN KELLER'S FRENCH SISTER. 

BY THE COUNTESS DE COURSON. 

|EW among the tourists who visit the old French 
city of Poitiers are aware that the ancient town» 
whose churches are among the most curious in 
France, can boast of another sight, a flesh and 
bloody living and tangible, proof of what can be 
accomplished by a woman's intelligence and patience, stimulat- 
ed by the noblest of all motives — love of God and of his 
creatures. 

Even in France the story that we are about to relate 
is little known. That it is known at all is due to a professor 
of the University of Poitiers, M. Louis Arnould, who enjoys a 
high position in the literary world. He was the first to give 
his countrymen the curious and touching history of an ''im- 
prisoned soul."* 

Three kilometres from Poitiers stands the Convent of Larnay, 
directed by the Soeurs de la Sagesse. The gray dresses, black 
cloaks, and white head-dresses of these nuns are well known 
throughout the west of France. 

Their order was founded in the seventeenth century by the 
venerable Grignon de Montfort, and till the recent iniquitous 
laws sent religious women adrift, they directed a large number 
of poor schools, '' criches^^ and hospitals, both in Paris and in 
the provinces. Since the government's cruel expulsion of the 
religious orders, a number of their houses have been closed, 
but the Convent of Larnay has, so far, escaped destruction; 
perhaps because the politicians of the day, while they do not 
scruple to wage war against the sisters, are less inclined to 
provide for the helpless objects to whom these devoted women 
silently consecrate their lives. For the present, therefore, the 
Convent of Larnay is untouched, and both the infirm girl, 
whose story we are about to relate, and the humble religious, 
to whom the '' imprisoned soul " owes all that makes life worth 
having, are still, as we write these lines, safe within the precincts 
of their convent home. 

* Unt Ame en Prison, Par Louis Arnould. Paris : Oudin, £diteur. 



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58 HELEN Keller's French Sister [Oct., 

Much has been said and written across the Atlantic on the 
subject of Laura Bridgman, and especially of Helen Keller, both 
of whom, being blind, deaf, and dumb, were nevertheless made 
capable, the latter especially, of receiving a good education. 

Laura Bridgman, who was born in New Hampshire in 1829, 
became deaf and blind after scarlet fever, at the age of two, 
and gradually she lost the sense of taste and smell. The man 
who opened the gates of knowledge to her '' imprisoned soul '' 
was Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, of Boston, and the story of his 
extraordinary achievement has been told over and over again 
in French, in English, and in German.* 

Dr. Howe was a pioneer. He was the first to attempt the 
stupendous task that has since been successfully accomplished 
by others, among whom gentle Soeur Marguerite, of the Con- 
vent of Larnay, would certainly, were her story more widely 
known, hold a foremost place. Dr. Howe, although the process 
was slow and painful, succeeded in instilling in his pupil's mind 
the sense of right and wrong, and a certain knowledge of God, 
a knowledge sufficient to make Laura write in her diary : ^' I 
thought about heaven and God — that he would invite me some 
time when he is ready for us to go to heaven." Laura Bridg- 
man's devoted teacher, who had ''delivered to her the keys 
of life" died in 1876, and very pathetic was his ''spiritual 
child's" silent grief. She followed him thirteen years later, 
in 1889. 

More celebrated than Laura Bridgman is her countrywoman, 
. Helen Keller, whose Life^ written by herself, is familiar to 
American readers. She was born in Alabama, in 1880, and 
lost the use of sight, hearing, and speech at the age of eighteen 
months. Her first instructress, Miss Sullivan, taught her to 
communicate with the outer world. Helen Keller, an unusu- 
ally intelligent girl, was an apt pupil; she pursued her educa- 
tion at different schools and colleges, under various professors, 
and became a happy, bright, and cultured woman, who is, 
moreover, skilled in out-of-door sports, which she throughly 
enjoys.t 

What Dr. Howe did for Laura Bridgman, and Miss Sullivan 

* The Education of Laura Bridgman, By Dr. Samuel Howe. The Life and Education of 
Laura Bridgman, By Mary Lamson. Dr. Howe's account of his pupil has been translated 
into French and German. 

t Ahoays Happy, By Miss Chappell. Helen's own biography was translated into French 
and published by Juven, Paris, in 1904. 



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1907.] Helen Keller's French Sister 59 

for Helen Keller, was accomplished with equal success by a 
Soeur de la Sagesse for Marie Heurtin, a blind deaf-mute, whose 
infirmity was even more grievous than that of her American 
sisters, for, whereas they enjoyed, during the first few months 
of their lives, the blessings of sight, speech, and hearing, the 
French girl was born blind, deaf, and dumb. 

She was the daughter of a poor workman of Vertou, in Loire 
Inferieure, who, before finding a safe home for his unfortunate 
child, had endeavored in vain to procure her admittance into 
different asylums and hospitals. Homes founded for the blind 
declined to receive her because she was a deaf-mute; and 
homes for deaf-mutes rejected her because she was blind. In 
her parents' poor cottage she was cared for according to their 
lights, but, except that they fed and clothed and abstained from 
ill-treating her, they were absolutely incompetent to deal with 
so delicate and difficult a case. It was afterwards discovered 
that the child was gifted with an ardent, loving, and passionate 
nature, and, until communication had been established between 
her and the outer world, her very vitality was an enigma to 
the well-intentioned but ignorant folk who surrounded her. 

They were terrified at her fits of passion and her incoherent 
screams, and thought for a time of sending her to a mad-house 
at Nantes. The efforts of an ardent spirit to break through its 
prison walls were, in their eyes, clear signs of madness. Hap- 
pily for Marie Heurtin, her father heard that the nuns of Lar- 
nay, near Poitiers, had succeeded in educating a young girl 
who, at the age of three and a half, became deaf, dumb, and 
blind; and thither, in March, 1895, he brought his unfortunate 
little daughter. Marie Heurtin's " debuts '' at Larnay are, even 
now, after twelve years, alluded to with a kind of terror. Dur- 
ing two months, she never ceased to scream and to shriek ; she 
used to roll on the floor and strike the ground with her 
clenched fist. Sometimes the nuns ventured to take her out 
walking, but their attempts to give her a little change and 
amusement were generally unsuccessful. In the streets, or on 
the country roads, she would, for no apparent reason, break 
into an uncontrollable fit of anger, lie down on the ground, re- 
fuse to move, uttering all the time unearthly shrieks, until the 
frightened sisters carried her home. These outbreaks were a 
source of endless annoyance to the nuns. Seeing them strug- 
gle with their terrible charge, strangers concluded that they 



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6o Helen Keller's French Sister [Oct., 

were ill-treating her, and readily interfered in favor of the sup- 
posed victim. 

The young Alsatian, Marthe Obrecht, to whom we have al- 
luded, who lost sight, speech, and hearing at the age of three, 
had been educated by a nun, Soeur Ste. M6dulle, who died the 
year before Marie Heurtin's arrival at Larnay. She had ex- 
plained her method of proceeding to another sister, Soeur Ste. 
Marguerite, to whom the far more difficult task of educating 
Marie Heurtin was intrusted. Besides being of a more violent 
disposition than her Alsatian fellow- sufferer, the latter was born 
blind, deaf, and dumb; she had not been like Marthe Obrecht, 
in possession of her senses for the three first years of her life; 
and when Soeur Marguerite took her in hand, she was, to all 
intents and purposes, a wild animal, whom a confused sense of 
its helplessness drove to frenzy. 

Soeur Marguerite's first thought was to bridge over the 
abyss that separated the poor child's '' imprisoned soul " from 
the rest of the world and, to attain this object, it was neces- 
sary to establish some means of communication, however im- 
perfect, between her pupil and herself. A little pocket knife, 
that Marie Heurtin jealously cherished, served the purpose. 
Soeur Marguerite one day took it from her pupil, who imme- 
diately flew into a violent rage. When her anger had subsided, 
the sister took her hands and placed them in such a manner 
that they made the sign used by the deaf mutes to mean a 
knife. Having done this, she returned the knife to Marie, 
whose delight was great. After letting the girl enjoy her treas- 
ure, the sister again took it away; a second burst of anger 
followed, but suddenly the child made the sign that her in- 
structress had taught her, and immediately the knife was put 
back into her hands. 

This seemingly trivial incident was the starting point of 
Marie Heurtin's education. Having impressed upon her charge 
the important fact that certain signs meant certain objects, 
Soeur Marguerite improved the occasion. By degrees, she 
taught her to ask for bread, eggs, meat, and other articles of 
food. The child being unusually receptive, her mistress was 
able, in a comparatively short time, to extend her knowledge; 
she followed the system that is used for deaf-mutes, only, 
whereas these are made to see the signs, Marie was made to 
feel them, a more difficult and complicated process. When this 



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1907.] Helen Keller's French Sister 61 

was accomplished, Soeur Marguerite taught her to read the 
raised letters of the Braille alphabet, invented for the use of 
the blind, making her understand how each one of these words 
corresponded to the signs that she had previously taught her. 
Thus she met Marie's twofold infirmity, employing for her 
benefit the signs and letters invented for the deaf-mutes and 
also for the blind. The case was one of extraordinary diffi- 
culty, and it needed all the sister's patience, stimulated by her 
love for the girl, to achieve so arduous a task. 

In the space of a year, Marie Heurtin learnt to ask for the 
common necessaries of life, but Soeur Marguerite's ambition 
soared higher, and she longed to teach her pupil the meaning 
of things spiritual and intangible. 

She began by teaching her the difference between a tall and 
a short person, by making her feel two of her companions who 
were of unequal height. It was more difficult to make her 
realize the idea of riches and of poverty, but the sister suc- 
ceeded in doing so by letting Marie feel a beggar, who was 
dressed in rags, and afterwards a lady, robed in silk, covered 
with jewels, with a sum of money in her pocket. Marie grasped 
the idea thus conveyed to her so thoroughly that she expressed 
her horror of poverty with a violence that startled her instruc- 
tress. The next day the sister returned to the subject, begin- 
ning by asking her pupil whether she loved her, a question 
which Marie answered by the warmest expressions of grateful 
affection. Then Soeur Marguerite made her accept the fact 
that she too was a poor person, who possessed neither jewels 
nor money, and that she expected Marie to love her all the 
same, and to love other poor people for her sake. The idea of 
old age was transmitted to her by making her feel the wizen 
and wrinkled face of an old woman, and then her own young, 
fresh countenance and straight figure. Here again, Marie got 
much excited and vehemently explained that she would never 
grow old, bent, and wrinkled; but Soeur Marguerite's gentle 
influence quieted her so effectually that when the other nuns, 
who had witnessed the girl's outbreak, tested her by inquiring 
if she was resigned to getting old, she replied : " Yes ; Marguer- 
ite wishes it." The ideas of time, of the future, of life and 
death, were successively understood by Marie Heurtin. The 
notion of death appalled her, and, after being made to feel the 
cold form of a dead nun, she angrily declared that she would 



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62 Helen Keller's French Sister [Oct., 

never consent to die. Her instructress had to explain that none 
could avoid this law, and that if she, Soeur Marguerite, were 
resigned to it, Marie must be so likewise. The sister's greatest 
wish was now to reach her pupil's soul ; and this, after months 
of patient teaching, she was able to do. She noticed that when 
Marie received a letter from home, she used to kiss it and she 
made use of this incident to teach her how to distinguish be- 
tween the body and the soul. 

"You love your father?" she argued, taking care that her 
pupil effectually grasped every point of her reasoning. "With 
what do you love him? With your feet or your hands? No; 
with something that is within you and that is able to love. 
This thing is in your body, but is not your body ; it is called 
the soul, and death separates the soul from the body. When, 
the other day, you touched the cold, silent form of a dead 
sister, her soul had fled; and that soul lives and continues to 
love you." 

When once she had ascertained that Marie understood the 
important fact of a spiritual world, Soeur Marguerite felt that 
she might venture to speak to her of the existence of God. 
She began by explaining to the girl how a certain class of 
men made certain articles. Thus she took her to the carpenter 
and to the baker and made her touch the furniture that was 
made by one and the bread baked by the other. Having no- 
ticed that her pupil delighted in the sunshine, and used to 
stretch out her arms to grasp the warmth- giving orb, Soeur 
Marguerite inquired : " Who made the sun ? " " The baker," 
was the prompt reply. Marie connected the heat of the sun 
with that of the furnace. " No, indeed ; he who made the sun 
is greater, stronger, wiser than any one " ; and then she went 
on to explain that in a class a sister was at the head of her 
pupils; above the sister was the superioress; above the super- 
ioress the chaplain; then came the Bishop of Poitiers; then the 
Pope ; lastly, above every one, was le bon Dieu^ who knew, 
loved, governed all the world. 

Marie listened with close attention, and her mistress com- 
pleted her teaching by telling her the story of the creation 
and of the passion of our Lord. The child took an eager in- 
terest in these tales, but it was difficult at first to make her 
grasp the notion of time, and she anxiously inquired if her 
father was among the wicked men who put our Lord to death ? 



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1907.] Helen Keller's French Sister 63 

Soeur Marguerite then proceeded to instill into her pupil's 
singularly receptive mind a clear notion of the difference be- 
tween good and evil. When Marie committed any trifling fault, 
her instructress treated her with a studied coldness that the 
child was prompt to resent. Thus, by tangible means, she led 
her first to recognize the difference between right and wrong, 
and then, by degrees, to understand the motives that should 
make her seek the one and avoid the other. 

The first years of Marie Heurtin's education were naturally 
the most laborious. Those who have studied her case are 
unanimous in acknowledging her to be gifted above the aver- 
age ; she is prompt to understand, eager to learn. Comparisons 
are invidious; it would hardly be fair to draw a parallel be- 
tween the convent- bred French girl and her more brilliant 
American sister, Helen Keller. 

The latter is evidently the more learned of the two ; she is 
acquainted with several languages, and both by the extent of her 
knowledge, the variety of her experiences, and the activity of 
her out-of-door life, she is Marie Heurtin's superior. 

Her social station being different from that of her French 
sister, more money has rightly been spent on her education and 
pursuits. 

The ambition of the good nuns of Larnay was to open to 
the ** imprisoned soul " of their charge the wide horizons of 
the spiritual world, from which she was hopelessly excluded by 
her threefold infirmity. They wished to make her a good, use- 
ful, and happy member of society. But they never lost sight 
of the fact that Marie was a child of the people, and they 
trained her as befitted her social station, studiously avoiding 
anything that could develop unhealthy tendencies or lead her 
to look down upon her poor parents and humble companions. 

Monsieur Louis Arnould, whose thoughtful and sympathetic 
account of the blind deaf-mute of Larnay excited keen interest 
throughout the learned world, and provoked much interesting 
correspondence between professors of different nations, pro- 
nounces Marie Heurtin's education to be, in all respects, excel- 
lently carried out. He was, on several occasions, requested by 
Soeur Marguerite to examine her pupil on the subjects she had 
studied, and the result was, he informs us, highly satisfactory. 

Marie knows her catechism and religious instruction thor- 
oughly ; she also has an accurate and sufficient knowledge of 



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64 HELEN KELLER'S FRENCH SISTER [Oct, 

church history, the history of France, geography, and arith- 
metic. She writes easily and seldom misspells. Her letters to 
her friends and benefactors are the simple, truthful outpourings 
of a grateful and affectionate disposition, and the essays that 
she is made to write on different subjects prove that the girl 
to whom the world was a dark place of terror, can enjoy, up 
to a certain point, the gifts and beauties of nature. 

As is the case with the blind, her sense of touch is mar- 
velously developed. M. Arnould and his family having been 
to see her, she quickly, by passing her fingers over the face of 
her visitors, pronounced two of them to be sisters, and accu- 
rately stated the age of each one. The same sense of touch 
enables her to play at dominoes as tapidly and as correctly as 
if she saw. 

While developing her pupil's intellect, Soeur Marguerite, 
mindful of Marie's humble origin, did not neglect the more 
commonplace and practical sides of daily life. She taught her 
to sweep, to dust, and to arrange the living-rooms of the con- 
vent. These she does with a thoroughness and a method that 
many a housemaid, gifted with eyesight, might well imitate. 

But the field in which Soeur Marguerite achieved her great- 
est success is neither Marie Heurtin's intellect nor memory, nor 
even her practical sense of order and usefulness. The sister 
wished, above all things, to reach her pupil's soul, and this she 
succeeded in doing at the end of some months. One so sorely 
tried, placed in conditions so abnormal, needed special training, 
and her teacher's ambition was to develop the spiritual side of 
her nature in such a manner that she might find in spiritual 
things the compensations and consolations best suited to her 
shadowed life. After impressing upon Marie the existence of 
a Divine Creator, the sister proceeded to develop other ele- 
mentary notions. The girl's eager and generous nature fully 
responded to her teaching, and with a rapidity that speaks vol- 
umes for the sister's proficiency as an instructress, and for her 
pupil's receptive powers, Marie Heurtin grasped the full mean- 
ing, grandeur, and beauty of the good nun's religious teaching. 

In May, 1899, she was allowed to make her First Commu- 
nion. She performed this solemn act, not only with a clear 
and complete knowledge of what she was doing, but also with 
an overpowering and radiant feeling of joy. 

An innate and deep-seated cheerfulness is Marie Heurtin's 



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1907.] Helen Keller's French Sister 65 

chief characteristic. We cannot wonder at it, when we learn 
that the girl, who a few years ago was an object of terror and 
repulsion, is now in full possession of the real secret of hap- 
piness, a secret that sets those who are fortunate enough to 
penetrate its hidden meaning above the wear and tear, the 
changes and vicissitudes of life. She has learnt not only to ac- 
cept the cross that has been laid on her by an all- wise Provi- 
dence, but to rejoice in it; and she has attained this rare de- 
gree of perfection with the happy unconsciousness of an inno- 
cent child. 

One day Soeur Marguerite made her understand that a weal- 
thy lady of Poitiers would probably give her the necessary sum 
of money to go to Lourdes. There, added the sister, we will 
pray It ban Dieu to cure Marie's blindness through the inter- 
cession of his Holy Mother. 

The girl listened attentively, evidently grasping the full mean- 
ing of her kind mistress' speech and the hope it held out to 
her; then, with an expression of radiant joy, she touched her 
sightless eyes. '' No '' ; she said, '' I wish to remain blind. I 
would rather not see here below in order to see better in heaven." 

Even from a human standpoint, Marie Heurtin's life is not 
devoid of interest and of pleasure. She can converse, by means 
of her fingers, with her fellow deaf-mutes and with the nuns of 
Larnay, and it is curious to see the rapidity and deftness with 
which she communicates, by touch, her thoughts and impres- 
sions. Although, among the inmates of the convent, there are 
none afflicted to the same degree, yet all her companions are 
mote or less infirm. All things, therefore, are ordered so as 
to enable these to take part, as far as possible, in the daily 
life that goes on around them. 

As an example, M. Arnould tells us that he was present at 
a sermon in the convent chapel, and he explains how the 
preacher's words were ingeniously conveyed through different 
channels to his 250 hearers, most of whom were either blind, 
deaf, or dumb ; Marie Heurtin and Marthe Obrecht being the 
only ones in whom the three infirmities were united. 

The preacher, standing close to the communion rail, spoke 
to the blind who sat before him; a nun, standing on a plat- 
form, transmitted his discourse by signs to the deaf-mutes; at 
the same time, another sister, by moving her lips with peculiar 
distinctness, pronounced it, without a sound, for the benefit of 

vou LXXXVI.— 5 



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66 HELEN KELLER'S FRENCH SISTER [Oct, 

the deaf who were not mutes, and the neighbors of Marie Heurtin, 
skilled in the language by touch, transmitted it to her by making 
on her hands the conventional signs. 

The stupendous task, so successfully accomplished by Soeur 
Marguerite, was little known to the public at large, even in 
France, until M. Arnould published his remarkable pamphlet. 
With characteristic humility, the sisters shunned notoriety, and 
only the pressing entreaties of their friends and the direct en- 
couragement of Pope Leo XIII., could prevail upon them to 
allow their work to be made known. A ptix Montyon^ which, 
as our readers probably know, is given to reward deeds of 
unusual devotedness and benevolence, was awarded to Soeur 
Marguerite in 1899, and, in 1903, the Societe cT encouragement 
au Men bestowed a civic crown on Marie Heurtin's gentle 
teacher. 

The nuns at Larnay, although they were prevailed upon to 
allow their work to be made public, declined to be present at 
the meetings where its successful issue was solemnly proclaimed ; 
but the civic crown was brought to them, and it now hangs in 
the convent parlor. 

Monsieur Arnould, whose remarkable work on the sub- 
ject first drew attention to Marie Heurtin's threefold in- 
firmity, has since then received letters from professors and 
philosophers in Germany, Holland, France, and other countries, 
raising interesting discussions on the subject. Many philosophical 
problems are suggested by this unique case. For the reason 
that Marie Heurtin, unlike her American sister, was blind, deaf, 
and dumb from the hour of her birth, the task achieved by 
Soeur Marguerite was one of superhuman difficulty. 

Among the philosophers who were more particularly interested 
in the story we have just related, was Father de Groot, a Dom- 
minican. Professor of Thomist Philosophy at the University of 
Amsterdam. He came to France for the express purpose of 
visiting the Institut Pasteur in Paris and our heroine at Larnay, 
and his account of the latter was published in a Dutch 
review. He heard from the lips of Soeur Marguerite the de- 
tails of Marie's arrival at the convent and of the terrible scenes 
of anger that frightened the nuns, when the unfortunate little 
creature was left on their hands. As a striking contrast, he 
draws a charming picture of the girl as she is at present: 
sweet and bright, full of vivacity and quickness, yet perfectly 



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1907.] Helen KELLER'S French Sister 67 

self-possessed and calm. Her spiritual transformation is far 
more remarkable, and Pere de Groot marveled at the purit}% 
nobility, and generosity of her aspirations, at the depth of 
her earnest, loving nature. He ascertained also that her life, 
even apart from its intense spirituality, is not devoid of interest, 
that she can enjoy sunshine and flowers, the books that she 
reads with her fingers, the friends who come to see her, and 
with whom she communicates through her devoted instructress* 
She is always ready to please others, and contrives, in spite of 
her threefold infirmity, to be a really useful member of the 
large household where she has found a home. She is keen 
over her lessons, loves history, has strong likes and dislikes on 
the subject of the heroes with whom her studies make her 
acquainted ; but although her intelligence is remarkably quick 
and receptive, more remarkable still is her spiritual growth. 

No physical infirmity can impede the strong impulse of her 
soul towards God, whose tenderness, wisdom, and power she 
fully realizes. Some years ago, when the iniquitous laws against 
religious were issued, the nuns of Larnay feared that their time 
must come, and Marie wept bitterly at the thought of being 
separated from "Marguerite." 

The danger has not passed away, and the Convent of Notre 
Dame de Larnay is still threatened, but Marie Heurtin, the 
most helpless of the helpless beings within its walls, no longer 
fears. " God is a good Father," she says to her anxious com- 
panions. '^ He watches over us ; he will not part us; let us live 
in peace." 

May the trustful words prove prophetic and the devoted 
Sisters of Notre Dame de Larnay be spared the cruel fate of 
so many religious women throughout France ! 



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LISHEEN; OR, THE TEST OF THE SPIRITS.* 

BY CANON P. A. SHEEHAN, D.D., 
Autk^r of " My New CuraU** ; " Luke Delme^e*' ; " Glenanaar,** etc. 

Chapter VII. 

A LEPER. 

^HEN Outram tapped at his wife's door, and, unin- 
vited, entered, he found the room in complete 
darkness. He could not distinguish Mabel's fig- 
ure, and said hesitatingly: 
"Mabel, are you here?" 

" Yes " ; she said firmly. " I am here. What do you seek ?" 

'' Let me ring for a light. There's something wrong. What 
is it ? " 

"You have come into my room unasked," she said. "You 
have something to say, or seek. Better say it in the darkness 
than in the light. What is it ? " 

" Mabel," he said, "there's something evidently wrong. This 
is unusual. Are you coming down to dinner? Or, look here," 
he said, as if suddenly struck by a new idea, " will you let me 
send for Dr. Bellingham? Clearly you are not well." 

He had come over, guided by her voice, and by the faint 
gleam of pallor from her face, and stood over her, as she sat 
by the window. 

"Again I repeat," she said, "you have come here unso- 
licited. Furthermore, you are acting a part, and acting it 
badly. You have something to say ; say it. If you have 
naught to say, leave me." 

He still kept a firm hold on his rising temper, though he 
felt his hands trembling. 

" For God's sake, Mab," he said, " let nothing come be- 
tween us now. We are too recently yoked to quarrel. There 
will be misunderstandings, I suppose, forever, between married 
people; but, as a rule, they are easily cleared up. Now, it is 
clear, we both have tempers. We can't help that. But, for 

* Copyright. Z906. Longmans, Green & Co. 



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1907.] LISHEEN 69 

God's sake, let us give and take. We have to consult for each 
other's happiness, or at least, peace. And there's the old man, 
your father, to consider. I know he doesn't like this kind of 
thing, and he's troubled — " 

*• Yes " ; she said, " he is troubled ; and why ? " 

" Why ? Because you are giving way to nerves, or temper, 
or something feminine, which we men don't understand." 

" He understands," she said, " too much ; but not all I " 

'^ What, then, does he understand?" said Outram. "Come, 
let us have explanations. There's nothing like clearing the air ! " 

" He understands," said Mabel slowly, but with terrible dis- 
tinctness, " that he and I have made the blunder of our lives. 
He understands that I have paid, for my partial disobedience 
to his wishes, a fearful penalty. He understands that on the 
day I, in my girlish folly and ambition, promised to be your 
wife, it would have been better if he had seen me dead. He 
understands that partly for him, altogether for me, there is 
no more peace or happiness any more forever." 

" Not very complimentary," said Outram, " but at least you 
will be pleased to remember that I did not force myself on 
you in any undue or unbecoming manner. You are not pleased 
with me — I, at least, conjecture that to be your meaning — but 
you married position and power, and a certain place in society^ 
You still retain them ; and you have no reason to complain." 

The words were cutting, because they were so terribly true* 
Mabel dared not deny them. He was encouraged. 

'' You could have married," he went on, " that idiotic cousin 
of yours, and been now a dairymaid in Kerry, instead of being 
one of the recognized queens of such society as we have here; 
but you chose better. Why do you complain ? " 

'' Because I didn't know," she said with contrition, '' the 
penalty of such pride; the terrible conditions attaching to it." 

" You mean my personality ? " 

She hesitated to say the offensive word. But he persisted: 

" It is I who am the horror. Is it not ? " 

She muttered a feeble: "Yes." 

"Of course," he said bitterly, "I am not the Adonis you 
imagined. The Lord didn't make me a Count d'Orsay, a 
padded creature of stays and corsets to catch the eye of a 
silly girl. But you have all you anticipated otherwise. Surely, 
you didn't expect love in the bargain ? " 



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70 LISHEEN [Oct., 

She was silent. He knew his advantage, and went on merci- 
lessly : 

" You bartered your happiness deliberately for other things," 
he said. " But you did no more than every other woman in 
society. People may read novels ; but even the most silly of 
schoolmisses doesn't believe in them. Their good manners take 
care of that. Girls marry in these unpoetical and prosaic days 
for money, position, a place in society; and they are prepared 
to take with such things their disadvantages. For Nature is 
impartial, ma chirie. Where she gives beauty, she balances it 
with idiocy; where she gives intelligence, she retrieves the gift 
with ugliness or moral malformation. Your Adonis is always a 
fool. Now, most women believe and understand this; and are 
content with a iew of the gifts of fortune. You want all." 

"I wanted at least as much as I gave," she said. "When 
a girl gives up everything, she expects some return." 

" Well said, my dear," he cried with a tone of triumph. 
" Now, we're beginning to understand. You see there is noth- 
ing like an academic argument, like this, to throw light on 
matters, although this seems slightly out of place in such Cim- 
merian gloom. Now, let us pursue this train of thought, which 
you have so admirably started. You looked on our marriage 
as a bargain, as a contract, where there should be a fair inter- 
change of goods. Neither of us pretended then, or pretends 
now, to any sentimentality on the matter. Now, it does not 
reflect credit on my business tact or talent, to have to admit 
that I think you have had decidedly the best of the bargain. 
You married for position, ease, social rank, etc., etc. I mar- 
ried that I might have a handsome woman, whom I could 
call my wife, and who would be known in society as the Mrs. 
Ralph Outram. I obtained that desire. Mrs. Ralph Outram is 
the queen of fashion, the cynosure of all eyes in the drawing- 
room, at the theater, at the ball; and I am rewarded when I 
hear one eye-glassed idiot say after another: 'What a demd 
handsome woman!' 'Who is she?' And the reply is: 'Mrs. 
Ralph Outram — Outram, you know, who is aide-de-camp, etc' 
It is a poor compensation, I admit, but que voulez^vousf I say 
to myself. . You couldn't have done better. But, my dear 
Mabel, don't you see the balance is on your side? Position, 
wealth, social rank, admiration, envy on your side ; and on 
mine, the poor compensation of being ranked as Mrs. Outram's 



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1907.] LISHEEN 71 

husband. Now, fie ! fie ! When a girl has made such a tre- 
mendous bargain, why should she rail against fortune ? " 

Mabel sat crouched in her sofa under the terrible words. 
They were uttered so cynically, so coolly, that she could not 
reply ; and, above all, they were true ! She had sold herself 
in the marriage- market; and she had no reason to complain of 
the price. She could only feebly say : 

"When people repent of their bargain, they are sometimes 
allowed to revoke it. Have you any objection?" 

"The greatest, my dear. I could not think of revoking 
such an important contract, and one so advantageous to you, 
on any terms. You see I am disinterested. I do not con- 
sider myself. All the gain is on your side; and I have such 
a deep interest in you, that I should consider myself ungener- 
ous were I to take advantage of your oiler. No, my dear 
wife ^; he laid terrible emphasis on the word, " we are linked 
together for good or ill, and must remain so. And now, one 
little word ! You are very innocent if you don't know that 
these little differences of temperament do exist in all married 
circles. They do. Men of the world, like myself, understand 
this well; and when they see more than the usual demonstra- 
tion of affection between married people, they shrug their 
shoulders, and say something about Mrs. Caudle's Lectures. 
But they are wise enough to keep their secrets to themselves. 
Now this is what I want you to do. Whatever happens, you 
must understand that the social convenances shall not, and must 
not, be put aside. In polite circles, emotionalism is a crime. 
Anything but that. You may be angry, or envious, or un- 
happy ; but you must not show it. We do not love each other ; 
and I suppose never shall — ?" 

He stopped as if questioning her. 

" Never " ; she said solemnly. 

" Very good. Tant mieux. But, at least, let us not have 
scenes. Now, that little scene last night was not quite becom- 
ing. It hurts people. And, what is worse, it makes people 
talk and conjecture and form opinions — " 

" What do you refer to ? " she asked, feeling at last that 
he was plunging beyond his depth, out of the region where 
his cynicism made him safe. 

"I mean your collapse, your fainting- fit, your ungoverned emo- 
tion in that drawing-room. It was unguarded and unbecoming." 



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72 LISHEEN [Oct, 

'' I could not help it/' she said, drawing him into deeper 
depths. 

" Oh, yes you could. There was really no necessity for it." 

" It was a dread revelation to a woman, to a wife," she said. 

'^ What ? You don't mean that any woman would regard a 
little excess as an unforgivable offence in her husband ? " 

" Quite the reverse," she answered. ** I regarded it as a 
blessing." 

"As a blessing?" 

" Quite so ! " 

"How?" 

" Because for the first time you told the truth, and revealed 
yourself." 

" How ? I don't understand," he said. The darkness shut 
out the sight of pallid lips and whitened face. But Mabel 
knew that her moment of triumph had come. Yet she hesitated. 
The truth was too terrible to be spoken. Even to such a cal- 
lous and unfeeling wretch it was hard to speak so bitter a 
word. But she felt it was an opportunity that, once lost, would 
never be recovered. She recalled for a moment all his sting- 
ing words to fortify her, lest her woman's heart should fail 
her. She repeated them over and over in her mind ; and yet 
so switftly that the pause seemed unnoticed. The bitter language 
stung and smote her into a passionate desire for revenge. She 
yearned to say the one word that would kill him. But she had 
discretion enough left to allow him to drag the fatal word forth. 

" You told a strange story," she said. " It was sensational 
enough for a neW magazine." 

She paused. 

" It was well invented ! " she continued. 

" I'm glad to hear you say so," he said. " It reflects credit 
on my imagination. It so excited the fancy of that Professor 
over his whisky, that he should have it again over his tea." 

" It cleared up one or two mysteries for me," said Mabel. 

" Indeed ? " 

" Yes ; the Sanskrit writing that came with the porphyry 
vase." Then she added, as in a tone of unconcern: "The 
porphyry vase is broken ! " 

He started back and muttered in a tone of alarm : " Hell ! 
who broke it ? " 

"I," she said. "The green snake stirred at the bottom of 



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1907.] LISHEEN 75 

the vase, and I thought it might have stung me. I struck it 
with the heavy steel shell, and the snake was crushed into 
powder; and the vase parted in two/' 

"You have done an evil thing," he replied. "You have 
summoned and defied your fate ; and you will rue it. Come, 
now, let us see the mischief you have wrought I " 

He put down his hand in the darkness, as if to reach her 
shoulder. He touched her check rudely. She sprang instantly 
to her feet, and flung him aside. 

"How dare you touch me," she cried, "you — a leper? 
How dare you come into a respectable family, that has never 
had a physical or moral blot or stain for generations on their 
family history, and bring your loathsome presence there ? You, 
an unknown adventurer, whose secret and awful record is only 
now being revealed; you, a drunkard and a profligate; you, 
the companion and confidant of occult and loathsome things 
over there in India; you, the hypocrite, carrying your slimy 
ways into decent society, at which you rail and cry out in order 
to hide your own moral deformity ; and you, once a leper by 
your own confession, and, therefore, a leper forever ; how could 
you have the courage, how could you have the heart, you un- 
clean thing, to steal into our home, and bring with you such 
moral and physical loathsomeness ? You have given me position, 
wealth, social position ! Take them ! Take them ! and give me 
back my innocence, my ignorance. But you cannot. Oh, my God I 
you cannot. The evil is done, and not God himself can undo 
it ! And I am betrayed and lost I I, Mabel Willoughby, who 
couldn't bear on my finger-tips the presence of an ink spot, nor 
on my garments the pin point of a speck I I, who would shud- 
der at a prick of a needle, and thought myself polluted if a 
fly rested on my hand — I have to bear your presence, to sit 
with you at table, drinking in the pollution of your presence, 
and the hateful contagion that you breathed. You unclean 
brute I there is no punishment on earth sufficient for your crime ! 
But, go I go where you please; and carry with you the curse 
and the despair of the wrecked and ruined girl you have be- 
trayed ! " 

Whilst she uttered the last word, she heard the door open- 
ing, and saw by the reflection of the gas jets outside the 
miserable creature creeping from the room. Then she threw 
herself back on the sofa, murmuring : "Father I Oh, Father I" 



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74 LISHEEN [Oct., 

She was suddenly startled by a fearful crash on the stairs, 
and the sound of a heavy body falling. She held her breath, 
divining what it was. There was a rush of feet, the stifled 
screams of servants, the rustling and pushing of people vainly 
trying to lift something weighty. Then a tap at her door. 

'' Mr. Outram has a fit, ma'am, on the stairs. Will you 
come and see him ? " 

She came forth, and her wild, pallid iace startled the ser- 
vants. She came slowly down into the lobby, shading her eyes 
from the gaslight, until she stood over the prostrate body of 
her husband. The butler and footman were trying to lift the 
inanimate form, whilst the girl-servants helped. Mabel stood 
still as a statue, looking down on the wretched creatuie she 
had dismissed from her side forever. They had torn open his 
collar to give him room to breathe freely. There was a gash 
on his forehead, where he had struck against some sharp pro- 
jection when falling. He was quite unconscious. The dining- 
room bell was ringing furiously, where the old, feeble, chair- 
tied Major was clamoring to know the cause of the disturbance. 
Mabel coldly ordered the servants to take the prostrate and 
bleeding form into the breakfast parlor on the ground floor; 
she swiftly ordered the doctor to be sent for; and then went 
in to speak to her father. 

'' Ralph has had a fall or a heavy fit,'' she said. '^ I have 
sent for the doctor." 

"How — how did it happen?*' asked her father, watching 
with some curiosity her white, drawn face. 

'^ I don't know. I think it was what they call ' a visitation 
of Providence.' " 

" Where was he ? Where was he coming from ? " 

" From my room. We had some explanations. Father," 
she suddenly cried, "this is the hand of God; and we must 
flee, flee from this dreadful place." 

" Calm yourself, Mabel," said the old man. " Above all, 
show nothing to these servants. You know how servants talk." 

'*I do. But is it better to have to bear everything in si- 
lence, than to be talked about?" 

"Yes, oh, yes" ; said her father. "Family secrets, you know, 
family secrets. And then, your own pride I You must never 
let on that you have made a mistake. That would never do. 
It would be an admission of defeat, you know. And think of 



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1907.] LISHEEN 75 

the position you occupy, and how all your friends would exult 
over your unhappiness." 

"Yes, yes; 'tis all position and rank and secrecy. Oh, if 
we could only go away somewhere; and be our own natural 
selves. Father I " 

" Yes, dear 1 " 

" If anything happens to Ralph — to Mr. Outram — you and 
I must go away — away — away, anywhere ; the raore remote the 
better. We'll take some old castle in Scotland where there's 
no one within a hundred miles; or go to Brittany; or — some- 
where, anywhere out of the world ! " 

" Very well, my dear. But I must have some kind of doctor 
near me. There, now, go see after Ralph. The servants will 
talk if you keep away from him just now." 

She returned to the room where her husband lay insensible 
on the sofa ; and, after giving some slight ordtrs, she went up- 
stairs to her room. As she passed through the lobby, she saw 
that the pedestal, on which the porphyry vase stood, had fallen ; 
and that the vase itself lay shattered into potsherds on the 
floor. Clearly, it was against one of the sharp, broken frag- 
ments her husband had fallen, after he had stumbled and toppled 
over the pedestal and vase. 

"There is some horrible mystery in the evil thing," she 
thought. "I wish I had in my possession, and could read, that 
girl's letter." 

She took a light to her room; and turned up the gas jets 
that hung before her mirror. Then she started back, affrighted 
at her own appearance. Her eyes were wild and dilated; and 
her mouth seemed to be drawn down at each side, as if in 
paralysis ; and the flesh of her cheeks was tightened as if pul- 
led by some hidden agony or force. She shook her head at 
the apparition. 

"Ah, Lady Clara Vere de Vere," she muttered, "you put 
strange memories in my head." 

How long she remained in a kind of stupor or ecstasy, star- 
ing at herself there in the glass, she could not remember. She 
was recalled to life and actuality by a tap at her door and the 
servant's announcement that the doctor had come. Then she 
made a few rapid changes in her hair, and went down. 

He had been examining the patient carefully; for Outram's 
shirt-front was torn open, and his chest was bare. The doctor 



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76 LISHEEN [Oct., 

was bending over him, making some further examination, when 
Mabel silently entered. She stood still by the doctor's side. 
Presently he turned round, and looked at her. 

" Not a fit," he said, " but a fall. He's quite unconscious ; 
but he will recover consciousness immediately." 

'^ He must have stumbled coming down stairs," she said, 
without a trace of emotion, " and thrown down the porphyry 
vase, and then fallen on it." 

" Very probably. But would you mind leaving me alone for 
a few moments, until I make a further examination?" 

He looked at her in a strange way, as if questioning : '^ Can 
she bear it ? " Mabel read his thoughts and went out. At least, 
this would be a confirmation or a contradiction of her own con- 
clusions. 

Doctor Bellingham leaned over the prostrate form again; 
gently opened again the shirt-front and looked long and 
anxiously at his patient. He then took up the helpless hand 
and examined it. Then he felt the lobes of the ears ; then lifted 
the closed eyelids. 

Ah, those doctors! Grand Inquisitors of the human race, 
from whom there is no secret, because they have their spies in 
every feature of face, of form; and finger-nails, eyelids, lips, 
teeth, babble like traitors and informers the history of the vic- 
tim; whilst the arch-traitors, the opthalmoscope and stetho- 
scope probe into the deepest recesses and whisper to the Grand 
Inquisitor the terrible secrets of brain and lungs and heart, 
down to the last thread of nerve and capillary. And, worse 
still, they tell what they have no right to tell, of hidden sin 
and moral turpitude and secret vice ; and, by some terrible sys- 
tem of induction, tell too of the hidden history of the dead — 
of the father, or grandfather, whose sins were supposed to be 
buried with themselves. Ah, yes ; there is no secret ; the very 
leaves will whisper and tell. 

For a long time Dr. Bellingham watched and felt, and felt 
and watched his patient. Then he drew a long sigh and said: 
" Poor girl I " 

He touched the bell. Mabel entered. 

'^It is as I say, Mrs. Outram," he exclaimed, looking at 
her with dilated eyes, as if questioning : '' Does she know ? " 
and " Dare I tell ? " " There is shock and slight concussion 
from the fall ; but the wound has bled freely. He will recover 



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1907.] LISHEEN 77 

consciousness soon, and the effects will soon pass away. His 
general health is good, is it not ? " 

*' I haven't heard Mr. Outram complain/' said Mabel. 

'' No ; he has seen some hard service, I believe. There are 
cicatrices on breast and arm. I suppose sword cuts." 

'* I never heard my husband say he was in action/' said Mabel. 

''No; perhaps not. It may be something else. But the 
Major is better, is he not ? " 

" My father ? " said Mabel, noticing the sudden change in 
the doctor's words, and divining ill news from that little cir- 
cumstance. But she quietly said : '' No ; not much better. I 
suppose he will never get better." 

'' Hardly. We can only mitigate his sufferings. I had bet- 
ter see him, as I am here." 

Doctor and wife were staring at each other during this 
brief conversation, doctor asking his conscience : '' Ought I tell ?" 
Mabel asking: "Does he know?" Both were playing a dread 
part in that ugly drama there in that silent rpom before that 
prostrate form. The servants were whispering and tittering out- 
side in the hall. The doctor moved to go. Mabel said: 

'' Doctor, I have something to ask you I " 

" To be sure ! " said the doctor, folding up his stethoscope. 

" About these wounds ; these cicatrices ! " 

•* Don't I " said the doctor, his eyes filling with tears. 

" May God help me, then ! " said Mabel. 

'' May God help you, child ! " said the doctor. 



Chapter VHI. 
great preparations. 

Father Cosgrove did not at all like the new development 
things were taking. Fate, or the Fates, were rushing matters 
on in a way he decidedly disapproved of. Not that he was 
what is called in college slang ''a safe man." He was one of 
those imprudent characters that are always doing the very things 
human foresight tells them they should not do. Nor was he 
an advocate of that cast-iron conservatism which studies only 
«* the things that are," and whose motto is : " Let well alone ! " 

He was quite enthusiastic about Maxwell when Hamberton 
told him all. 



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78 LISHEEN [Oct, 

" A fine fellow ! " he said. " Ah I if we had a few more 
like him ! " 

"What would then become of the patience and long- suffer- 
ing of your people?" Hamberton asked maliciously. "You 
good Christians are always inconsistent. You say character can 
only be developed by trial and combat. But you want to avoid 
trial and evade combat whenever you can. You say adversity 
is the royal road to heaven. But you want prosperity by pref- 
erence, and heaven into the bargain. You want to catch the 
two worlds with one hand. Now, if I were anything, I should 
be a Manichean. I would like to believe that there is a Spirit 
of Evil created specially to prove the good ; and an over- mas- 
tering Spirit, the Over- Soul of things, to reward their fidelity." 

" That's what we believe ! " said Father Cosgrove faintly. 
He always felt in the hands of such an antagonist as helpless 
as a babe; though he knew that he had the strength of truth 
on his own side. 

" Precisely. . But you fight the Prince of Darkness by evad- 
ing him, not by facing and conquering him." 

" Is it all arranged then ? " asked Father Cosgrove, anxious 
to get away from these "foolish controversies." 

" Practically all. You're sorry ? " 

" I am. That is — you know — I'm not," said the priest, mak- 
ing circles in the air. " 'Twill all come right I 'Twill all come 
right ! Providence is guiding all in its own wise way ! " 

" There is, then, a Demiurgus intermeddling in human af- 
fairs ? " asked Hamberton. He enjoyed the discomfiture of this 
simple man whose faith he admired and envied. 

"No"; said the priest solemnly. "There is a God, and 
you will" — he stopped lest he should say anything harsh — 
" know it ! " 

" Perhaps ! The great perhaps 1 " muttered Hamberton. 

" Does Mr. Maxwell know all ? " asked the priest. 

" All what ? " said Hamberton. He was actually getting 
vexed, losing his philosophical equanimity at the reiteration of 
the word "God." 

**A11 about everything!" said the priest. 

" Of course ! " said Hamberton. " What has he to know ? " 

" Oh, of course not," said the priest inconsequently. " I 
mean all your generous treatment of Miss Moulton's father ? " 

Hamberton was struck silent. He watched the pale, placid 



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1907.] LISHEEN 79 

face before him for a long while, trying to read the hidden 
meaning beneath the words. He thought he discovered a 
subtle arraignment of his own conduct in this simple guise of 
language. Did the priest mean something else ? Did he say, 
although not in as many words : " Are you concealing from this 
honorable man, Maxwell, the fact that his future wife is the 
daughter of a felon ? " 

But that pale face was impenetrable. Hamberton would 
have liked to be angry or cynical, but he couldn't. And his 
genuine honesty told him that he had made a very serious 
mistake in not having told Maxwell all before matters reached 
their crisis. He said gently: "You don't want this marriage 
to take place, good father ; and I should be the last to com- 
plain, for I know your motive, your generous motives, towards 
myself. But it must go on. It is fate. And you may trust 
my honor. Maxwell shall know the whole history of Claire and 
her father, if he has not already heard it from her own lips." 

'' Quite so ; quite so I " said the priest. You are always so 
honorable." 

''And now," said Hamberton, "you must give me all the 
help in your power towards rebuilding Lisheen cottage and put- 
ting things in order. You have great influence with the Land 
League." 

" You have much greater," said the priest. " They'll do any- 
thing for you; and this will make you a hundred times more 
popular." 

"But I must tell them it is all Maxwell's generosity," said 
Hamberton. 

" Not yet ! " said Father Cosgrove. " That would spoil all 
just now. They would hardly believe such an extraordinary 
story ; and you know that just now there is a strong feeling 
against him." 

" I suppose they're not sorry for his arrest ? " 

" Indeed, no ; it was just what they expected, they say." 

" Human nature again, always gloating over misfortunes. 
The instinct of the beast everywhere. The same fury that drives 
a terrier into a rat-hole, or a ferret into a rabbit-warren, is 
dominant in the human heart. And your religion hasn't ex- 
pelled it. The fisherman on the river bank, plying his 'gentle 
craft ' of murder, the fowler on the hillside with his gun, the 
hunter on his horse, the prosecutor in a court of what is called 



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8o LISHEEN [Oct, 

justice, the minister plotting war in bis cabinet, tbe mob around 
a gallows — are all alike. The same brute instinct of destruc- 
tion is everywhere; and neither religion, nor education, nor 
progress, nor civilization, can root it out. We are a hopelessly 
lost race." 

''There are good men in the world, too," said Father Cos- 
grove faintly. 

** A few," said Hamberton. " There would be a good many 
more, if they would only adopt the maxims, and follow the 
life, of that gentle prophet that appeared in Judea some cen- 
turies ago. But all that is dead, dead. Nature has again as- 
serted itself against Christ, and has won all along the line. 
And human nature is hopelessly bad." 

His head had sunk down upon his chest, as was always the 
case when he was deeply moved and disturbed. Then he flung 
aside the depression and said, in a chuckle of delight: 

" Won't it be rare fun deceiving those fellows ? What a re- 
velation to those hounds who would hunt Maxwell down ? I'll 
make them cheer themselves into a kind of aphasia the day I 
shall be able to reveal to them that there is one man alive. 
Won't it be dramatic ; and won't it be a revenge ? " 

'' They don't mean it ; they are ignorant ! " said the priest. 

" Of course, of course. So is the hawk when he has a spar- 
row in his talons ; so is the hound when he has his white teeth 
in tbe neck of the hare. Yes ; you are right. They are igno- 
rant. It is all blind instinct — that terrible blind force that 
evolves everything, and then selects, by cunning process of 
selection, only those things that are fit to live. But, now, we 
must commence at once. The time runs by. When does the 
mighty — the almighty League meet ? " 

"On Sundays at the school-room." 

"Then we shall make a beginning next Sunday. It is a 
good work, is it not — and therefore no violation of the Sab- 
bath?" 

There was a slight commotion the following Sunday at the 
Land League, when in the midst of a full house, and in the 
thick of a hot debate, Hamberton was announced. 

There was instant silence ; and all angry feelings were hushed 
in his presence. He entered with that calm assurance that 
marks the Englishman the wide world over — in the hotel, in the 
dining-hall, in the picture gallery, under the dome of St. Peter's, 



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1907.] LISHEEN 81 

ander the shadow of the Pyramids. Other races assume an air 
of deprecatory politeness, as if claiming a privilege ; the English- 
man owns the whole world, and claims it as a right. He took 
the chair offered him obsequiously, and sat down. 

" I just called in to say," he said, without apology or ex- 
cuse, "that the McAuliffes are to be reinstated in their home- 
stead the moment they are liberated from prison." 

There was a mighty cheer, and many an exclamation : '' Gad 
bless yer 'anner! We wouldn't doubt you," etc., etc. 

'' And under circumstances that will effectually prevent them 
from being disturbed again." 

Here there was a wide gape of curiosity and surprise. 

"Their farm has been purchased — " 

There was a scowl and the men closed up. 
"—for them." 

There was another mighty cheer. The excitement became 
almost painful. 

"I hold the deed, granting them fee-simple in Lisheen for- 
ever." 

It was only the natural fear of the "gintleman," that pre- 
vented them from lifting Hamberton upon their shoulders, and 
carrying him around the room. 

"And now," he continued calmly, "I want you to do this. 
The friend who has bought this place, and made it over for- 
ever to the McAuliffes (God bless him, and spare him long) 
wants to give these poor people a little surprise. He wants 
them to come into a farm ready-stocked, the cows in the byre, 
the pigs in the sties, the fowl in the yard ; he wants the house 
rebuilt, but maintaining all its ancient features; he wants the 
fields ploughed and harrowed and sown ; the drills full of pota- 
toes, the grass-corn springing from the soil. He wants all the 
fences repaired, new gates erected, hedges trimmed; and he 
wants you, the Land League of Lisheen, to do it all." 

Their faces fell. Where could they get money to do all 
that gigantic work? 

" I'm afeard, yer anner, the * frind ' is playing a joke an us," 
said the Chairman. "What you're afther shpakin' about would 
cost about two hunned pound, and where's that to come fram ? " 

"Oh, begor!" said a joker. " 'Tis like the man that 
promises a tousand poun's to build a chapel, if ev'y wan else 
will give a tousand poun's too ! " 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 6 



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82 LISHEEN [Oct., 

Here there was a general, and most sarcastic, laugh. 

" The friend^*^ said Hamberton with cold sarcasm, " doesn't 
propose to do things half-way, and leave them there. He is 
prepared to pay all the expenses of the improvements I have 
suggested — all I He simply wants the Land Leaguers of Li- 
sheen, who, I presume, are patriotic and ready to die for their 
country^ to give the labor. Or, to put it plainly and categorical- 
ly, he will defray all the expenses of building the house — masons', 
carpenters', and all tradesmen's wages; he will pay for gates 
and seeds and manures, and everything. He simply wants to 
know will you plough the fields, trim the hedges, put in the 
seed-corn and potatoes — do, in a word, the agricultural labor? 
And" — he added with some bitterness — "if you require it, he 
will pay you.** 

The bitter word cut them deeply; but they could not re- 
sent it. 

" Well, then, as your honor has been so magnanimous," said 
the Chairman, '' it would be a grave thing if we did not second 
you. I'll guarantee that my plough will be in the field to- 
morrow at six-o'clock — " 

"And I—" 

" And I—" 

" And I — " said a dozen voices. 

" Well, then," said Hamberton," I'll leave the labor details in 
your hands. I go on now to Tralee to see a contractor about 
the house. I shall see after everything myself; and, when I 
am not able to be on the spot, my steward will take my place." 

He was turning to go; but they stopped him at the door. 
One of them came forward sheepishly, and said : 

''Is it the desarter, you mane, yer honor ? For, if it is, the 
divil a wan of us will work ondher him." 

" Yerra, no ; sure he's in gaol, and likely to remain there," 
said another. 

" What objection have you to Maxwell ? " said Hamberton. 

" He interfared the day of the eviction," said the secretary, 
"and previnted a settlement." 

" And, according to all accounts, he's likely to have other 
occupation," said another. 

" Oh, all right," replied Hamberton. " I won't force him up- 
on the workers. And probably he won't care to have anything 
to do with it. But—" 



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1907.] LISHEEN 83 

He stopped, and looked around calmly at the excited faces. 

" It would be well for you, good people, not to be too 
quick at your conclusions about things in general. It is not 
pleasant to have to change your opinions too often." 

And he left. 

Meanwhile, Maxwell had passed through the little trial, that 
was but a preliminary to his release. And leaving the police 
office, where there was no little confusion and shame and re- 
criminations for their blundering, he made his way southward^ 
in the warm, sunny weather, to his beloved hermitage above 
Caragh Lake. Of course now, when he had neither his servant, 
Aleck, nor his tent, he had to put up at the hotel ; but as there 
were only half-a-dozen visitors there, mostly silent Englishmen, 
he felt no inconvenience. 

The day after his arrival, and when he had posted to Bran- 
don Hall an account of his adventures in Tralee, he set out in 
the early morning to visit the mountain hollow where he usual- 
ly pitched his tent. The place, of course, was quite unchanged, 
except that, as he approached, a hare jumped from her form 
right in the very spot where his tent was usually erected. He 
sat down on a clump of dry heather, lit a cigarette, and be- 
gan to muse on the strange events of the past few months. 
That scene in the Dublin club, the forfeiture of the ring, his 
own weary journeys in search of employment, his welcome at 
Lisheen, the tenderness and gentle courtesy of the poor people 
with whom he lodged, the attention to him during his sickness, 
his meeting with Hamberton and his niece, his betrothal, his 
arrest — and all in a few months — 

" I can't say," he muttered aloud, •' ' to-morrow, and to- 
morrow, and to-morrow, thus creeps our petty pace from day 
to day.' 'Tis dramatic enough for a two- cent novel. But, there, 
I shall have to give up my Shakespearean renderings. They 
have got me into trouble enough." 

And he did not quite know whether to laugh at, or be 
angry with, the midnight espionage of Debbie and her brother, 
and their interpretation of his moonlight solilcquies, as revealed 
in her depositions. 

*• I suppose the time will come," he thought, " when these 
poor people and their kind will not be such strangers to Mac- 
beth and Othello. But it appears far distant — far distant." 

He rose up, and looked down along the valley to the lake. 



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84 LISHEEN [Oct., 

There was a slight golden haze suspended over vale and wood- 
land and water, and all was still beneath its gauzy folds, unless 
where, from far thicket or copse, the blackbirds and thrushes 
were pouring out their flute- like melodies. Down along the 
ravine, as far as he could see, the sides were clothed with 
yellow gorse, and the air was heavy with the cocoa nut per- 
fume that exhales from the essential oil of the golden petals ; 
and beneath the gorse the hedges were carpeted thickly with 
yellow primroses and purple violets, until the whole valley was 
a mass of color and light. The air up there on the hills was 
so light and pure, it was a physical pleasure even to breathe; 
and the deep azure canopy above seemed to hang like a great 
blue dome, flecked with silver, over the peaceful Temple of the 
earth. 

Maxwell watched the scene eagerly; and, somehow he felt 
that that pungent tobacco odor was a desecration of such sweet- 
ness and purity; for he flung his cigarette impatiently away, 
and strode slowly up the mountain. 

When he had leaped the little burn, that ran sparkling 
across the road in front of Darby's cottage, he stood still for 
a moment to admire the new coat of thatch that lay, warm and 
snug, over the cabin. Altogether there was a decided improve- 
ment in the appearance of the place, although the ducks still 
quacked melodiously as they wallowed in the green, stagnant, 
compost- lake before the door. 

He entered gaily, with the usual : " God save all here ! " 
He had now adopted the manners and language of the country. 

The old woman was bending over the fire in that calm, 
meditative attitude so characteristic of our people. Darby had, 
as usual, tilted back the chair, and had his red shins almost in 
the blaze that shot up from the wood and turf fire on the 
hearth. He nearly lost his balance, as he jumped to his feet, 
recognizing the old, familiar voice, although now disguised be- 
neath the Irish salutation. The old woman never stirred, but 
only muttered : 

" An' you too, sir 1 " 

"Yerra, 'tis the masther," said Darby, giving his mother a 
poke. And then he turned round, his face beaming with pleas- 
ure and excitement, and his white teeth showing beneath the 
grin. 

" Well, Darby, how are you ? And how is mother ? " 



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1907.] LISHEEN 85 

"Begor, as well as yer anner 'ud wish," said Darby. 
"Sure, it does our hearts good to see you." 

" Yerra, is it the masther, Darby ? " said the old woman, 
rising from her seat. "Yerra, why didn't you tell me? Oh, 
cecLd mile failte^ a thousand times over, yer anner. Sure you're 
welcome to our little cabin." 

" Well, I see you've got the new coat of thatch," said Max- 
well. " Does it keep out the rain ? " 

" Oh, yeh, that it does, sure enough. If it was peltin' cats 
and dogs, not a dhrop ud come in now. An' sure you have 
our prayers, night and day, for that same." 

" I'm afraid Darby doesn't kill himself with the prayers," 
said Maxwell. " Tell the honest truth now. Darby. Would 
you rather be saying your prayers, or snaring a rabbit ? " 

Darby grinned, and blurted out: 

" Begor, yer anner, I'd rather be snarin' the rabbit, cos 
why, me mudder keeps me too long on me knees with all the 
prayers she do be sayin'." 

" I thought so. Well, look here ! I'm comin' up again next 
month for a day or two; and I'll send on the tent. I won't 
bring Aleck this time, as it will be too short. But I'll leave 
it in your care, whilst I'm away." 

Darby was in heaven. 

" I have another bit of news for you. I'm afraid my tent- 
ing- days will soon be over. I'm getting married in the au- 
tumn." 

*' Ah, thin, wisha, may you be happy, and may your ond- 
hertakin' thry with you ; and may you get the sweetest and 
best young lady widin the four walls of Ireland," said the old 
woman. 

" Have you nothing to say. Darby, you scoundrel ? " said 
Maxwell. 

But Darby was silent. He had suddenly fallen to earth. 
His face was a picture of misery. 

"An' must you give up the tint, yer anner, an' the fishin' 
an' the shootin'? Oh, tare an' ages," said he, breaking into 
tears, " to tink of giving up the gun an' the rod an' the boat 
an' the dog, an' all the fun ! Oh, wisha, madrone, madrone, 
sure 'twas the bad day she crassed yer anner's path." 

And Darby turned away weeping. The idea of any man 
giving up the mountain and the lake and the grouse and the 



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86 LISHEEN [Oct, 

whirr of the partridge, and the pull on the rod, for the tame 
felicities of married life was incredible. 

" Never mind, Darby," said the master. " Some day you'll 
be getting married yourself; and you and the old woman can 
come down with me, and I'll get you a lodge; and maybe," 
he added, "we'll have a crack at the woodcock, or a pull on 
the lake again." 

Darby's face brightened. The old woman's was clouded. 

*'Wisha, thin, yer anner," she said, **you shouldn't be put- 
tin' thim thoughts into that omadan's head. What a nice fa- 
ther of a family he'd make, wouldn't he ? Betther for him 
airn his bread, an' mind his ould mother, so long as she's wid 
him. An', sure, me time is short ! " 

<< Never mind, never mind ! " said Maxwell, who felt he was 
treading on dangerous ground. " But come along. Darby, and 
let us look around." 

They descended the hill together. Darby evidently was 
preoccupied with deep thought. He tried to keep behind the 
master in the old way. He felt he was presuming too much 
in walking side by side. 

''Is there anything the matter. Darby?" said Maxwell at 
last. " Are you sorry I'm coming back again ? " 

" Oh, wisha, thin, 'tis I'm glad, yer anner. It lifts the 
cockles av my heart to see you in the owld place. But — " 

•' Out with it, man," cried Maxwell. " Say anything you like." 

"Well, then, yer anner," said Darby, blushing till his face 
was as red as his bare chest, "were you in airnest, or only 
makin' game of me, whin you said : ' Maybe you'd be married 
too ' ? " 

" Oh, is that the way the land lies, you villain ? " said Max- 
well. " Come now. Of whom are you thinking ? " 

"Well, thin, yer anner, there's a purty little shlip of a col- 
leen down there in the village, an' sure — " 

"Yes, I know"; said Maxwell. "Your eyes are burnt out 
of your head looking at her ? " 

" Begor, they are, yer anner," said Darby, scratching his 
red locks. 

"I suppose now," said Maxwell, "you look oftener on her 
than on the priest at Mass on Sunday ? " 

"Whinever he does be sayin' the hard words that I can't 
undershtan'," said Darby, "sure I can't help turning round — " 



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1907.] LISHEEN 87 

"I see. What's her name?" 

"Noncy Kavanagh/' said Darby, *'as purty a little — " 

"All right/' said Maxwell. "We'll take that for granted. 
Now, what can I do for you ? " 

"I was thinkin', maybe, yer anner — " 

" Out with it," said Maxwell. " What do you want ? " 

" I was thinkin', if I had a new pair of corduroy breeches, 
yer anner, an' brass buttons — " Darby stopped. 

'•Yes, I see; the corduroys would fetch her. Is that it?" 

''Well, you see, yer anner, she do be making game of me 
sometimes, about these sthramers; an' since Phil Doody got a 
new shuit wid money his sisther sint him from America, she 
won't look at me at all, at all." 

"Well, then, we'll beat that fellow hollow, Darby," said 
Maxwell. "What would you say to a whole new suit of 
tweed—? " 

" Oh, tare an ages, that would be too much intirely, yer 
anner. An' sure if I turned out so grand, the nabors are bad 
enough to say I killed or robbed some wan." 

" Well, then, I'll tell you what," said Maxwell. " We'll get 
the corduroys — and maybe they'd be more serviceable than the 
tweed up here ; and we'll also get a new frieze coat with the 
biggest buttons that can be got for money; and, look here. 
Darby, you'll have to get some shirts — " 

"Yerra, for what, yer anner?" asked Darby. "I don't be 
a bit cowld." 

" I know that," said Maxwell. " And probably I'm putting 
you in for an attack of pneumonia, that may end in consump- 
tion. But you see. Darby, I'll have to introduce you to my 
wife; and when you come down to the lodge, you'll be meet- 
ing people that are hampered by civilization, and — somehow, 
you know, they like to see — well — a shirt-front." 

"Do they thin?" said Darby in surprise. "Well, what- 
ever yer anner likes. Sure, I'd do more than that for yer 
anner." 

Maxwell smiled. 

" I know you would," said he. " Although I admit you 
are making a sacrifice now. But, tell me, what about the wed- 
ding ? Won't you want a gallon of whisky, and something to 
give Noney, and — ?" 

" Oh, begor, yer anner is too good intirely," said Darby, 



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88 LISHEEN [Oct., 

who began to fear that this generosity was too excessive to be 
genuine. '' Maybe it ud be as well to ketch the hare fust ! " 

"Oh, never fear that/' said Maxwell. ''To make a long 
story short, I calculate you'll want about five pounds to win 
Noney, to furnish a little house, and to have a decent wed- 
ding. I'll give it to you — " 

" Oh, yer anner, that's too much out an' out. Yerra, what 
ud I be doin' wid all that money ? An' sure, Noney tould me 
that her mudder ud give her a feather bed an' blankets an' 
half the chickens in her yard the day she was well married." 

"So ye've been talking it over," said Maxwell. "That's 
right. I tell you. Darby, we'll settle Doody. We'll leave that 
fellow without a feather in his cap. Now, will you take the 
money now, or shall I send it?" 

"Oh, begor, yer anner, I wouldn't tetch it for the wurruld. 
Where the divil could I hide it ? The ould 'uman 'ud search 
me high and low for it.". 

"You couldn't hide it?" said Maxwell. 

"Av I swallowed it, she'd see it," said Darby. "She'll 
sarch every bit av me now whin I goes in to see did I get 
anythin' from yer anner." 

"Can't you hide it outside, you omadan?" said Maxwell. 
"Aren't there a hundred holes where you could put it?" 

" Yerra, but yer anner, sure I'd never have a wink of shleep 
agin, thinkin' that some wan would shtale it. Oh, Lord, no; 
'twould never do at all, at all." 

" Well, then, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give the money 
to the priest to keep for you until the day you're married; 
and then you can snap your fingers at the old woman." 

"The very thing, God bless yer anner. But" — his face fell, 
as a new difficulty presented itself — "Father Tom is the divil 
himself agin the dhrink. Av he thought we were goin' to have 
a sup of whisky at the wedding, he'd pull the chapel down an 
us." 

" Well I'm not going to tell him ; and sure you needn't say 
much about it. When 'tis all over, he can't do much harm." 

" N — no " ; said Darby doubtingly. Then a bright thought 
struck him and he cheered up. 

" 'Twill be worth a power an' all of money," he said, " wid 
the priest whin yer anner spakes for me ; and maybe — " 

" Maybe what ? " said Maxwell. 



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1907.] Lis HE EN 89 

*' Maybe, if you axed him, he'd put in a good word for me 
wid Noney." 

'^I will, to be sure/' said Maxwell, '^ though perhaps he 
won't care to be a matchmaker. Anything else ? " 

''Maybe yer anner ud give Jack Clancy, the .tailor, the 
ordher for the corduroys?" 

** All right. And the coat ? But what about the measure- 
ment ? " 

" Ah, he needn't mind about that," said Darby. ** Sure, yer 
anner can tell him make the shuit for a bye of eighteen ; an' 
sure, av it is a couple of inches aither way, 'twill make no 
matther." 

"All right. Darby. 'Twill be all right. Meantime I'll send 
up the tent. I'm only sorry I can't dance at your wedding. 
But, we'll settle Doody, won't we ? " 

"Begor, we will, yer anner. Long life to yer anner; and 
may you reign long." 

The two conspirators parted. Maxwell for Brandon Hall, 
and Darby for home. But, before he reached it, he executed 
many a pas seul on the mountain road to the astonishment of 
sundry rooks and jackdaws, who gravely cawed their disappro- 
bation. But he couldn't help it. His heart was as light as a 
feather; and now and again he stopped, whistled "The Wind 
that Shakes the Barley," or, "The Top of Cork Road," and 
danced to his own accompaniment, flicking his fingers in sheer 
delight above his head. 

But when he entered the cabin he was as serious as an owl. 

"Is the masther gone?" said his mother. 

" He is," said Darby sulkily. 

" What did he give ye ? " 

" Divil a copper. Not a thrancen of a sixpence even ! " 

" Don't be desavin' me, ma bouchal ! I knows the masther 
betther. Come here, an' lemme thry you ! " 

" Here, thin," said Darby, " as you won't believe me worrd ! " 

The good mother felt his pockets and his tattered sleeves 
and his trousers. She then made him open his mouth and show 
his teeth and gums. She found nothing. 

" Lift up yer feet, you omadan ! " 

Darby raised his broad feet, the soles of which were as 
thick as leather. Thete was nothing there. She went back to 
her seat grumbling. 



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90 LISHEEN [Oct., 



" Tis quare," she said, " I suppose he's getting close/' 
"Didn't you hear his anner saying that he was goin' to be 
married?" said Darby. 

'* I did. I suppose he's savin' up for the wife I " 

''Av coorse he is," said Darby, winking softly at himself. 



Chapter IX. 

A BAPTISM OF TEARS. 

Into the eyes of all conquered things, human or other, there 
comes a wistful look, that seems to denote the end of the 
struggle, and to say : ** Do what you will now I I am con- 
quered." You see it in the poor speckled thing that has been 
dragged from its element, and lies gasping on the wet grass 
above the river; you see it in the fiercest brute that has fought 
and bit and trampled for life, and now lies still at the feet of 
his conqueror, awaiting the final blow. The great artist put it 
in the stone eyes of the ''Dying Gladiator," and the suppliant 
look of '' Laocoon " ; the mightier artist puts it in the eyes of 
every dying and conquered thing to win mercy perhaps from 
his conqueror. 

Even such was the look that fell on Mabel Willoughby's 
face from the eyes of her husband, when late in that eventful 
night, after many watchings, he recovered consciousness, looked 
up, closed his eyes to collect his thoughts, remembered all, and 
looked again. He had been removed to his own room after 
the doctor's visit; and Mabel, with a certain love and much 
loathing, had gone in and out during the night, watching and 
fearing the moment when his soul would come back again. 
She didn't know what to think, or what to do. She could 
only hope in a vague, inarticulate way, which she would not 
express to her own mind, that he might pass away in that 
sleep or coma, and solve the dread problem that now confronted 
her. For, the doctor's words left no room now for doubt. She 
had expressed her terrible suspicions; and they had been con- 
firmed. Yes, she had been inveigled into marriage with a man 
who had been a leper. What other loathsome things lay behind 
that revelation she dared not conjecture. She knew enough to 
understand that the disease was ineradicable; and the sense of 
the horrible injustice done to her, and the sense of terrible de- 



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1907.] LISHEEN 91 

spair fought, side by side, for the mastery of her soul during 
the long watches of the night. The gas jet was singing over 
her head. Now and again came the sound of the muffled tread 
of the servants on the soft carpet outside her door. Now and 
again, too, night noises, the barking of a far-off dog, or the 
rumbling of a wagon, came to her ears. But she sat like one 
petrified, staring blindly at nothing ; and sometimes going to the 
mirror to ask the white face shown there whether she was not 
in reality mad. Like one in a dream, or a sleep-walker, she 
stepped from time to time from her room, and passed into her 
husband's, where some maids were replacing and wetting, wet- 
ting and replacing, the brown paper saturated with toilet vinegar, 
that was supposed to relieve the forehead of the unconscious 
man. The injured woman would look down on the white face 
and watch the labored breathing ; then return to her own room 
to resume the posture of statue-like immobility, until the desire 
of breaking the horrible spell came upon her again. Once, when 
looking over the past, and recalling all that happened prior to 
her marriage, the remembrance of the Indian letter smote her. 
She went over to her escritoire and took it out, and turned 
up the gas jet to read. 

Oh I it was so prophetic — that Indian letter I How every 
word seemed to rise out of the notepaper, and smite her with 
its deadly truth ! " Ah, yes, that * Nevermore 1 ' It means you 
cannot go back to the stalls or to the box again — never again 
be a spectator of the mighty drama. Only an actor." 

'' True, true," she thought, as she held the letter in her 
lap. '' Nevermore ! Nevermore ! There is no going back. There 
is no unlearning the one terrible lesson of life 1 " 

She read on. 

" Who wants to be happy ? No one. At least, I see half 
the world throwing happiness to the winds." 

** How true," she thought. ** I, even I, how have I wasted 
and squandered my years. I was happy, at least comparatively 
so, because I had no horror, no dread; only a craving, which 
I should have suppressed. But I didn't know; I didn't knowl 
My God ! if there be a God, why is there no test for souls, no 
means of knowing the awful spirits, with which fate insists on 
uniting us ? " 

She took up the letter again, and read: 

"Yes, yes; these poor benighted Papists, wrong in nearly 



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92 LISHEEN [Oct., 

everything else, are right in holding the marriage tie inviolable. 
Nay ; there should be a strict law that marriage shall not be 
dissolved even in death ; because it is enough for each human 
being to have one world revealed, and no more ! " 

" Very true, Edith," was Mabel's comment, " so far as con- 
tracting new ties is concerned. God knows I have had enough of 
the experiment. And surely, if this — this — man would dare 
drag another unhappy girl into such a frightful union, no hell 
could be deep enough to punish him ! But, why inviolable ? 
We shall see. If there be law or justice in this country, Mabel 
Outram will be Mabel WiUoughby again before many months. 
The doctor knows all, and he can testify. And what is drink, 
or cruelty, or infidelity, or incompatibility of temperament to 
this?'* 

But as her thoughts ran over the dread possibility of a divorce, 
with all its shame and public exposure ; and as the poor girl 
thought : " If I dared bring the matter into court, what a dread 
sentence I should pass on myself — a leper's wife, and, there- 
fore, herself a possible leper," her heart shrank. She was beaten 
back from the only loophole of escape into the dread slough 
of misery, where she found the actual even less dreadful than 
the possible. 

'' I close it with a few bitter tears 1 " ran the last para- 
graph of the letter. 

" Oh, Edith, Edith," sobbed the poor girl, as her tears fell 
fast upon the letter. '' So do I ! But why, oh why, didn't you 
speak more plainly to me ? " 

After a while she folded the letter and laid it aside ; and 
went in again to see the man who had decided her fate for Hie 
in such a brutal and unscrupulous fashion. He seemed easier 
in his breathing; and the maid said: 

" Don't take it too much to heart, ma'am. I think he is 
coming round. He was moaning now, and he muttered some- 
thing. I think he was calling your name." 

What delightful irony ! 

" I wish you could have some sleep, Kate," said the unhappy 
woman. '' If you would lie down for a few hours, I could watch." 

" You want sleep more yourself, ma'am," said the girl. " If 
you cry and give way to your grief for Mr. Outram, you'll 
make yourself sick. Try and lie down; and I'll call you if 
there's any change." 



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1907.] Lis HE EN 93 

And Mabel went back to her lonely watch again. Sleep ? 
There was no sleep, she thought, for her evermore. 

She then did a foolish thing — foolish for any one; thrice 
foolish for one in her condition of mind. She wanted to know^ 
forgetting that '' he who addeth to his knowledge, addeth also 
to his sorrow.'* She crept like a guilty creature down stairs, 
passed into the dining-room, opened a little corner bookcase, 
and took out a volume of a certain Encyclopaedia, marked 
LAV- PAS. With a certain feeling still of guilt, or rather with 
the nervousness with which one plunges into a dangerous course 
of action, she took the heavy volume upstairs, and with trem- 
bling fingers opened it at the dread word: Leprosy. Fearful, 
yet covetous of knowledge of the dreadful thing, she read down 
the long, dismal column, read of its probable causes, which made 
her shudder, its symptoms, its consequences, its different spe- 
cies, with all their dread manifestations of putrid flesh and 
rotting limbs and swollen features and dropping joints — the 
living death, which is so much worse than death, inasmuch as 
it is accompanied by the dread crucifixion of an acute con*, 
sciousness, and an incurable despair. It was all more horrible 
than she had imagined ; and to make the horror more terrible 
and tragic, she read of the dread, but infallible, contagion, and 
how the disease may lurk unseen for years, but was certain to 
manifest itself in the end. And so the governments of the 
world had decreed that whoever once placed foot on an infected 
island or other leper enclosure, was thenceforth ostracized from 
his kind forever; and the laws of the world, considering always 
the safety of the majority, heeded not the sufferings of the 
few, but made them the victims for the race. 

It was all sad, terrible. Mabel looked at her white fingers, 
as if she already beheld them swollen by disease ; touched her 
ears, as if she foresaw the time when these tender little lobes 
would drop away in dread decomposition. She had not the 
grace to pray: My God I Thy will be done I She loathed 
herself for the fate which her imagination assured her was in- 
evitably hers. But, lo 1 in the very climax of her agony, there 
came a voice, though but a word of relief. 

She had read down to the end of the article, and was about 
to close the book, when a further paragraph : " Leprosy in the 
Middle AgeSy^ caught her eye. She read on, read the many 
ceremonies, some awe-inspiring, some consolatory, with which 



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94 LISHEEN [Oct, 

he Mother Church sequestrated the victims of the dread dis- 
ease from their kind, and yet surrounded them with that Christ- 
like pity and love, which made them not so much the victims, 
as the victors, of the awful malady. She read of great things 
done by lepers in the depths of their exile from humanity; of 
saints, canonized by the Church, who had been lepers; of great 
poets, whose songs resounded throughout Germany, whilst they 
toiled away in the leper- hut, and rang the leper-bell; and — 
her heart stood still as she read: 

'' In the great majority of cases, we are assured that the 
wives of these unhappy victims elected to go with them into 
the tombs and leper-haunts, rather than be separated from 
those they so deeply loved." 

Her pure white hand lay open on the page, as she looked 
up, and tried to picture to her imagination what that meant. 

She saw the stricken creature rise up from the funereal 
ceremonies in the church, which were so regulated as to as- 
sume that leprosy was a kind of social death, and which there- 
fore resembled, in the prayers, the exorcisms, the enshrouding 
the leprous body in a black pall, etc., the Exequiae^ or burial 
rites of the actual dead. She saw him go forth, sounding his 
leper-bell, as a warning to all healthy and sane creatures to 
step aside from his path, and avoid the contagion that exhaled 
from his diseased body. She saw him go forth from the haunts 
of men, into remote and solitary places, amongst the wild things 
of field and forest She saw him excommunicated from his 
kind, and sentenced to a banishment, where no human voice 
would greet him, no human presence cheer him ever again. 
And she saw those brave, loving women, allowed by a merci- 
ful dispensation to share such awful sorrows, cheerfully electing 
to give up home and kindred, and all the sweet, wholesome 
surroundings of life, to bury themselves in those desert places, 
to wait upon and watch and tend those stricken wretches, with 
no help but their great, all- conquering love, and their sublime 
faith in the Invisible Power that had inspired it And for 
them no hope of return to friends or children, even after the 
death of the leprous victim. By that sublime act of renuncia- 
tion, they sentenced themselves to perpetual and solitary ban- 
ishment from their kind. 

'' It was magnificent, appalling ; heroic, insane ; madness, 
glory; sublimity, folly"; thought Mabel. Then: 



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1907.] LISHEEN 95 

** These things were for other ages than ours/' she reflected. 
'' These were ages of faith and chivalry, of greatness and hero- 
ism, though they were Dark Ages. We have changed all that/' 

'^ But/' the thought would recur, '^ surely a woman is a 
woman ; and love is love. Can I tear it from my heart, fee- 
ble though it be ? And am I not called to bear, not expatria- 
tion, not solitude, but only patience and toleration ? If I go 
into open court, and expose him and myself to the curious and 
delighted gaze of the public, what do I gain? Social ostra- 
cism. I proclaim myself a leper. If I slink away with father 
into some remote and solitary place, shall I not carry with me 
the fatal consciousness that I have shirked my duty? No, 
Mabel; there is nothing for thee, as for most mortals, but to 
endure. « Let me examine, have I as much love left for Ralph 
as will help me to do so." 

Then she went over the period of her courtship, her mar- 
riage, his little acts of courtesy, the deference, amounting to 
worship, that he always showed her in society; his little pres- 
ents from time to time, ''the little, nameless, unremembered 
acts of love"; and gradually she felt herself softening towards 
the stricken creature; and something, if not love, at least bear- 
ing a resemblance to it in the shape of duty, came uppermost^ 
and revealed her to herself as something superior to a mere 
queen of fashion. She began to feel for the first time a wo- 
man; and to recognize that that sacred aspect of her nature 
and character was higher and holier than she had yet con- 
ceived. 

The night was now wearing to the dawn, when she arose, 
closed the book, and knelt. She knew then that she had never 
prayed before. She had been to church, had read the service, 
had joined her voice in hymn and anthem, had studied the in- 
tonations of the preacher ; but she had never prayed. She had 
never realized the supernatural — the powers that lie hid beyond 
the senses, and yet exercise so marvelous an influence on hu- 
man life. But now, as she knelt, there in the silence of the 
dying night, with the faint dawn creeping through the un- 
shuttered window, she prayed against herself, and for herself. 
Against herself — against her pride and passion, so fearfully re- 
venged and humiliated; against her revolt from obligations de- 
liberately contracted ; against the cowardice that would make 
her break sacred ties, even under so ttemendous a provocation. 



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96 LISHEEN [Oct. 

And she prayed for herself — for strength and endurance and 
love to enable her to conquer all physical revulsion, all her 
loathing and her fear, and be to the wretched and afflicted, if 
dishonest, creature who is called her husband, a help and a 
solace during the bitter remainder of their lives. 

Then, fortified by the effort, she rose up and passed into 
his room. 

'' I think, ma'am," said the maid, '' that Mr. Outram is 
coming round. He seemed to open his eyes, and look around 
as if seeking some one; and then closed them again." 

They watched and waited ; and after an interval, the eyes 
of the sick man opened, and, as we have said, rested on the 
face of his wife. And he seemed satisfied. He only stared and 
stared and stared; and, when she drew aside, and went over 
for some cordials, he followed her with the same wistful, yearn- 
ing look. It seemed to ask for mercy and compassion; for 
forgiveness and forgetfulness of aught that could be remembered 
against him ; for a plenary absolution and a wiping out of the 
dread past. 

And Mabel, haunted and touched by that look, and by all 
her recent thoughts, came over, and bent down, and touched 
with her lips his forehead and his mouth ; and then, as if the 
pent-up feelings of her soul had swelled and labored and burst 
their barriers, she broke out into hysterical sobbing, and a 
baptism of hot tears rained down on her husband's face. 

Kate, the maid, said to her fellow- servants in the course of 
the afternoon, that there is no knowing people at all, at all. 
She thought that Ralph Outram and his wife cared not much 
for each other, as far as her lynx eyes could judge. And be- 
hold, this accident, she said, revealed everything. 

"An' who would ever 'a' thought that Mrs. Outram could 
cry ? Yet she did, cried like a child," said Kate. 

But the others expressed their incredulity. It was play- 
acting, they said. 

And Kate waxed indignant; not for her mistress; but for 
the imputation that she had been taken in so easily. 

(to be continued.) 



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PUCK AND ARIEL 

BY A. W. CORPE. 

EWICE in the course of his dramatic creations has 
Shakespeare invoked the aid of imaginary super- 
natural agents, bodying forth in his imagina- 
tions ^'the forms of things unknown": once in 
the play from which these words are borrowed, 
a production of his early prime, in which Oberon and Titania 
are the governing spirits, and the shrewd and knavish Fuck 
and his fellows the ministering agents, and once again in the 
form of the "delicate" Ariel in one of his latest plays — pos- 
sibly his last entire work — which, by the contrariness of things, 
Hemminge and Condell have placed in the forefront of their col- 
lection. Puck as Robin Goodfellow was well known for his mis- 
chievous pranks long before the poet's time. The more potent 
Ariel is his own creation. It may be of interest to compare them. 
To begin with the earlier play : Puck is introduced to us 
meeting a Fairy who relates how he is employed in the service 
of Titania; how that it is his duty to dew the magic circles on 
the green, how that the cowslips are her pensioners, the spots on 
their gold coats rubies, and their freckles fairy favors, and how 
that he is in search of dewdrops to hang a pearl in every 
cowslip's ear. He accosts Puck, whom he seems imperfectly to 
recognize, by the not very complimentary title of "lob of 
spirits," and presently, suspecting who be is, speaks of his mis- 
chievous pranks : frightening the maids, upsetting various house- 
hold operations, misleading travelers and then laughing at them, 
while to those who would observe a respectful euphemism he 
would give help and good luck. Puck accepts the description 
of him and goes on to say that he is Oberon's jester, and to 
speak of the tricks he is fond of playing. While they are 
speaking, Oberon and Titania, meeting from opposite directions, 
come upon the stage. They have had a quarrel. Titania has 
as her attendant " a lovely boy stolen from an Indian king." 
Oberon is jealous and would have the boy as a knight of 
his train. Titania refuses to part with him. 

The fairy land buys not the child of me, 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 7 



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98 PUCK AND ARIEL [Oct., 

she says; the strife leads to mutual recrimination and becomes 
so heated that ^^all their elves creep into acorn cups and hide 
them there." Oberon calls "his gentle Puck" and commands 
him, in a speech containing an elegant compliment to the 
sovereign then upon the throne of England when Shakespeare 
wrote his play, to fetch him a certain flower, the juice of which, 
laid upon sleeping eyelids, would make the sleeper dote upon 
the first object that should present itself upon awakening. 
He says: 

Fetch me that flower . . . 

Ere the leviathan can swim a league. 

His ready minister replies:. 

rU put a girdle round about the earth 
In forty minutes. 

It is curious to reflect that among the forces of nature was 
one undreamed of in Shakespeare's day which was competent 
to perform the feat many times over in one single second. 
When he gets the flower Oberon will steal upon Titania in her 
sleep and drop the juice of the flower into her eyes, and by 
this means obtain the mastery over her. 

Meanwhile Oberon, invisible, is witness to a wrangle be- 
tween Helena and Demetrius. Helena was passionately in love 
with Demetrius, who indeed had formerly been her lover, but 
had transferred his affections to Helena's schoolfellow and bosom 
friend, Hermia. Demetrius' suit was favored by Hermia's father, 
and he had enjoined her under severe penalties according to 
the strict Athenian law to marry him. But Hermia had an- 
other lover in the person of Lysander, whom she preferred, 
but who found no favor in the father's eyes. In these circum- 
stances Lysander and Hermia agree to elope, and for that pur- 
pose they choose a wood, conveniently near to Athens, but 
beyond the reach of its stern law. Lysander and Hermia, 
good-naturedly thinking to assist Helena with Demetrius, con- 
fide their design to her, who in turn tells Demetrius. Deme- 
trius, of course, pursues the lovers, and Helena, in her doting 
fondness, follows him. In the wood Demetrius and Helena meet 
and Oberon overhears their contest of crossed love and de- 
termines to aid Helena. 

Ere he do quit this grove 
Thou shalt fly him and he shall seek thy love. 



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1907. J Puck and Ariel 99 

Puck having returned from his quest with the flowers, Obe«* 
ron proceeds to execute his design upon Titania ; not before, 
however, leaving some of the juice with Puck and instructing 
him how to use it. 

A sweet Athenian lady is in love 
With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes; 
But do it when the next thing he espies 
May be the lady. Thou shalt know the man 
By the Athenian garments he hath on. 

But Demetrius is not the only person in the wood clad in 
Athenian garments; for Lysander and Hermia are also there, 
and Puck lights upon them lying at a respectful proximity, 
and of course takes Lysander to be the object of his com- 
mission, and accordingly throws the power of the charm upon 
his eyes. Helena, in the course of her love chase, chances to 
light upon Lysander just as he is waking ; the charm operates 
upon him, he sees Helena and immediately falls in love with 
her, and Hermia is forgotten. 

Certain rude handicraftsmen of Athens, of whom it is only 
necessary to particularize the immortal Bottom, have planned 
to offer a dramatic entertainment to Theseus and Hippolyta in 
celebration of their forthcoming wedding : the same wood af- 
fords a stage for their rehearsal. Puck scenting some frolic, 
has made it his business to see what is going on: 

What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here 
So near the cradle of the fairy queen ? 
What, a play toward? Til be an auditor; 
An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause. 

The play is " the most lamentable comedy " of Py ramus and 
Thisbe, and Bottom is essaying the part of Pyramus. An exit 
gives Puck the opportunity to fix an ass' head upon him ; and 
when he presently returns to the stage, thus decorated, the 
rest, not unnaturally, are frighted and run away. Quince ex- 
presses the sentiment of the company in 

Bless thee, Bottom ! bless thee I thou art translated. 

Shakespeare was not without authority for this ridiculou^ 
metamorphosis : Albertus Magnus, three centuries before, had 
given the following recipe: "Si vis quod caput hominis assimi- 
latur capiti asini, sume de sanguine aselli et unge hominem in 



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loo Puck and Ariel [Oct, 

capite, et sic apparebif Bottom thinks they are making game 
of him, and he will carry it ofif by bravado; and accordingly 
he marches up and down, singing, so that his companions may 
know that he is not afraid. 

It will be remembered that we left Oberon meditating his 
design upon Titania. Presently the opportunity occurs. Titania, 
after giving certain directions to her elves, is lulled to sleep 
with the pretty song of which Herrick's *' Night Piece to Julia " 
seems in some sort a reminiscence. Oberon applies the charm. 
Bottom then marching up and down with his ass' head on, in 
the vicinity of Titania's ''cradle," and singing, presents him- 
self as the first object that her eyes meet on her awaking. Her 
first words: 

I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again : 
Mine ear is much enamored of thy note; 
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape, 

show that the charm has taken effect. After a little pretty 
talk, she says she will give him fairies to attend him : 

And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep. 
And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep. 

She calls upon her elves, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and the rest, 
to do him service. 

Be kind and courteous to this gentleman ; 
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes ; 
Feed him with apricocks, and dewberries. 
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; 
The honey- bags steal from the humble-bees. 
And for night- tapers crop their waxen thighs. 
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes. 
To have my love to bed, and to arise; 
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies 
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes; 
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies. 

While this dalliance is going on, Oberon encounters Puck, 
who relates what he has done. They come upon Demetrius 
and Hermia, when it is made evident that Puck has operated 
upon the wrong man. This must be put right; and Puck is 
ordered to fetch Helena, while Oberon will himself lay the 
charm upon Demetrius. Helena is brought, and with her Ly- 



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1907.] Puck and Ariel ioi 

Sander. Lysander is already enamored of Helena, and Deme- 
triuSy if he should now awake, will be so also. '^ Lord I What 
fools these mortals be I " is Puck's comment. The tangle which 
ensues, when, on Demetrius waking, both he and Lysander, 
leaving Hermia, pursue Helena, is charmingly worked out: 
how Helena, hurt by being mocked as she supposes by all 
three, recalls to Hermia their school-days' friendship; how 
Hermia, amazed at Lysander's behavior, upbraids Helena, whom 
she supposes to have stolen her lover away; how her anger 
flashes forth when she imagines Helena to be reflecting upon 
her small stature compared with her own "personage, her tall 
personage.'' 

How low am I, thou painted maypole ? speak ; 

How low am I ? I am not yet so low 

But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes. 

How Helena timidly implores the others' aid: 
Let her not hurt me; I was never curst; 
I have no gift at all in shrewishness; 
I am a right maid for my cowardice; 
Let her not strike me. You perhaps may think, 
Because she's something lower than myself. 
That I can match her. . . • 
She was a vixen when she went to school; 
And, though she be but little, she is fierce. 

The two men, as might be expected, did not confine their 
feelings to words. And in order to prevent bloodshed, Puck 
was ordered to cover the sky with fog, and to lead the rivals 
astray, so that they might not meet. At length they are all 
brought together; the charm is applied to Lysander's eyes, so 
that he shall return to his former love; and all ends happily. 

Titania is still in the company of her '* gentle joy." Bot- 
tom enters into the humor of the situation, for he desires Cob- 
web to kill him a bumblebee on the top of a thistle, and 
bring him the honey bag, and have a care that the bag do not 
break, for he would not have him overflown with a honey-bag ; 
or possibly it is, that his appetite and feelings have changed 
with his transformation, for he wishes for oats and hay to eat, 
and complains that he is such a tender ass, that if his hair do 
but tickle him, he must scratch. Titania suggests that a cer- 
tain venturous fairy of hers shall get him some new nuts from 



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I02 PUCK AND Ariel [Oct., 

the squirrel's hoard, but he prefers a handful of peas. At 
length an '' exposition of sleep" comes upon him, and Titania 
is similarly affected. Oberon now takes pity upon his queen ; 
she had expressed penitence, and had given up the changeling, 
and he commands Puck to take off from Bottom the '^ trans- 
formed scalp," and he himself will restore Titania. 

These things done, the work of Puck and his fellows is 
ended. It only remains to celebrate the triple marriage; to 
laugh kindly at the efforts of Bottom and his companions — for, 
as Theseus had said: 

Never anything can be amiss. 
When simpleness and duty tender it, 

and for Puck to speak his Epilogue. 

In Ariel, the wonder-working spirit of "The Tempest" we 
have a being of a different order. 

Several years before the commencement of the action of the 
play, the witch, Sycorax, had been banished from Argier, on 
account of her foul sorceries, and left upon the desert island, 
the scene of the play, where she gave birth to Caliban, "a 
freckled whelp . . • not honored with a human shape." 
Ariel was at this time under the control of Sycorax, and be- 
cause he refused to comply with her evil commands, she caused 
him, by aid of her more potent ministers, to be confined in a 
cloven pine. Sycorax, even had she had the will, had not the 
power to undo the charm; and at her death, some time after, 
Ariel still remained in this unhappy condition, in which Pros- 
pero, on his arrival at the island, found him. Prospero, who 
was deeply skilled in magic, by his more potent art, made the 
pine gape, and set him free; from which time to that of the 
commencement of the action of the play — some twelve years — 
Ariel continued to serve Prospero and do his bidding. 

The scene opens with a great storm, in which a ship is 
seen to founder, and the passengers (among whom were Pros- 
perous brother, the usurping Duke of Milan, and the King of 
Naples and his son), together with the crew, to be lost. Mi- 
randa's first words: 

If by your art, my dearest father, you have 
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them, 

show us that she was not unaccustomed to displays of magical 
power by her father. She continues: 



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1907.] Puck and Ariel 103 

Oh, I have suffered 
With those that I saw suffer I A brave vessel, 
Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her, 
Dash'd all to pieces. Oh, the cry did knock 
Against my very heart ! Poor souls, they perish'd ! 
Had I been any god of power, I would 
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere 
It should the good ship so have swallow'd, and 
The fraughting souls within her. 

Prospero's calm and dignified reply: 

Be collected ; 
No more amazement : tell your piteous heart 
There's no harm done, 

and a little further on : 

Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort, 
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd 
The very virtue of compassion in thee, 
I have with such provision in mine art 
So safely order'd that there is no soul — 
No, not so much perdition as an hair 
Betid to any creature in the vessel 
Which thou heard 'st cry, which thou saw'st sink, 

set the key-note to both their characters. 

After a while Ariel enters, and his address: 

All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come 

To answer thy best pleasure ; be't to fly. 

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride 

On the curPd clouds, to thy strong bidding task 

Ariel and all his quality, 

and his description of the- storm and shipwreck, contrived by 
him, clearly exhibit his attitude towards Prospero, and his own 
and his fellow- spirits control over nature. It is curious to note 
the phenomenon of St. Elmo's fire in conjunction with light- 
ning, as the connection would be unknown in Shakespeare's time. 
To have raised a storm, shipwrecked a vessel, saved the 
lives of the passengers and crew, and even made their garments 
fresher for their drenching, and, as appears further on, brought 
into harbor the ship itself, which Miranda had seen '' dash'd all 
to pieces," would seem to be a sufficient exercise of Ariel's 
power, but Prospero goes on to demand something further: 



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104 PUCK AND ARIEL [Oct., 

Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains, 
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised, 
Which is not yet performed me. 

How now ? moody ? 
What is't thou canst demand? 

returns Prospero, and proceeds to remind him of the torment 
from which he had been freed, taxes him with forgetfulness, 
calls him " malignant thing," " dull thing/' and threatens severer 
torture : 

If thou more murmur'st I will rend an oak 
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till 
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters. 

Ariel replies: 

Pardon, master; 
I will be correspondent to command 
And do my spiriting gently. 

Prospero, on this, promises him his freedom after two days: 

That's my noble master I 
What shall I do? say what; what shall I do ? 

is Ariel's reply. Prospero directs Ariel to make himself like a 
water-nymph, invisible to all eyes but his, and gives certain 
secret instructions. In pursuance of these Ariel is presently 
heard singing some songs (pleasantly associated by us with 
Purcell's music), by which he lures Ferdinand into the presence 
of Prospero and Miranda. By a singularly graceful expression, 
Prospero calls Miranda's attention to Ferdinand's presence. 
Curiously enough Swift, in " Martinus Scriblerus on the Art of 
Sinking in Poetry," has instanced this very passage (without 
even taking the trouble to quote it correctly) as an example of 
what he calls '' the Breskin." The beautiful scene of the meet- 
ing between Ferdinand and Miranda follows, wherein each takes 
the other to be of more than human origin ; but this, as it does 
not concern Ariel, must not detain us. 

We next meet Ariel, invisible as before, attending the 
usurping Duke, the King of Naples, Sebastian his brother, and 
others, while a plot is being concocted for the murder of the 
King, which, by Ariel's intervention, is frustrated. It would 
appear from Ariel's remark at the end of this scene, 

Prospero, my lord, shall know what I have done, 
that Ariel acted, in this, on his own initiative. 



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1907.] PUCK AND ARIEL 105 

The scene shifts to another part of the island, where Caliban 
is venting his ill-humor in cursing Prospero. He says: 

His spirits hear me. 
But yet I needs must curse. 

His thoughts revert to the various forms Prosperous spirits 
assume, sometimes as urchins, sometimes like firebrands, or as 
apes, hedgehogs, and adders. Trinculo and Stephano enter, and 
Caliban supposes them to be spirits of Prosperous, come to tor- 
ment him, and implores their mercy. Stephano gives Caliban 
to drink of his bottle and Caliban is ready to worship him: 

That's a brave god and bears celestial liquor. 

Caliban, after a time, proposes a scheme for revenge on 
Prospero : 

I'll yield thee him asleep 
When thou may'st knock a nail into his head, 

he says to Stephano ; from which we may perhaps gather that, 
in pursuance of his benevolent intentions, Prospero had not 
omitted to instruct Caliban in Scripture history. Later he sug- 
gests alternative methods, and especially insists on the necessity 
of getting possession of Prospero's books: 

For without them 
He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not 
One spirit to command; they all do hate him 
As rootedly as I. 

Ariel, as we should suspect, has been present, invisible, at 
their conference, and will, of course, warn Prospero. 

The scene again changes to the locality of Antonio and the 
others. Accompanied by solemn music, several '' strange shapes " 
bring in a banquet; presently, amidst thunder and lightning, 
Ariel enters in the form of a harpy, claps his wings upon the 
table, and the banquet vanishes. Ariel sternly denounces the 
conspirators, tells them that their misdeeds are known, that he 
and his fellows are " ministers of fate " and invulnerable, while 
the conspirators themselves are powerless: That the Powers 
have incensed the seas and shores against their peace, and that 
lingering perdition attends them, unless they with heart's sorrow 
amend. Then Ariel vanishes and the " shapes " enter and, to 
soft music, carry out the table. 

Having by these means terrified and confounded the con- 
spirators, Prospero determines to bestow upon the eyes of 

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io6 PUCK AND Ariel [Oct., 

Ferdinand and Miranda " some vanity of his art/' and requires 
Ariel to provide a masque in which goddesses appear, and 
nymphs and reapers join in a dance, in the midst of which, 
at a sudden gesture of Frospero, the whole vanishes, which gives 
occasion for his celebrated speech beginning : 

Our revels now are ended. 

This picture of the final catastrophe was no doubt inspired 
by the prediction, common to secular and sacred lore, of the 
consummation of all things. It would not be difficult, however, 
to claim for it a prevision of Berkeley's Theory of Matter^ air 
being supposed by Shakespeare, as by St. Paul, to be immaterial. 
Prospero again calls Ariel : 

Spirit, 
We must prepare to meet with Caliban. 

Ariel replies: 

Ay, my commander; when I presented Ceres, 
I thought to have told thee of it; but I feared 
Lest I might anger thee. 

Ariel proceeds to tell how he had led Caliban and his com- 
panions, red-hot with drinking, into a filthy pool near Prospero's 
cell. Prospero then directs Ariel to fetch certain gorgeous ap- 
parel and expose it to their view. There is fine satire in Cali- 
ban's restraint of Stephano's and Trinculo's admiration of this 
'' trash," and their eagerness to possess themselves of it. While 
they are disputing about it, they are hunted about by spirits 
in the shape of hounds. Ariel cries : 

Hark, they roar ! 

The scene is now before Prospero's cell ; he is arrayed in 
his magic robes; addressing Ariel, he says: 

Now doth my project gather to a head : 

My charms crack not ; my spirits obey ; and time 

Goes upright with his carriage. How's the day ? 

On the sixth hour; at which time, my lord, 
You said our work should cease, 

replies Ariel. Then, answering Prospero, he tells him the dis- 
tracted condition in which he had left the conspirators against 
Alonzo, and the distress of Gonzalo : 

His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops 
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em 



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1907.] Puck and Ariel 107 

That if you now beheld them, your afifections 
Would become tender. 

Pros. Dost thou think so, spirit? 

Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human. 

Pros. And mine shall. 

Hast thou, which art but air, a feeling 
Of their afHictions, and shall not myself. 
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, 
Passion'd as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? 
. . . Go release them, Ariel. 

After the fine passage commencing: 

Ye elves of mills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, 

recalling Medea's adjuration in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Frospero 

proceeds : 

But this rough magic 
I here abjure; and, when I have required 
Some heavenly music — which even now I do^ 
To work mine end upon their senses that 
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff. 
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth. 
And deeper than did ever plummet sound 
I'll drown my book. 

Ariel brings in Antonio and the rest, to whom Frospero 
grants pardon; but, perceiving that they appear not to recog- 
nize him, he determines to present himself as he was ^'some- 
time Milan " : 

Quickly, spirit; 
Thou shalt ere long be free, 

he says; whereupon Ariel sings the exquisite little song which 
has served to perpetuate the name of Arne. 

Why, that's my dainty Ariel ! I shall miss thee ; 
But yet thou shalt have freedom, 

is Frospero's comment. 

Yet another labor is to be put upon Ariel : he is to bring 
the master, the boatswain, and the other mariners before Fros- 
pero. The general eclaircissement takes place; Alonzo regains 
his son, who is discovered playing with Miranda at the not al- 
together love- compelling game of chess; lastly, Caliban and his 



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io8 Puck and Ariel [Oct. 

companions are driven in, and all ends happily. Even to Cali- 
ban we become somewhat reconciled, when, apostrophizing the 
drunken butler, he exclaims: 

What a thrice- double ass 
Was I to take this drunkard for a god 
And worship this dull fool I 

It is probably from the opening words of Prospero's Epi- 
logue, together with certain expressions in the latter part of the 
play, that some have supposed this was Shakespeare's farewell 
to the stage, and the calm dignity of the character of Frospero 
would favor this; but all that can be certainly known is that 
this beautiful play was one of his latest works. 

Comparing, or rather contrasting, the orders of imaginary 
spirits, we find Puck and his comrades constituting a body of 
attendants attached to the service of Oberon and Titania, the 
King and Queen of Fairyland ; some at the disposition of the 
King, others at that of the Queen ; Puck in particular, exhibit- 
ing a freakish spirit of mischief, of which he himself is pleased 
to give several illustrations; and not without a capacity for 
blundering and obeying his orders in a manner somewhat per- 
functory. 

Ariel and his fellows, on the other hand, appear as actuated 
by superior intelligence, and possessed of independent power 
and able to exercise individuality of action ; it does not appear 
that they are under the subjection of any dominant authority, 
but may be brought under human control by magical arts of 
greater or less power ; the evil witch, Sycorax, was able to con- 
fine Ariel, but not to release him; Prospero, by his more po- 
tent art, could do either. After the first outbreak of petulance 
— which gives us the opportunity of learning his history — he 
serves Prospero with an affectionate devotion inspired by grati- 
tude, to which Frospero responds by frequent expressions of 
admiration and even affection. 

Neither Puck nor Ariel is quite the same as the Jinnee of 
the Arabian Tales, which seems to be a third variety of these 
sports of the imagination, and more nearly represents a blind 
force put in motion at the instance of the person possessing 
the requisite authority. Puck will laugh at human folly ; Ariel 
will sympathize with human affections; while the Jinnee will 
preserve the unconcerned indifference of a statue. 



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flew Books. 

Among the many problems that 
THE SECULAR UNIVERSITT. demand the careful consideration 

of the Catholic hierarchy in Amer- 
ca, not the least is the question of what policy is to be pur- 
sued regarding the rapidly increasing numbers of our young 
men who are entering secular universities. The dangers which 
they incur there are all too obvious. And these dangers are 
not merely for themselves. A large proportion of these young 
men will, presumably, afterwards occupy important positions in 
life. If they come from their C3llege or university with faith 
lost or weakened, then instead of being, as they ought to be» 
a source of strength to the Catholic community in which they 
will live, they are likely to exert a malign influence. What is 
to be done? Nothing whatever, has been the answer hitherto 
of a good number of the loyal friends of Catholic education. 
If young men will run into the danger, their destruction is 
upon their own head ; if you give them any official recogni- 
tion, you merely encourage others to follow them. This shorts 
sighted view is rapidly disappearing; many of the hierarchy 
admit that something must be done for the Catholic students 
of non- Catholic universities; some have actually begun to do 
something. The question was discussed at the recent meeting 
of the Catholic Educational Association in Milwaukee. The 
most practical contribution to the discussion was made by the 
Rev. Father Farrell, of Cambridge.* With his four years' ex- 
perience as director of the Catholic Club at Harvard, he was 
able to offer many valuable suggestions as to how a priest in 
charge of the student body might exercise a beneficent influ- 
ence on the young men. His own experience is encouraging; 
and he pleads against the policy of undiscriminating denuncia- 
tion and anathema: 

Concerning the character of the Catholic students attending 
the secular university, there has been a good deal of unfair 
criticism which my experience pronounces unwarranted and 
harmful, driving the student who hears it, as I have known 
it to happen, farther from the priest who sometimes utters it, 
and farther from the Church. It is true that these young peo- 
ple attend the secular university just as they attend the pub- 

* The Catholic Chaplain at the Secular University. By the Rev. John J. Farrell. Spiritual 
Director of St. Paul's Catholic Club of Harvard University. 



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no New Books [Oct, 

lie school, because their parents send them, against the coun- 
sel and protest of the Church. The parents, not infrequently, 
make little of the Church's protest, because they find priests 
and nuns attend these universities, and on that account re- 
gard the protest of the Church as a dead letter. In character 
I have found these students about what their home training 
and early religious education have made them. I find a fair 
proportion strong in the faith, and faithful to its practice, not- 
withstanding the statement made before this association a 
year ago by a reverend father, who took for granted as true 
the word of " a gentleman who told him that, as a rule, the 
Catholics of Harvard were no credit to the Church." 

Father Farrell has signally helped towards an intelligent dis- 
cussion of the question, and emphatically displays its magni- 
tude, by submitting a carefully prepared table setting forth, 
approximately, the number of Catholic students and Catholic 
instructors or officers found at the non-Catholic colleges and 
universities of the United States for the year 1906-1907. Sum- 
marizing this table, he writes: 

We have found 5,380 young men and 1,557 young women, 
making a total of 6,937. ^ovf much greater these figures 
would be if all the records were accurate, and made to include 
the one hundred and thirty-six colleges not heard from, is a 
matter hard to determine. 

That the actual number is very much in excess of the above 
figures may be inferred even from the single fact that, in reply 
to Father Farrell's inquiry, the answer of Columbia University 
was : " No record, but very many ; probably thousands in the 
last ten years." Whatever plan the bishops, in their wisdom^ 
individually or collectively, may decide upon. Father Farrell's 
statistics demonstrate that, to ^ay the least, the laissez-faire 
policy no longer can cope with the situation. 

In a conference delivered to a 
THE CHURCH IR FRANCE. Catholic audience in Luxemburg, 

the rector of the Catholic Institute 
of Toulouse, Mgr. Batiffol, treated of the measures by which 
the French clergy maybe expected to meet the new conditions 
which the Separation Law and the rejection of the scheme of 
associations has imposed upon them.* In 1905 the number of 

* VAvenir Frochain du Cath9licisme en France. By Mgr. BatifiFoI. Paris : Bloud et Cic 



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1907.] New Books i i i 

bishops and priests drawing a salary from the government was 
41,721. These, along with many others, are now reduced to 
depend on their own resources or the loyalty of their flocks ; 
upon whom, besides, will devolve the other charges necessary 
for the maintenance of religion. 

Comparatively few priests, says the Monseigneur, will be 
able to support themselves by manual labor in mechanical or 
agricultural life. He expects to find more efficient resources in 
mutual assurance societies, to be organized in the other dio- 
ceses, as is already done in Paris. Each parish will be re- 
quested to draw up a list of its receipts and outlays. The 
budgets of each parish must receive the approbation of the 
bishop, who will lay a progressive tax on the rich parishes, 
and, out of the proceeds, will assist the poorer ones. All the 
contributions tor the support of the clergy will be centralized 
in the bishop, who will distribute them to the parochial clergy. 
This plan will seem strange to Americans ; and still stranger 
the motive which prompts the hierarchy to adopt it. " The 
prevailing conviction among our bishops is that the dignity and 
independence of the priest demands that he shall not receive 
his support directly from the hands of his parishioners." Evi- 
dently it is with great reluctance that the governing body of 
the Church in France finds itself reduced to depend upon the 
faithful. 

With the removal of the restrictions imposed by the Con- 
cordat, which forbade any changes in the number of parishes, 
and thus maintained many priests in places where they no 
longer found any work, '' in a few years from now many par- 
ishes, whose populations are diminishing, many parishes, too> 
alas I in certain districts where religion is falling towards zero, 
will be transformed into out -missions of more populous and 
more Christian parishes." "We shall abandon the mendacious 
arrangement which, hitherto, professed to count in each parish 
as many parishioners as the official census counted inhabitants." 
On the whole, Mgr. Batiffol believes, though there will be much 
hardship and even hunger for many priests, the material wants 
of the clergy will be fairly well provided for. 

What about the political situation ? Catholicism in France, 
says the rector, failed to make any effective resistance to the 
radical campaign, because Catholics had no organization. " We 
have always been protected, always privileged, always on the 



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112 NEW Books [Oct, 

side of power. We had for King the most Christian King; he 
was consecrated by the hands of our bishops; he, in turn^ 
nominated to bishoprics and benefices. How could the clergy 
develop any political action of its own ? The monarchy and 
the Galilean Church fell together. And when, after the Revo- 
lution, the State religion had disappeared, Catholicism was 
recognized even by the Napoleonic Concordat as the religion 
of the majority of Frenchmen ; it was once more official and its 
clergy became a hierarchy of government functionaries. How 
could the Catholicism of the Concordat ever become a school 
of opposition, and endow us with the spirit of a minority ? " 

Another reason why Catholics have not developed a political 
union in France, as has been done in Germany, is that the 
Frenchman considers his religion as something personal, exclu- 
sively spiritual, and, therefore, having nothing in common with 
the political and temporal. In compensation, however, for the 
absence of a Catholic political party, the rector points out, 
there are large numbers of Catholics in all the parties. The 
key to future triumph for the Church will be to stimulate all 
these Catholics to exert their influence on the side of religious 
interests. 

The concluding section of the address is taken up with in- 
sisting upon the necessity for the clergy to enter, a great deal 
more than they have hitherto done, into all kinds of works for 
the social, moral, and economic amelioration of the people's 
condition. '' It is not enough for the priest to say : Let us 
go to the people. He must, above all, come out of his sacristy, 
show himself, draw the people to him, and acquire that as- 
cendancy which is always enjoyed by a man of energy, kind- 
ness, and self-denial, as soon as the people discover that he 
seeks only the welfare of others." 

That French Catholics have already taken up, on a large 
scale, in many various lines, the social work from which Mgr. 
Batiffol hopes so much, is witnessed to by a solid volume, al- 
ready in its second edition, closely packed with statistical and 
other information on the subject, by Professor Max Turmann.* 
He records the methods and successes of various societies in 
different parts of France, in the manufacturing and the rural 
world. His scientific training enables him to give the reader 

* Actwitis SocttUei. Par Max Turmann. Paris : V. LecofEre. 



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1907.] New Books i cs 

valuable appreciations on the strong and weak points of the 
different enterprises which he examines. Like Mgr. Batiffol, he 
expects precious results for the Church if Catholics, forgetting 
old prejudices and worn-out traditions, accept the fact that the 
present age belongs to democracy, and, with vigorous good- 
will, enter into the work of social amelioration. Students, the- 
oretical or practical, of the social sciences will be repaid for a 
careful reading of this instructive volume. 

" Let this be carefully weighed : 

THE PRINCE OF THE APOS- The Church of England to-day 

TLES. claims continuity with the Church 

of England before the Reforma- 
tion, and the Church of England before the Reformation was 
in conscious dependence upon the Holy See in spirituals from 
start to finish; that is from A. D. 597 to A. D. 1534." These 
words, which occur in the preface, may be taken as repre- 
senting the main thesis of this earnest little work,* which, 
with forcible logic and sober eloquence, presses upon Anglicans 
the necessity of reunion with the Holy See. The witness of 
the Scriptures, of the early Church, of the papal consciousness, 
and of the English Church itself, first in the early British 
period, afterwards in the later centuries, down to the Tudor 
disruption, are set forth strikingly, though without much elabora- 
tion. The radical change of attitude towards the Papacy that 
occurred in the sixteenth century was not, our authors hold, 
the work of the English Church or of the English nation: 

The account of the English Reformation, so long current 
among Anglicans, to the effect that the Church of England 
was weary of the Papal yoke and eagerly embraced the op- 
portunity afforded by Henry to shake herself free from * * the 
usurpations of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable 
enormities," has been so thoroughly discredited of late years 
by our best historians, both secular and ecclesiastical, that 
no man who has due regard for his reputation as a scholar, 
will any more venture to uphold the old time tradition about 
the '* blessed English Reformation." It has been slain by 
the cold logic of facts. 

The argument is strengthened by appeal to the findings of 

• Tht Prince of the Apostles. A Study. By the Rev. Paul James Francis, S.A., Editor of 
The Lamp, and the Rev. Spencer Jones, M.A, Garrison, N. Y, : The Lamp Publishing 
Company. 

VOL. LXXXVU— 8 



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114 New BOOKS [Oct., 

Dr. Gairdner, Dr. Bliss, Mr. Luard, the editor of Robert Gros- 
seteste's letters, and other contemporary students of English 
history. An objection made by a class, who are here called 
Tridentine Anglicans, against the enterprise of reunion, towards 
which the Rev. Mr. Spencer Jones and his associate author are 
so devotedly laboring, is reviewed and disposed of: 

If Rome had only not added to the faith, and asked no 
more of us than the acceptance of the Council of Trent and 
the primitive teaching concerning the Primacy of the Apos- 
tolic See, we could readily allow as much, for, in fact, that 
would be no more than the pre-Reformation belief of the 
Church of England, to which, as Anglo- Catholics, we are 
bound in consistency to adhere. But the dogmas of the Im- 
maculate Conception and Papal Infallibility, added to the re- 
peated refusal of Rome to recognize the validity of our orders, 
render all effort to repair the sixteenth century breach hope- 
less and vain, since nothing that we can do is at all likely to 
alter the de fide definitions of 1854 and 1870, or to effect a re- 
call of the Bull *• Apostolicae Curse." 

Neither of these dogmas, the volume proceeds to show, is a 
novelty. Even Luther himself taught the Immaculate Concep- 
tion, and '' If the corypheus of Protestantism so lucidly ex- 
pounded the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, three 
hundred years before it was defined by Pius IX., it can hardly 
be called a new doctrine." Acceptance of the Vatican defin- 
ition " would mean two or three amendments to the Thirty - 
nine Articles, which are certainly not irreformable." The sub- 
ject of Anglican orders the writers consider as one involving 
the question of jurisdiction and, therefore, not within the scope 
of the present study, which is limited to matters of faith. But 
Catholics, who respect the earnestness of such men as the Rev. 
Spencer Jones and his associate, when discussing the topic, say : 
Why waste time over the question of reunion ? There is but one 
way to that consummation — complete submission to Rome by 
Anglicans. Until they are ready to take this step nothing can 
be done. The Rev. Mr. Spencer Jones meets this assertion 
half way. Rome, he admits, cannot be expected to change her 
dogmatic position. Reunion, he admits, can come only by the 
conforming of the other party to Roman doctrine. Yet such a 
conformity would not be extinction: 

It may be urged that if it should be proved possible to con- 



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1907.] New Books iig 

form to the dogmatic position of Rome, that will amount to a 
surrender of the entire Anglican position. But this is a mis- 
take ot the first magnitude. For while, as we said above, it 
is only the few who appreciate the significance of dogma, al- 
though all benefit by it, where the shoe pinches with many is 
the plane of discipline not dogma. Matters of discipline 
touch us all round and strike us at once; and so far from 
changes in discipline making no difference, they would, Ih 
the eyes of the general run of men, make all the difference ia 
the world ; and it is here, we repeat, that Rome can change, 
that she has changed actually in the past, and might change 
therefore in the future. Discipline is, in fact, variously ad- 
ministered in different quarters of the world to-day, and there 
would be nothing impractical, therefore, in looking for modi- 
fications in that direction. 

Those who believe that no sincere mind can resist the im- 
pact ot sound logic will find it difficult to admit that any An- 
glican in good faith can read this weighty little volume and 
remain unconvinced. But Cardinal Newman, who knew human 
nature and had considerable experience in controversy, has told 
us that we may expect to convince men by mere logic when 
we have learned to shoot round corners. Nevertheless we may 
hope that the efforts of these earnest workers towards the reali- 
zation of the Savior's prediction of one fold and one shepherd 
will, through the grace of God, be a helping hand to some souls 
struggling towards the light. 

In this volume • the Convent of 

IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF the Good Shepherd, of New York 

THE GOOD SHEPHERD. City, has a touching and appro- 

By Katharine E. Conway, p^iate memorial of its jubilee, 

which will occur on October 2, 
1907. No work of the Church, perhaps, appeals more widely 
and deeply to the sympathy of the world than that of the 
Good Shepherd nuns, who devote their lives, with what ?eal 
and success need not be said, to the rescue of their fallen sis- 
ters. Probably no house of the order has grown more rapidly 
than that one which has found in Miss Conway a worthy his- 
torian. The New York foundation, she observes, was unique, in 
beginning with the toleration rather than the approval of the 

•/» the Footprints of the Good Shepherd, New Yorh, iSsj-J^orj. By Katberinc E. Con- 
way. New York : Convent of the Good Shepherd. 



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li6 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

chief ecclesiastical authority. Archbishop Hughes, for reasons 
that Miss Conway mentions, was unwilling to give the sisters 
permission to establish themselves within his jurisdiction. He 
did not expect that their labors would prove successful. 

It was a charitable Protestant, after all, who spoke the de- 
cisive word which secured the introduction of the Nuns of the 
Good Shepherd into New York in 1857. ** They will swamp 
us," said the Archbishop, "and the end will be failure.*' 
"But, Archbishop," said Miss Foster (the Protestant lady), 
" would you consider the work a failure if but one grievous 
sin were prevented ? The house in question would undoubt- 
edly prevent many mortal sins. Would not this be to the 
honor of God, even though none of the inmates was thorough- 
ly converted ? " The Archbishop surrendered, and gave per- 
mission to start the House, though still regarding it as a 
doubtful experiment. 

The experimental stage was soon over, and the order began 
at once to increase its personnel, to enlarge its house, and to 
give proofs of its efficiency that won for it friends of all kinds 
and of all persuasions. In the course of time it gained muni- 
cipal and state recognition; and sent out sisters to establish 
convents, first in Boston, and later on in Brooklyn. Besides 
telling the story of the convent's growth. Miss Conway gives an 
interesting account of the rule of life practised by the Sisters, 
and their methods of treating their charges, with many touch- 
ing illustrations of the divine efficacy of the Good Shepherd's 
power. We may hope that the successes of New York are but 
an earnest of what the noble daughters of Pere Eudes are yet 
to do in America in their special field. For, as Miss Conway 

says: 

Many changes are before us, but of one thing we may be 

sure : no matter how great our social and scientific progress, 

the sad old fashions of sin and sorrow and death will not pass 

away while time endures ; and, while they last, there will be 

• work for the Nuns of the Good Shepherd. 

M. Marechal, who, in his previous 

LAMMENAIS AND LAHAR- studies concerning the influence 

TINE. of Lammenais upon Sainte-Beuve 

By Christian Marechal. and Victor Hugo, has already 

shown a profound knowledge of 
the course of ideas which agitated the deeper currents of re- 

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1907.] New Books 117 

ligious and politico- religious thought in the early and middle 
decades of the last century in Europe, here undertakes to prove 
that, for more than twenty years, Lamartine drew almost all 
his inspiration on religious, philosophical, and social topics from 
Lammenais.* The latter was the dominant influence which 
ruled and directed the author of the Harmonies^ Meditations^ 
La Politique Rationelle^ Jocelyn^ and the Voyage en Orient, 

M. Marechal's method is thoroughly scientific and objective. 
He analyzes closely the published works and a good deal of 
private correspondence of the poet; he compares idea with idea; 
follows the development of Lamartine's political and religious 
tenets; and compares the data thus gathered with the writings 
of Lamennais, to find that, to an astonishing extent, at least 
from the year 181 7, Lamartine is but a reflection of Lamennais. 
Besides enjoying an exhibition (on an extended scale) of acute 
critical powers, the reader of this fine literary study will, un- 
less he is already uncommonly well acquainted with these two 
writers, get a deeper insight into the minds of both and into 
the intellectual struggles of the period. 

Those who have enjoyed the charm 

BESIDE STILL WATERS, of From a College Window^ with 

By Benson. sweet spirit, lofty thought, and e:(- 

quisite tenderness expressed in 
limpid, delightful English, will find a similar treat in Mr. Ben- 
son's present work.f It is cast in the form of a biography of 
an educated Englishman who prefers the things of the mind 
and the joys of the simple life to the more boisterous pleasures 
of society or the prizes of public life. Mr. Benson is an amia- 
ble Christian stoic, deeply tinged with a moral idealism. As 
he narrates the development of the life of his fictitious hero, 
Hugh Neville, he descants upon the experiences and problems 
of life in a vein of gentle optimism tinged with a shade of 
melancholy, never acute enough to pass into sorrow. The phi- 
losophy of the book is fairly summed up in a passage towards 
the end when Hugh, from a spot dear to his youth, is casting 
a retrospective glance over his path: 

The thought of the long intervening years came back to 

* Lammenais and Lamartine, Par Christian Marechal. Paris : Bloud et Cie. 
\ Beside SHU Waters. By Arthur Christopher Benson. New York: G. P. Putnam's 
Sons. 



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II 8 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

Hugh with a sense of wonder and gratitude. He had half 
expected then, he remembered, that some great experience 
would perhaps come to him, and lift him out of his shadowed 
thoughts, his vain regrets. That great experience had not 
befallen him, but how far more wisely and tenderly he had 
been dealt with instead ! Experience had been lavished 
upon him ; he had gained interest, he had practised activity, 
and he had found patience and hope by the way. He knew 
no more than he knew then of the great and dim design that 
lay behind the world, and now he hardly desired to know. 
He had been led, he had been guided, with a perfect tender- 
ness and a deliberate love. ... A great sense of tran- 
quillity and peace settled down upon his spirit. He cast him- 
self in an utter dependence upon the mighty will of the Fa- 
ther ; and in that calm of thought his little cares, and they 
were many, faded like wreaths of steam cast abroad upon the 
air. To be sincere and loving and quiet, that was the ineffa- 
ble secret ; not to scheme for fame, or influence, or even for 
usefulness ; to receive, as in a channel, the strength and 
sweetness of God. 

As one reading Mr. Benson's pages feels the deep religious 
earnestness of the man, one wonders what the power of his 
pen would be if to him had come the crowning grace which 
has been vouchsafed to his brother. 

Lovers of the Imitation will be 
THOMAS A EEMPIS. well repaid by a study of Mr. De 

Montmorency's fine, scholarly work. 
As the title * implies, he is a staunch advocate of the A Kem> 
pis authorship. He treats the vexed question extensively, if 
aot exhaustively. He dismisses Gerson, abbot of Vercelli, as a 
mere myth ; and, though he acknowledges that some of the ar- 
guments in favor of the claims of the Chancellor Gersen are 
perplexing, he ultimately rejects them. The claims of Walter 
Hilton he considers more plausible, and subjects them to search- 
ing and acute literary and documentary criticism. But in the 
end he decides for the monk of Mount St. Agnes of Winde- 
sheim. The first section of the book is a description of the age 
in which A Kempis lived. This historic sketch is bold and 
full. The part of it which is devoted to depicting the external 

• Thomas ^ Kemfis : His A^e and Book. With 23 Illustrations. By J. E. G. De Mont- 
morency. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 



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1907.] New Books 119 

conditions of ecclesiastical life, and the prominent figures of the 
secular side of the Church, gives so much prominence to the 
fruits of human frailty, and deals so liberally in dark colors 
and shades, when describing many ecclesiastical potentates, 
that the picture becomes somewhat false. 

But this is, to a great extent, counterbalanced by the ap- 
preciative manner in which the spiritual, invisible life of the 
period is related. The author endeavors to trace the influence 
of the line of mystics who were the highest manifestation of 
that life, of which the Imitation is the classic expression. Be- 
lieving that the mystic movement was carried to ics height in 
England, he dwells markedly upon the names of Richard Rolle 
of Hampole, Walter Hilton, and their fellow-countrymen. But 
his national preferences do not prevent him from treating wor- 
thily the German mystics too. Unfortunately, we cannot say 
as much of his impartiality^ when his religious prepossessions 
come into play. For they have led him to believe in the ex- 
istence of a rivalry, if not an incompatibility, between the mys- 
tical movement and the visible organization, and to see in the 
Protestant Reformation the culmination of the mystical tenden- 
cy. He admits, however, that " the author felt nothing of the 
Reform movement so busily at work in his time. No touch of 
Wicklivism, no taint of LoUardy appears in the little books.'' 

It might be argued, too, we think, that in analyzing the 
genesis and development of mysticism he has, at some periods, 
assigned too much importance to philosophic doctrines and in- 
fluences which were chiefly academic and intellectual. The 
chapter on various manuscripts and editions of the Imitation 
is full of interest, which is enhanced by numerous photograv- 
ures of famous texts and manuscripts. The analysis of the lit- 
erary structure, too, in which all the quotations from and allu- 
sions to sacred and profane authors are marked, besides being 
interesting, are evidence that the study of the Imitation has been 
for Mr. De Montmorency a labor of love. 

For one service, too, we must thank him. It is his refutation 
of the charge of selfishness made, in virulent language, against 
the spirit of the Imitation by Dean Milman, in his History of 
Latin Christianity. "There is," writes the Anglican dean, "no 
love of man in the book: of feeding the hungry, of clothing 
the naked, of visiting the prisoner, even of preaching there is 
profound, total silence. The world is dead to the votary of 



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120 New Books [Oct., 

the Imitation, and he to the world, dead in a sense absolutely 
repudiated by the first principles of the Christian faith. Chris- 
tianity to be herself must shake off indignantly, not only the 
barbarism, the vices, but even the virtues of the Mediaeval, of 
Monastic, of Latin Christianity." 

The novelist Thackeray wrote in a somewhat similar strain, 
with similar shallowness of view: "The scheme of that book 
carried out would make the world the most wretched, useless, 
dreary, doting place of sojourn. There would be no manhood, 
no love, no tender ties of mother and child, no use of intellect, 
no trade or science — a set of selfish beings, crawling about, 
avoiding one another, and howling a perpetual Miserere.*^ 

Such a view as this, our author shows, can be entertained 
only by a man who has failed to grasp the spirit of the Imita-- 
tion, and who has not even understood some of its iterated 
maxims, and, as a set-off to the opinions of the two above- 
mentioned writers, he quotes the views of a number of men 
distinguished in the world of letters. Making the fullest de- 
ductions with regard to the reservations that we have men- 
tioned, we believe this work deserving of an honorable place in 
the immense library that has grown up around the Imitation. 

No complaint of niggardliness can 
IRISH SONGS AND LYRICS, be laid against the editor of these 

two handsome volumes, which con- 
stitute the largest extant anthology of Irish verse — songs, lyrics, 
ballads, and short poems.* We find here all that are to be found 
in almost every previous collection, and a great many that now 
for the first time take their place in a general anthology. 
Among the latter there is a good number of pieces, chiefly 
translations or imitations of Celtic poetry, that have appeared 
since the beginning of the present Gaelic revival. The editor 
has arranged the names of authors alphabetically, grouping to- 
gether the selections from each author. Reference is facilitated 
by two indexes, one of the authors' names, another of first 
lines. A third index arranges the contents into groups accord- 
ing to the various subjects, such as Home, Conviviality, Legend, 
History, etc., etc. Those familiar with other collections will 
be surprised at some of the numbers in these volumes, and, 
perhaps, will ask with something approaching to indignation 

♦ The Golden Treasury of Irish Son^s and Lyrics, Edited by Charles Welsh, a Vols. 
New York : Dodge Publishing Company. 



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1907.] New Books 121 

why so many poems that have not the remotest reference to 
anything distinctively Irish, and do not possess anything of 
the peculiar quality of the Irish inspiration, have found their 
way in here. Nor will the editor's announcement of his plan 
in the preface provide an answer. He says that the anthology 
** aims to present some of the best examples of Irish songs and 
lyrics from the bards who wrote in their mother tongue, when 
Ireland was the island of saints and scholars and the school of 
the West; the folk-songs, street- ballads, the great wealth of 
patriotic poetry called forth by the suppression and oppression 
of centuries, the humorous and convivial verse with which Irish 
literature abounds, the pathetic, romantic, and sentimental poe- 
try for which the Irish have always been famous." This is a 
broad plan, yet it does not cover all the ground. The fact is 
that Mr. Welsh must have tacitly assumed that everything is 
Irish poetry that has been written by any one born in Ireland 
or having Irish affiliations. So Bishop Berkeley, Richard Fleck- 
noe, and the author of the " Mourning Bride " find themselves 
admitted to the Celtic Parnassus; Mrs. Alexander's beautiful 
hymn " There is a Green Hill," her *• Burial of Moses," and 
Lady Maxwell's " Bingen on the Rhine," along with many other 
equally incongruous pieces, are here placed under the auspices 
of the shillelah and the shamrock. This feature is rather a 
drawback to the character of the work. But Mr. Welsh has 
given us in such generous measure all that he promised, that 
it would be ungracious to grumble because he has thrown a 
lot of odds and ends into the bargain. 

The subject of this biography * was 

A MARTYR OF OUR OWN a young French priest who was 

^^AY. martyred in Corea in the year 1866, 

during the last of the fierce perse- 
cutions which the Corean empire waged against Catholic mis- 
sionaries and converts. This persecution lasted from 1866 to 
1870. It has been estimated that, at its close, over eight thou- 
sand persons had been put to death. These figures cannot be 
more than conjectural. But it is certain that a great number of 
persons suffered death all over that unhappy country which had 
the terrible distinction of being the last or latest of the perse- 
cutors of the Church. However we may sympathize with the 

* A Martyr of Our Own Day. The Life and Letters of Just de Brenteni^res. Adapted 
from the French by Rev. John Dunne. New York : Society for the Propagation of the Faith. 



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122 NEW BOOKS [Oct. 

Corean, from a political point of view, as we see his national 
independence crushed in the grip of the Japanese, we cannot 
but rejoice that the supremacy of Japan promises a reign of 
liberty for missionary effort. Thence will come the abundant 
harvest of which the seed is the blood of the great host of mar- 
tyrs that has consecrated the soil of Corea since 1781. 

A hearty welcome from grateful Sodalists will undoubtedly 
be the response to the new Sodality Manual* which Father 
Mullan, S.J., has compiled, with every care and zeal, for the 
Children of Mary. The Manual is a valuable guide, complete 
in its instruction, in its rules and prayers for private devotion, 
and has every quality to help the Sodalist who aims at a per- 
fect and loyal devotion to our Lady. The publishers have 
taken every care to present a neat and attractive book, and we 
wish it a wide sale. 

Another valuable publication, f Father Mullan's latest con- 
tribution to the work of furthering and fostering zealous devotion 
to the Blessed Virgin, has just come to us. These Hints and Helps 
— as the work is modestly titled — will be found invaluable to all 
those who have charge of Sodalists. In its scope it covers^ 
in a thorough, practical way, the many points pertaining to the 
organization and management of a Sodality. It cannot but 
be of much use and aid to those for whom it is intended. 
Again, the make-up of this book is neat and attractive. 

* The Book of the Children of Mary, Compiled and Arranged by Father Elder Mullan, 
S.J. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 

t Sodality of Our Lady: Hints and Helps for those in Charge, By Father Elder Mullan, 
S.J. New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons. 



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ffoteign periobicals* 

The Tablet (3 Aug.) : The Roman correspondent writes of the 
reception given by Pius X. to the Japanese Ambassador. 
The Holy Father expressed his thanks to the ambassador 
for the favor shown to the Church in the flowery king- 
dom : '' We wish to express our gratitude and our sincere 
good wishes that Providence may for long years grant all 
prosperity to the august Sovereign of Japan.*' In ac- 
cepting the dedication of Professor Minocchi's translation 
of the Book of Isaias into Italian, the late Cardinal Svampa 
wrote a most complimentary letter to the author. '' In 
accepting/' the Cardinal writes, ''there is a gratification 
in offering to you and to all sincere and able students of 
Holy Scripture in your person, a slight testimony of my 
attachment and good will." 

(10 Aug.): Fr. John Gerard, S J., combats the idea 
that Sir Tobie Matthew was a crypto-Jesuit, or a Jesuit 
of any kind. ■ In a leading article the present unenvi- 
able position of the English Prime Minister with regard 
to Catholic Training Schools is exposed. Some weeks 
ago Campbell- Bannerman, speaking to a Catholic depu- 
tation, who interviewed him on the subject, insisted that 
he was sympathetic with all Catholic voters, and added 
that he thought the Catholic life of a Catholic college 
would be improved if salted with the presence of Non- 
conformists. A week later, speaking to the representa- 
tives of the Free Churches, he showed his real colors. 
Speaking of the recent legislation regarding the Training 
Schools, he remarked that ''the government would have 
liked to do something more drastic." 
(17 Aug.): The Archbishop of Dublin writes that he is 
in favor of changing the canon of obedience, making it 
compulsory to abstain from alcohol instead of meat on 
all days of fast and abstinence. This stand is taken in 
view of the fact that, in proportion to population, Ireland 
suffers to a most deplorable extent from the drink evil. 
The establishment of Apostolic Bands for mission- 
ary purposes in the United States — how they work and 
the results achieved — forms the subject-matter for an 
article. 



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124 Foreign Periodicals . [Oct., 

(24 Aug.): The Roman correspondent writes that the 
Holy Father is about to issue a universal decree which 
will practically nullify the Tameisi Decree of the Coun- 
cil of Trent. The law regulating sponsalia will also be 
greatly modified. They will not be considered an im- 
pediment to marriage, unless contracted with specified 

formalities and consigned to writing. Recently the 

''Catholic Settlements Association" was formed to stem 
the tide of indifferentism in the slums of London. A 
start is to be made in Hoxton district of London next 
autumn. The hopes and plans are discussed at length 
in this issue. 

The Month (Sept.): Apropos of the revision of the Vulgate, 
now being undertaken by the Benedictine Order, the 
Rev. Sydney F. Smith writes on the nature of its author- 
ity in the Catholic Church and the nature of the revis- 
ion it requires. Fr. Herbert Thurston contributes a 

study on the " Baptism " of Bells. The denunciation, by 
the Reformers of the sixteenth century, of the ceremony 
of the consecration of church-bells, was particularly vio- 
lent. The popular designation of the rite as " baptism," 
accounts for the vehemence of the attacks, for such an 
apparent parody on a sacrament was considered intoler- 
able. However, as Cardinal Bellarmine pointed out at 
the time, neither the words of blessing in the Pontifical, 
nor the manner of the ceremony itself, justified the pro- 
test. The use of the word " baptism " is purely popu- 
lar and arbitrary. "The Society of Jesus and Educa- 
tion," is the subject of discussion by Rev. Alban Goodier. 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Aug.) : The opening article in 
this number, from the pen of the Rev. R. Fullerton, deals 
with the Origin of Religion. The subject is introduced 
by insisting on the unity of morality and religion, and 
on the definition of religion as belief in God or gods and 
relations of some kind existing between him or them and 
man. The paper is principally concerned with the theory 
that all religions had their origin in Phantoms of the 
Night, This theory, as held by Mr. Tylor and his school, 
is fully explained and the position of those who defend 
it outlined. Many flaws are detected by the writer. 
" This ingenious theory," he notes, " it will at once be 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 125 

observed) credits the primitive reasoner with such an 
amount of intellectual acumen as would entitle him to 
rank with the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century." 
In refuting the assertion that the alliance of morality and 
religion belongs to religions above the savage level, he 
shows in striking contrast the ethics of the lowest tribes 
of humanity and the orgies of classic culture. In fine, 
he insists that in treating of the evolution of religion, 
we have not a shadow of direct evidence, and that it 
would be well to throw theories aside and go to the 
heart of the question, by asking: Is there a spiritual 
soul in man ? Is there a God ? If the answer must be 
negative; then is the time to consider theories to ex- 
plain the error. "Scotland and John Knox," is 

a criticism by Rev. M. H. Mclnerny, O.P., of two 
articles by Mr. Rait, which appeared in the Fortnightly 
Reveiw for July, 1905 and 1906. The extravagance of 
the eulogies on John Knox is shown, and the want of a 
Catholic historian, to do for Fresbyterianism and Knox 
what Denifle and Janssen have done for Lutheranism and 
Luther, is deplored. Rev. J. Ferris, B.D., has a dis- 
sertation on right and wrong. He reduces the schools of 
ethics to two; namely, order and utility; but these, 
though distinct, are not opposed to one another. Sub- 
stituting "beautiful" as a synonym for "order" and 
" good " for " useful," metaphysicians make them identi- 
cal. Taking, however, the idea of utility as more primi- 
tive, and consequently more simple than that of order, 
he confines himself to it in the body of his paper. 
Under the heading "Proscribed and Non- Proscribed Ac- 
tions," seeming objections to utilitarianism thus under- 
stood are shown to be false. That the notion of retrib- 
utive punishment is entirely consistent with utilitarian 
principles is proved by showing that retributive and pre- 
ventative punishment are in reality the same thing viewed 
in different aspects. The notion that utilitarianism im- 
poses on men unbearable burdens, by bending them al- 
ways to do their best, is not so chimerical when we 
consider that we are constantly, though perhaps un- 
consciously, doing our best. The paper closes with an 
ardent plea for utilitarianism as a new natural revelation 



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126 Foreign Periodicals [Oct., 

of God's will, for it is the sure passage to man's perfec- 
tion and happiness. 

The Examiner i Bombay (27 July): A correspondence, arising 
from a demonstration held by Bombay Catholics to ex- 
press sympathy for their French brethren in the present 
crisis, is reprinted from the Times of India. The first 
correspondent makes an effort to point out to the '' simple- 
minded Catholics of Bombay " the ludicrousness of the 
movement. He asserts that the Church of Rome is now 
reaping in France what she has been sowing there for 
the past hundred and fifty years. He also suggests that 
if Catholics were allowed free inquiry they would see 
conditions in France in a different light. Fr. Hull, edi- 
tor of the Examiner^ in answer, declares the first accu- 
sation false and to the second responds with a more 
just presentation of the Church's attitude on the ques- 
tion of freedom of inquiry. 

Le Correspondant (10 Aug): The letters of Sainte-Beuve to 

Madame de Solms are published in this issue. M. £. 

Grassi contributes an article on Siam, its king, its 

court, and its government. The works and life of 

Nicolas Poussin, the great French painter, receives a 
lengthy notice at the hands of Jean Tarbel. The attitude 

of the critic is that of an enthusiastic admirer. M. 

Bdchaux criticizes a recent law of the Minister of Labor 
in France, which makes it necessary for all manufac- 
turers or employers of labor, who employ a hundred 
men or more, to hire inspectors to look after the well- 
being of the employees. These inspectors are elected 
by the employees themselves. It signalizes the end of 

authority and liberty on the part of the employer. 

Lately the Belgian government submitted to all employ- 
ers of labor, and also to workingmen, the following 
question : Is, in your opinion, a reduction in the hours 
of labor followed by an appreciable diminution in pro- 
duction and in salaries? As might be expected, the 
employers answered that it did mean a diminution in 
both, while the employees replied negatively. 

£tudes (5 Aug.): Opens with the sixty- five propositions of the 
new Syllabus. J. de Tonqu^dec adds another install- 
ment to his criticism of the notion of truth as contained 



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1907.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 1 27 

in the " New Philosophy." In this number he discusses 
the evolution of truth according to the modern scheme, 

and expresses his strong doubts of its success. ^This 

month brings A. d'Al^s, in his series on the witness of 
tradition in history, to the nineteenth century. This 
article is mainly a sketch of the writers, on the one 
hand, who have shown excess in traditionalism, and of 
those on the other side who have been excessive in 
idealism, and finally, of the exponents of the via media. 

Eugene Portali^ congratulates the Holy See on its 

latest work, the Syllabus. After mentioning in general 
the systems and theories which fall under condemnation, 
he proceeds to apply the decree to certain Catholic writers, 
notable among them being M. Loisy and M. Fogazzaro. 
He rejoices because this decree is a "great act of reli- 
gious progress, and will give a new impulse to profound 
studies." 

(20 Aug.): Pierre Suau writes on Madagascar, giving a 
history of its discovery, its first settlers, and its early 

missionaries. It is a custom among unbelievers, Lucien 

Roure states, to regard Kant, Spinoza, Darwin, and others 
as lay saints, men devoted to the seeking of truth, but 
men without religion. Lately, in an autobiography, Her- 
bert Spencer was referred to as one of those lay saints. 
M. Roure has doubts whether he may be given this title, 
and in doing so criticizes his philosophy, his motives, 
and his mental attitude. A. Brou indulges in a com- 
prehensive study of the history of the efforts made to 
form a native clergy in China and India. Such a clergy, 
the writer points out, would not be a universal panacea 
for all the ills that befall the Church in the orient. More 

enthusiasm is wanted in Europe. M. Louis Chervoillot 

notices a book of recent publication, entitled A History 
of Japanese Literature^ by Dr. Karl Florenz Bungaku- 
Hakushi. The work is a serious effort, and bears all 
the marks of erudition. The reviewer recommends it to 
all students of Japanese literature. 
La Revue Apologitique (July): H. Dutonquet, S. J., gives a brief 
review of the Scriptural evidences of our Lord's resur- 
rection. L. Mechineau, S.J., concludes his series of 

articles on "The Idea of the Inspired Book," with a 



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128 Foreign periodicals [Oct., 

sketch of the opinions of Catholic theologians, from the 
middle of the nineteenth century to the present day, re- 
garding the manner of the inspiration of the Holy Scrip* 
tures; the exact part played by the sacred writers them- 
selves in the composition of these books; and just how 
far, and in what way, divine assistance was extended to 

them. Dr. J. Lenssens brings to a close his criticism 

of M. Lameere's History of Humanity^ by refuting his 
proofs for the thesis that man has ascended from lower 
orders of creation through merely natural forces. He 
mentions, in particular, the ethical objection that a man 
would be no more responsible for his actions than a 
stone if he were the product of blind forces of nature. 

Abb^ Nive continues his historical sketch of Church 

Decorations; this article embracing the thirteenth, four- 
teenth, and fifteenth centuries.— Henri Mainde, writing 
^' Apropos of a Commission of Inquiry," speculates on 
the possible outcome of the movement of High Church 
Anglicans towards Roman practice and belief. 

Revue Ptatiqut d' Apologetique (15 Aug.): J. Riviere retraces the 
chief points of the recent controversy between MM. La- 
berthonni^re and Paul Allard on the value of the testi- 
mony of the early martyrs. J. Cartier believes that 

scientific morality or pragmatism is legitimate. He shows 
the reasons for this belief, basing his arguments on a 
work of M. Bureau, La Ctise Morale des Temps Nouveaux. 

Eugene Griselle describes the co-ordination which 

should exist between the catechism and apologetics. 

A. Poulain writes of the religious societies among the 
Mussulmen. — F^nelon Gibon laments the alarming increase 
in juvenile criminality. 

Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (Aug.) : M. Dimnet, continu- 
ing his discussion of M. Baudin's views concerning New- 
man's system of theology, comes to the constructive side 
of M. Baudin's work, in which he opposes his own the- 
ory of faith to that of Newman. But after a careful 
study M. Dimnet finds M. Baudin's system inconsistent 
and unsatisfactory. He thinks that M. Baudin so fre- 
quently makes concessions that interfere with a purely 
intellectualistic systematization of faith that he becomes 
much less rationaliste than he would appear. M. Baudin 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 129 

admits the existence of entirely new problems in philos- 
ophy and theology, and hopes to see the day when a 
^'future synthesis from a future St. Thomas/' shall see 
the light. But M. Dimnet complains that M. Baudin's 
school does little to create such a synthesis. Finally, 
the writer hopes that M. Baudin will make a broader 
study of Newman, and will thereby find that Newman's 
system, while not rationalism in the odious sense, is 

Christianisme raisonni^ and not mere " fideism." M. E. 

Jordan contributes his second article on the '' Responsi- 
bility of the Church in the Repression of the Heresies of 
the Middle Ages." He blames Mgr. Douais who, in at- 
tempting to apologize for the Inquisition as an institu- 
tion, does not seem to realize that he thereby throws 
back the blame of the abuses of inquisitorial procedure 
upon the Church. Likewise, M. Jordan thinks it folly 
to try to defend torture, confiscation, examination, and 
the other barbarities of the Inquisition. A wiser apolo- 
getic, he maintains, would aim to show that the Church 
was not responsible for them, or that her responsibility 
was secondary to that of the Inquisition itself. In gen- 
eral, it would be well if the Holy See had always been 
as high-minded in its teaching concerning torture as was 
Nicholas I., who, in his excellent *' Consultatio ad Bul- 
garos," declares that "neither the divine law nor the 
human law admit of torture, confession of guilt should 
. be spontaneous and voluntary, not extracted by force. 

Revue du Monde Catholique (i Aug): M. Dapoigny denies the 
right ot the doctors of the immanence theory to claim 
confirmation for their doctrine in the Fathers. In quota- 
tions from the writings of the latter, he points out a 
sentiment which he thinks is antagonistic to the thought 

of this school. M. TAbb^ Barret's " Study in Jewish 

History " continues through this and the following num- 
ber. ^The six biblical days of creation, and the literal 

interpretation of such like - texts of Scripture, occupies 
the attention of M. I'Abb^ Chauvel. 

La Democratie Chritienne (Aug.): In the exposition of Paul 
Lapeyre's doctrines of social morality, continued in this 
issue, the mutual duties of children and parents are dis- 
cussed. M. Decurtius' famous "Letter to a Friend," 

VOL. LXXXVI,— 9 



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I30 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct 

published in the Fribourg Liberty^ in which the writer 
vindicates his social apostolate by pointing out the dif- 
ference between social democratic reform and Catholic 
reformation, is given in translation by the editor. M. 
Decurtius refutes the charge that the propagation of the 
democratic spirit is necessarily accompanied by doctrinal 

disruption. After a careful examination of Socialism 

and its claims, Comte Jos. de Mailath concludes that it is 
not a remedy for present-day evils, but an evil itself. 
The progress of social activity in Italy is noted. 

Revue Tkomiste (July-Aug.): Fr. Thomas M. Pegues gives, in 
a comprehensive manner, the doctrinal status of that 
school of writers in the Catholic Church against whom 
the Pope's allocution of April last was particularly di- 
rected. In the mind of the writer effort should be 
made not to harmonize Catholic teaching with ''modern 
thought," but rather to adjust ''modern thought" to the 

truth which the Church has established. Fr. R. Gar- 

rigon- Lagrange defends the Thomistic proofs of the ex- 
istence of God against the criticism of M. Le Roy. 

The authoritative source of Scriptural proofs for Theol- 
ogy is the subject of a paper by Fr. J. R. Bonhomme. 
While the Vulgate is the official Bible of the theologian, 
Hebrew and Greek texts are not by that fact excluded. 

Stimmen aus Maria^Laach (Aug.): Victor Cathrein, S.J., dis- 
cusses the relation of " Religion and Pedagogy." He de- 
fends the general Catholic view that religious training is 
necessary for the moral character of youth, and can be 
adequately inculcated only by being given a place at 
least as prominent as any other department of edu- 
cational training. An anonymous article, entitled: 

" What the Hour points to," concerns itself with thf 
dark times in France, and compares the conflict there to 
that carried on in Germany not so long ago. The writer 
is hopeful of the final triumph of the Church which has 

emerged victorious from so many great crises. Hein- 

rich Pesch, SJ., writes of "The Signs of Prosperity." 
" From Rome to the Valley of Pompeii," is the title 
of an article by H. G. Hagen, S.J. 



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Cuttent Events. 

As very little has taken place in 
General. Europe specially related to the dis- 

tinct countries of which it is com- 
posed, it will be more convenient to refer in the first place to 
those events which have a bearing upon their mutual relations, 
especially as there is one feature common to them of the utmost 
importance and significance. This is the universal and apparently 
sincere desire for peace which animates not only the more en- 
lightened guides of thought and opinion, but even the ruling 
potentates and their ministers. The frequent visits, which are 
characteristic of the present, have been the means by which 
these desires have led to the assurance that at present there 
is no reason to fear the outbreak of war. Even the troubles 
which are taking place in Morocco, and the consequent inter- 
vention of France and Spain, do not seem likely to inflame the 
jealousy of the ever- watchful Kaiser, or to lead to his inter- 
vention. 

The visit paid by the Tsar to the German Emperor was the 
first of the steps taken. So far as is known its results, both 
positive and negative, were good. It has not stood in the way 
of the conclusion of an agreement between Russia and Great 
Britain; it has not weakened the alliance between France and 
Russia; it has not been the means of the revival of the Drei- 
kaiserbund. Russia has not thrown herself into the arms of 
Germany. On the other hand, every obstacle to the mainte- 
nance of peace has been removed, not only in Europe, but also 
in the Far East. Some even think (or say) that the Tsar 
may form a link between the Triple Alliance of Germany, 
Austria, and Italy on the one hand, and the Dual Alliance 
of France and Russia on the other, and that the tour of the 
European Courts which is being made by the Russian Foreign 
Minister is a step in that direction. It ought to have been 
mentioned before that the Triple Alliance has been renewed for 
a further term of years. This took place automatically, and so 
almost escaped notice. If the two alliances, which were formed 
in view of probable hostile action, should evolve into a wider 
union for the preservation of peace, it would be a striking ex- 
ample of the survival of the fittest. 

The visit of King Edward to the German Emperor was the 



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132 Current Events [Oct., 

next step to bring about the present satisfactory outlook. The 
relations between Germany and England, as is well known, have 
long been of the worst. No doubt is entertained in England 
by a not inconsiderable number of publicists that Germany, 
during the Boer War, tried to form a continental alliance against 
England. This of course is a thing of the past ; the same writers, 
however, are constantly giving expression to their conviction 
that it is against England that the German Navy is being pre- 
pared ; that a war, sooner or later, is inevitable ; and that, if 
it is to come, the sooner it comes the better for England. 
There is no reason to think that these ideas have been widely 
embraced ; but there is no doubt that the sentiments of the 
country have long been so cold that the visits which the Kaiser 
was wont to make have been suspended. Last year's visit of 
the King to Cronberg tended to remove these feelings of dis- 
trust. It is too soon to say whether this year's visit has com* 
pletely removed them ; but it seems fairly certain that, while an 
entente between England and Germany is still non-existent, what 
political writers call a ditente has been accomplished; and to 
this detente the King has set the seal. He could not well have 
done more, for his stay was less than ten hours; and as he 
took lunch, tea, and dinner, and changed his costume three 
several times, there does not seem to have been much time left 
for the discussion of serious questions. Perhaps this was done 
by the British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who ac- 
companied the King, and the German Chancellor, who was in 
attendance upon the Kaiser. But if speeches represent the real 
mind of the parties, the visit, in the Kaiser's opinion, was an 
expression of the good relations between the two nations, the 
King being the representative of the great English people ; and 
the latter, on his part, declared that his greatest wish was 
that only the best and pleasantest relations should prevail be- 
tween the two countries. This ought to be a sufficient refuta- 
tion of the belief that there is personal animosity between the 
two monarchs. At all events, even if economic and political 
antagonism may, to a certain extent, still remain, the personal 
antagonism has ceased to be. 

From Wilhelmshohe, the King proceeded direct to Ischl, 
where the Emperor- King, Francis Joseph, awaited him, with 
Baron von Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, 
in attendance. Between Austria and England there were no 



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1907.] Current Events 133 

animosities to remove; the problem to be solved was what ac- 
tion should be taken in Macedonia. Macedonia is one of the 
blackest spots on the surface of the globe; and that it is such 
is due largely to the selfishness of Austria and Russia, whose 
chief and paramount care is their own aggrandizement. An 
end could long ago have been put to the manifold horrors with 
which the region is filled, were it not that the Emperor and 
the Tsar, while taking some inadequate steps to remedy the 
evils, stood in the way of the more energetic action which the 
Western Powers were willing to take. The latter had to ac- 
quiesce as the less of two evils, although with ever- increasing 
reluctance. England especially had indicated that some more de- 
cided steps must be taken, and the King, the secret of whose 
popularity is that he has succeeded in discovering and becom- 
ing the representative of the mind of his people, conveyed their 
message to the Emperor. The result has been, it is semi- 
officially announced, that there is full agreement between the 
two governments on the question of reforms in the Macedonian 
vilayetSy and on proposals to be made to Turkey; also as to 
the manner in which the Macedonian bands are to be dealt 
with. Consequently, good hopes may be entertained of serious 
and lasting improvements being effected. The details of the 
proposed reforms have not yet been published, but they are 
said to include, in addition to the proposals for a reform of the 
judiciary now under discussion, an effective control of the 
Macedonian administration. The visit is regarded as restoring 
the Concert of Europe, which is expected to work more ef- 
fectually and more expeditiously than in the past. In particular 
Turkey will, if what is said is true, find herself face to face with 
a united Europe. This is the one and sole condition of success 
in dealing with that dreadful incubus. 

While the visit of the King to the Emperor of Austria was 
the last of those paid to the' crowned heads of states, his inter- 
view with the French Premier may be looked upon as in the 
same category, as the head of the ministry for the time being 
in the Republic represents the power of the State. In this 
case, too, the preservation of peace, if not secured, was at 
least materially furthered, for the question of Morocco and of 
French action there was discussed, and it may be believed that 
the King, fresh from his visit to the German Emperor, was 
able to bring into accord the views of France and Germany. 



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134 Current Events [Oct., 

A leading authority in political affairs describes, in the fol- 
lowing terms, the resulting situation: ''Through the exchange 
of views between the rulers of Germany and Russia, Germany 
and Great Britain, and Great Britain and Austria- Hungary, a 
sort of harmonious agreement has been effected which has be- 
come generally European; for the inclusion of France is as- 
sured by the Franco- Russian alliance and the entente between 
the Powers, without French statesmen having taken part per- 
sonally in these meetings. In fact, the conversation between 
King Edward and M. Clemenceau at Marienbad has filled up 
this apparent gap. The general wish for peace has never be- 
fore found such imposing expression, and in the same way the 
powerful guarantee which the world's peace interests possess in 
the great reigning Houses of Europe has never been so clearly 
demonstrated as in the summer of 1907." 

Here our chronicle of Royal visits might terminate, were it not 
that it may be mentioned that the King of Denmark has made a 
journey to Iceland, the first we believe ever paid by a reigning 
monarch to that island. This visit was not made merely for the 
pleasure of the trip, but to counteract, by personal influence, the 
agitation which is going on for Home Rule. There are some in 
the island who, while preserving the personal link of and with the 
crown, wish no longer to be subordinate to the Parliament of 
Denmark. Other royal peregrinations may be mentioned. The 
Crown Prince of Portugal has been to see the colonies of that 
country in Africa, and America has been favored by the pres- 
ence of a member of the royal house of Sweden. 

While monarchs have been so busy, cabinet-ministers have 
not been idle. Meetings have taken place between Baron von 
Aehrenthal and Signor Tittoni, the Foreign Minister of Italy, 
at Desio and at the Semmering. These have led to a complete 
understanding regarding the lines of international policy of the 
two nations. With respect to Balkan affairs, in particular, per- 
fect identity of view exists between Austria- Hungary and Italy. 

While Austria and Italy hitherto, although in general agree- 
ment, have had some few points of difference, Germany and 
France have scarcely found anything on which to agree. 
Whether the Conferences between the German Chancellor and 
M. Jules Cambon, the French Ambassador to Berlin, have ma- 
terially changed the situation, it is too soon to say, but the 
mere fact that these conferences had been held led to the ru- 



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1907.] Current Events 135 

mors of an impending rapprochement^ which appeared in several 
daily papers. These rumors, however, rather served the purpose 
— ^all-important for some papers — of filling space than of ex- 
pressing any real occurrence. The most that is likely to have 
been accomplished by the two representatives is an agreement 
as to Morocco. This problem is becoming more perplexing day 
by day ; and if it does not lead to complications, it will be due 
to the strong desire for peace of which we have already spoken. 

Royal visits and ministerial Conferences have not been the 
only means by which action has been taken to place Europe and 
the world on a peace establishment. The ordinary procedure of 
diplomacy has resulted in the conclusion of a Convention be- 
tween Russia and Japan ; and also of the long negotiated agree- 
ment between Russia and Great Britain. By the first-named 
Convention Russia and Japan undertake to respect the present 
territorial boundary of each other, and all rights under existing 
treaties with China. The independence and territorial integrity 
of the latter empire are guaranteed as well as the " open door " 
for all nations. Both the powers pledge themselves to the 
maintenance of the status quo. As in June last Japan and France 
entered into an agreement on the same lines, peace seems as- 
sured in the Far East, unless this country, or what is less like* 
ly Germany, should wish to enter actively upon the field. The 
field, therefore, is left open to Japan for peaceful development, 
both of her own resources and those of Corea, which has now 
through recent events been placed under Japan's direction, 
whether with or without justification we cannot say. The treaty 
of Portsmouth, instead of being a temporary truce, represents 
a permanent settlement. 

The exact provisions of the agreement just concluded be- 
tween England and Russia are still matters of conjecture. It 
is an open secret, however, that it deals with the relations of 
the two Powers in Central Asia, and the concessions which 
have been made by Great Britain will, it is expected, excite 
keen criticism. But it is worth paying a good price in order 
to get relief from the chronic dread of the invasion of India. 
There is, however, a small number of British politicians whose 
abhorrence of the Russian government's cruelty and oppression 
is so great that on no account would they enter into an agree- 
ment with it, however great the advantage to England might 
be. But it is hard to see how the Russian people will suffer 



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136 CURRENT EVENTS [Oct., 

in the event of an agreement being made. To render war less 
likely is a service for the people, for it is the policy ot despots 
to divert attention from their evil deeds by rousing the passion 
of patriotism. 

While potentates and statesmen 
The Hague Conference. have been so energetically and 

successfully acting for the preser- 
vation of peace, it would be unpardonable to pass over without 
notice the proceedings of the Peace Conference at the Hague. 
The mere fact of its meeting affords, in and by itself, the strong- 
est evidence of the desire of all nations for this, almost the 
greatest of all blessings. That it has been possible to call an 
assembly of the duly accredited representatives of nearly every 
nation, strong and weak, seriously and methodically to discuss 
measures, if not for the entire prevention at least for the alle- 
viation of the evils of war, is a wonderful testimony to the 
growing influence of ideas which a few years ago were scouted 
as the merest fads. While the most sanguine cannot expect 
complete success, the most brutally cynical cannot help recog- 
nizing that a great step in advance has been taken. 

The discussion has covered so many subjects, and the organ* 
ization of the Conference for the purpose of securing thor- 
oughness in this discussion was so complicated, that we can- 
not do anything more than make a few notes. The Confer- 
ence divided itself into four sections, with a certain definite 
class of subjects assigned to each section. These sections in 
turn were sub-divided ; and even these sub-divisions on occa- 
sion appointed special committees. In addition there were com- 
mittees for examination {comitis d'examen). Through all, or 
most, of these stages each question had to pass, and when the 
work of the section was completed, it had to be submitted to 
the Plenary Session of the Conference. After all this, even 
the points on which the Conference in plenary assembly 
unanimously agrees will have to be accepted or rejected by 
each and every government. It is very doubtful, however, 
whether any government will dare to reject, at least openly, 
any decision which, after so prolonged and careful a discussion, 
may be considered to represent the public opinion of the 
world. 

The first decision of the Conference in plenary session 



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1907.] Current events 137 

while it falls far short of what was hoped for by the most 
ardent promoters of the Conference, yet may not be without 
good 'results if it is really adopted as a principle of action. 
The crushing burden of the military armaments of the chief 
continental powers was the reason for which the Tsar took 
the initiative in inviting the world to these Conferences. One 
of the many evils caused by these armaments was the finan- 
cial expenditure. In 1898, the year before the first Confer^ 
ence, this expenditure amounted to over twelve hundred and 
fifty millions. The most, however, that the First Hague 
Conference could do with reference to this question was to 
pass a resolution in the following terms: ''The Conference 
considers that the limitation of the military charges which now 
weigh upon the world is greatly to be desired for the promo- 
tion of the material and moral welfare of humanity." This 
resolution, however, produced no effect The militaty charges, 
so far from having grown less, have increased, and were last 
year over sixteen hundred millions. Nothing daunted, the pres- 
ent Conference passed with unanimous acclamation the follow- 
ing resolution : " The Conference confirms the resolution adopted 
in 1899 in regard to the limitation of military charges; and, in 
view of the fact that charges have considerably increased in al- 
most all countries since that year, declares that it is highly desir- 
able that the governments should seriously resume the careful 
study of the question." This does not amount to much ; but 
if the passing of this resolution involves, or should lead to, the 
acceptance of the proposal that each government should com- 
municate annually to each other their respective programmes 
for expenditure, a great step will have been taken; this would 
indeed be a serious study of the question; too serious we fear 
to be realized. 

In the less ambitious projects success is likely to be greater. 
The establishment of a permanent court to which questions can 
be referred and settled promptly will render arbitration easier 
and more frequent, and may lead to its being recognized as 
the normal method for the adjustment of disputes, and if the 
American proposal for compulsory arbitration in a given list 
of cases is adopted, a still more definite step in advance will 
have been taken. But even should the results of the present 
Conference prove disappointing, the mere fact of its having 
been held constitutes an epoch in the world's history. 



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138 CURRENT EVENTS [Oct., 

Very little has happened in France 
France. itself which calls lor mention; the 

troubles in Morocco, and the con- 
sequent action of France and Spain in that country, are the 
most important events. The temptation to take advantage of 
the situation to enter upon the conquest of the country, and 
thus to complete the circle of her African possessions, may 
have presented itself to the government, and perhaps would have 
been yielded to, notwithstanding the arduous character of the 
undertaking, were it not that the watchful eye of Germany was 
known to be wide open. With great prudence and self-re- 
straint the action of France has been restricted within the lines 
laid down by the Act of Algeciras. The government has, in 
a note addressed to the various Powers, pledged itself to ab- 
stain from conquest or exclusive dominion, and to respect the 
rights of third powers. But it seems probable that in self- 
defence, on account of the activity of the Moors and their 
fanaticism, the armed forces will have to be materially in- 
creased. 

The report of the official commission appointed to inquire 
into the cause of the Una disaster, reveals a state of disorgan- 
ization in the naval service of France which almost equals the 
breakdown of its religious organization. Perhaps there is be- 
tween the two the relation of cause and effect. The Commission- 
ers report that this disaster, as well as the many that have 
devastated the national marine, is due to the lack of co- opera- 
tion and the division and even antagonism which exist between 
the various branches of the service. They report that they 
have met with nothing but antagonisms and divisions in the 
navy. Naval constructors, engineers, and combatant officers all 
act in complete independence of each other. There is no su- 
perior authority with power to unite these divergent forces in 
co-ordinated action. Administrative anarchy, it is declared, 
reigns in the organization. The heartrending inefficiency of the 
central power is the cause of the growing inefficiency of the 
naval power. Liberty and equality sound well indeed, but dis- 
asters seem to ensue from the practical realization. At all events, 
the way to apply these ideas in practice has not been discov* 
ered. This disorganization, together with the insubordination 
of the military, revealed during the wine growers' agitation, may 
prove disastrous to France. A nation's power not infrequently 



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1907.] Current events 139 

depends as much upon what it is thought to be as upon what 
it really is. If France's enemies think that the military and 
naval forces are disorganized, they will of course be the more 
ready to make an attack. 

The peaceful attitude of those who 
Germany. guide the destinies of the German 

Empire, to which we have already 
alluded, is doubtless due, in a large degree, to disinterested 
motives, and to the love of peace. It may well be, however, that 
the difEculty of finding the wherewithal for war may have an 
infljence. Gsrmm and Prussian Consols have lost in value from 
10 to 15 per cent in the past ten years, so that in this time of 
peace they stand at war prices. Industrial prosperity is one 
cause of this depreciation, and industrial prosperity makes war 
odious. It is satisfactory that all things should be thus work- 
ing together for the same good end. 

On the other hand, the leader of the Catholic Centre, Dr. 
Spahn, has called upon the country to raise some ten millions 
additional taxation per year, in order to increase the navy. 
This increase should be pushed on with all possible speed. 
Moreover, the fortifications on the North Sea and at the mouth 
of the Elbe should be extended and brought up to date. What 
the reasons are for this accession to the views of the Navy 
League is not clear ; it may be that the Catholic leader wishes 
to show that he is as patriotic as his opponents at the last 
election, and in the same sense. 

The Catholics in the German Empire have been holding their 
fifty-fourth annual Congress at Wiirzburg, at which discussions 
took place on several of the present-day problems. Some of the 
•utterances deserve recording. For example, the Catholic Labor 
Leader and member of the Reichstag, Herr Giesberts, while he 
declared Social Democracy to be an invention of the 4evil, went 
on to urge all Catholics to promote the cause of social progress, 
not by the inefficient methods of mere protest and opposition, 
but by practical hard work and the manifestation of the true 
Christian spirit and power. Their home life should be governed 
by Christian principle. This would enable them to be the pro- 
moters of a just settlement of the diflferences between masters 
and men — a settlement upon Christian lines in the interest both 
of the Church and the State. They should demand a further 



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140 Current Events [Oct., 

development of social rights and reforms, chambers of labor 
and freedom of meeting throughout the Empire. 

In the course of an address on '^ Catholicism and the Uni- 
versity/* Professor Martin Spahn seems to have gone to the 
root of many of the difficulties which the faith meets with in 
encountering the scientific theories of the day. Specialization, 
he said, in the domain of science had gradually usurped the 
place of the survey of the whole with which it was the first 
duty of a University to render its students familiar. The spirit 
of specialization was liable to become superficial and narrow, 
and as such it was inimical to the Catholic faith. This their 
opponents had realized. The spirit of German Catholicism was 
the championship of universalism, and this spirit, the true 
Christian and German spirit, must at all costs continue to be 
fostered. 

In Russia the preparations for the 
Russia. election of the third Duma have 

been proceeding as if the constitu- 
tional character of the government, so solemnly declared by M. 
Stolypin, still existed. But in view of the arbitrary dissolu- 
tion of the second Dutna^ of the illegal change of the organic 
laws by which the franchise has been restricted to less than 
100,000 voters out of a population of 120 millions, of the 
avowed principle that the Duma must conform itself to the gov- 
ernment, not the government to the Duma^ if it wishes to remain 
in existence, it is almost farcical to apply the term constitutional 
to what is in reality as unmitigated an autocracy as ever. The 
unblushing hypocrisy of the whole of the proceedings of the gov- 
ernment is rendered more evident by the recent re-enactment, 
for the twenty- seventh time, of laws which even Alexander III» 
declared to be temporary. These laws superseded even the 
semblance of law which is possible in a despotism. In fact, 
what with the various forms of the so-called reinforced and 
extraordinary state of protection, which really means martial 
law applied to most of the Empire, the local authorities are en- 
abled to suspend all law and to rule as they please. It is very 
difficult to find a place where the ordinary law prevails, and as a 
consequence to find any one who respects it ; for the law which 
is changed as the will of one man and his appointees has no 
sanction but force. M. Stolypin remains in office, and is, there- 



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1907.] Current events 141 

fore, responsible for this departure from constitutional principles. 
He has gained the approbation of the Tsar, but he has lost the 
reputation of being an honest man. While the gloom of dis- 
appointment and despair is settling down upon the mass of the 
Russian people, the increase of outrages — murders, robberies, 
and plots — testifies to the determination of the extremists not 
to accept the situation. 

Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria has 
The Near East. just celebrated the twentieth anni- 

versary of his accession. There 
were expectations that he would declare himself a king; but 
from this he has refrained, and thereby given another example 
of the prudence and self-restraint which have enabled him to 
make of Bulgaria, together, of course, with the co-operation of 
the Bulgarians, a prosperous and contented state in the midst 
of the anarchy by which it is surrounded. This anarchy is said 
by some to be diminishing in consequence of the reforms under 
the Miirzsteg programme; well-informed observers, however, 
who have visited various districts, deny that there has been 
any improvement, and declare that the inhabitants of Macedonia 
are being rapidly extirpated. Internecine warfare is chronic; 
each race fighting with every other race, while the Turks look 
on, cheering the combatants in the hope that, by extermination, 
quiet will be secured. 



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THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 

THE Editor of The Cathelk Northwest^ published at Seattle^ has gathered 
some facts that demand consideration. If Catholic patronage is given 
to hostile publications, and refused to the defenders of the faith, surely the 
stern reprimand here given is deserved : 

WHAT DO CATHOLICS READ? 

One sometimes meets with Catholics whose distorted notions concerning 
all matters relating to the Church, whether current or historical, occasions 
more than a mild surprise, and one finds oneself endeavoring to understand 
such a condition in view of the number of Catholic books, magazines, and 
newspapers turned out weekly and monthly all over the land at the present 
day. The experiences of a solicitor for a high-class periodical in another 
state, as related in one of our exchanges, turns the X-ray on this subject, 
and reveals the kind of literature in vogue among a considerable nvmber of 
Catholics, who, by education and social, professional, or business standing, 
might be fairly taken as representative of the culture and intelligence of the 
Catholic body of the place where it occurred; and there is scarcely a doubt 
that the solicitor's story could be duplicated in most of our cities. The can- 
vass of this particular young man showed that only about one-half of the 
Catholic people had any Catholic reading matter in their homes, and, even 
of these, many declared they never opened the papers at all, and therefore 
they were going to quit taking them. 

A few, only a few, expressed any appreciation for the efforts of the 
Catholic editor and publisher who devotes his time and talents to combating 
error and falsehood and aiding to extend the Kingdom of God on earth. 
For the great majority who take some Catholic periodical, but never read it, 
and those who take none at all, the daily papers, with the various popular 
magazines, make up the repertoire whence is derived their intellectual pabu- 
lum, as well as their information pertaining to Catholicity throughout the 
world. Small wonder, then, that their ideas of the Church and her affairs 
should be of a hazy and distorted character, as they uniformly are. But what 
surprised the solicitor most was the preference expressed by several for The 
Philistine and '' The Rambles " of its editor, Elbert Hubbard ; and, in order 
to discover the grounds of this preference, he hastened to procure two or 
three copies of the publication. His surprise grew when he found in the first 
one he opened such scintillating gems of thought and nuggets of faith and 
morals as the following : 

The belief in everlasting life was first evolved by savages, and then taken 
up by priests, who promised an endless life of joy to all ^ ho obeyed their 
edicts. It is a most selfish and harmful doctrine, and, by turning man's at- 
tention from this world te another, has blocked progress at least a thousand 
years. 

There is no idea so pernicious in its results as the doctrine of individual 
immortality. 



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1907.J The Columbian Reading Union 143 

To unhorse the priest we do not have to prove that there is no life after 
death — all we need do is to stand strong on the living truth that we do not 
know anything about it, and that he knows no more than we do. We can 
then live our lives as if we were to live always, and if death is an endless sleep 
we have made no mistake. 

And just so long as man is taught that he has an " immortal soul" that 
can never die, he is going to fear the future and speculate on his destiny in 
another world. 

But a religion that embraces vicarious atonement, regeneration by faitb, 
baptism, and other monkey business, is barbaric, degrading, absurd, and un- 
worthy, 

Man is only a protozoan wriggling through a fluid called atmosphere ; he 
is here but for a day, and knows neither where he came from nor where he is 
going. 

It is difficult to imagine such coarse blackguardism as the above appeal- 
ing to the taste of Catholics, but that it does do so is asserted by themselves 
As the reader will observe, not one only, but several dogmas of Catholic faith 
are assailed by the PkilisHne^s editor. Many more quotations, still more 
shocking in their blasphemy, could be given, but we will select only two of 
the least objectionable, from which the reader can judge of the others: 

Man is a partial, and probably the highest, specialized expression of 
Universal Energy. If you wish to use the word Over-Soul, First Cause, 
Vital Principle, or God, in place of Universal Energy, you are privileged, cf 
course, to de so. 

We ourselves are the Divine Will, 

Coming down to the January number for the present year, it was found 
to consist of fulsome eulogies of Maxim Gorky, the Russian revolutionist, 
whose flagrant disregard of decency caused him to be excluded from the 
hotels in our Eastern cities. Colonel Mann, editor of Town Topics^ who has 
been recently convicted of blackmailing, and Mary Baker Eddy, of Christian 
Science fame. 

And the solicitor is still endeavoring to solve the mystery of why Catho- 
lics should want to read such ribald balderdash, expressed in commonplace 
language, and without even the merit of a good literary style to recommend 
it. Does it filter through the consciousness of the admiring reader, weaken- 
ing his faith, diminishing his respect for religion and its appointed ministers, 
and coloring all his concepts of spiritual things with the tinge of scepticism 
as it goes? We hope it does not, but the chances are as a thousand to one 
that it does. 

The needs of the age demand that Catholics should be active and asser- 
tive in all matters relating to the good of the community in which they live, 
carrying their principles into their work and infusing into it the Catholic 

spirit of morality and righteousness. 

• • t 

The historian of the first Atlantic telegraph cable, John MuUaly, for 

many years a leader in Catholic journalism, has just published a condensed 

summary of that important enterprise, reprinted from the Philadelphia 

Journal of Franklin Institute, March, 1907. This will enable students 

to get a valuable retrospect of a most interesting epoch in the con- 



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144 BOOKS RECEIVED [Oct., I907.J 

quest of the ocean by the author of the official history published by D. 

Appleton Companyi and long out of print. 

• « • 

Canada has at last agreed to accept the movement in favor of Summer- 
Schools. The government of Ontario decided upon the location of six 
Summer-Schools provided under the legislation of the past session for a 
training course for separate school teachers and members of the Catholic 
educational and religious communities. The following have been chosen : 

Ottawa, for English and French teachers, in the D'Youville separate 
schools ; for other teachers in the Normal school. 

Peterboro, in St. Peter's separate school. 

Toronto, for male teachers, in De La Salle separate school ; for female 
teachers, in Toronto university. 

Hamilton, in St. Anne's separate school. 

Berlin, in St. Mary's separate school. 

London, in Sacred Heart separate school. M. C. M. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

Charles Scribnsr's Sons. New York : 

Isruel's Historical and Biographical Nartativts, From the Establishment of the Hebrew 
Kingdom to the end of the Maccabean Struggle. By Charles Foster Kent, Ph.D. With 
Maps and Chronological Charts. Pp. xxxi.-5o6. Price $2.75 net. 
Fr. Pustet & Co., New York : 

Vadt Mecum Jor Voccd Culture, A Complete Course of Instruction in Singing and the 
Rudiments of Music. By the Rev. Michael Haller. From the German, by the Rev. B. 
Dieringer. Price $1 net. Missa Pro Defunctis. Modem Musical Notation. Pp. 39. 
Price 20 cents net. Missa Pro Defunctis, Gregorian Notation. Pp. 122. Price 
15 cents net. 
Cathedral Library Association. New York: 

The Life of Christ. By Mgr. E. Le Camus. Translated by William A. Hickey. Vol. II. 
Pp. xviii.-5oo. Price $2 net. 
Henry Phipps Institute, Philadelphia, Pa.: 

Third Annual Repot t of the Henry Phipps Institute for the Study, Treatment, and Preven- 
tion of Tuberculosu, February, jgos-igo6. Illustrated. Edited by Joseph Walsh. 
A.M., D.D. I»p. 410. 
H. L. KiLNER & Co., Philadelphia: 

The Test; or, Mother Bettrand's Reward. By Mary Genevieve Kilpatrick. Pp. 300. 
Price $1.25. True Historical Stories for Catholic Children, By Josephine Portuondo. 
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Vol. LXXXVI. NOVEMBER, 1907. No. 512. 



THE FALLACY OF "BETTERING ONE'S POSITION." 

BY JOHN A. RYAN. D.D. 

" In life money means everything, and therefore anybody vdll do anything to get it. It 
enslaves those who possess it, and it likewise enslaves in a more sordid way those who have 
none of it." 

PLTHOUGH these sentences recall the words of St. 
Paul condemning money as the root of all evil, 
they were written by a modern socialist. Their 
author is a rich young man of Chicago, Joseph 
Medill Patterson, grandson of the founder of the 
Chicago Tribune^ son of the present proprietor of that journal, 
and connected by blood or marriage with some of the most 
prominent families of his city. In a letter, from which the pas- 
sage cited above is an extract, he formally abandoned the theories 
of life in which he had been educated, and proclaimed his adhe- 
sion to a movement which, however materialistic its philosophy 
of human motives and of human history, does hold up to its 
followers higher ideals than the making and spending of money. 
While this statement of Mr. Patterson contains, like all so- 
cialist condemnations of present institutions, a considerable ele- 
ment of exaggeration, it is substantially true of the majority of 
the American people. Few, indeed, are those who seek money 
for its own sake, for the mere satisfaction of possessing it in 
abundance. It is desired because of the things that it will buy, 
because, in Mr. Patterson's phrase, it ''means everything"; 
specifically because it commands the material requisites and ac- 
cessories of living. And it is precisely because of the false 
importance attributed to these latter things that money is able 

Copyright 1907. The Missionaxt Socibtt of St. Paul the Apostle 
IN THE State of New York. 
VOL. LXXXVI. — 10 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



146 " BETTERING ONE'S POSITION " [Nov., 

to ''enslave those who possess it, and likewise enslave, in a 
more sordid way, those who have none of it." In other 
words, its debasing influence springs from the circumstance that 
it is the chief means of '' bettering the position " of persons 
whose concept of what constitutes '' betterment '' is ignoble and 
false. 

Between the ages of sixteen and fifty, the great majority of 
Americans unceasingly strive and hope to '' better their posi- 
tion" by increasing their incomes, and thereby raising them- 
selves above the social and economic plane upon which they 
have hitherto stood. In so far as they are successful in this 
aim, they obtain an increased satisfaction of their material wants. 
Increased satisfaction is immediately followed by a still larger 
increase, both numerically and intensively, of the wants them- 
selves. It becomes literally true that '' the more men have, the 
more they want." In proof of this statement, all that is neces- 
sary is to make a rapid survey of the chief ways in which ma- 
terial wants call for satisfaction. 

The man who occupies a plain house of seven or eight rooms 
will expend a part of his larger income for a better house. A 
better house means, in the first place, a larger house. A larger 
house will, usually, be built of more costly materials. In addition, 
it will demand a greater quantity and a more expensive quality of 
equipment, furniture, and utensils — woodwork, wall paper, carpets, 
chairs, beds, tables, chinaware, etc. It means a larger outlay for 
"help." It implies also a more " select" neighborhood where land 
and, consequently, rents are higher. The cost of the new house 
and furnishings may be, let us say, 12,000 dollars, while the 
old one was built and equipped for 3,500 ; yet when the oc- 
cupier's income is still further and in a considerable degree in- 
creased, there will emerge in his consciousness, or in that of 
his family, the want of a still better house. This will neces- 
sitate a considerably larger expenditure for all the items above 
enumerated, as well as an additional outlay for several others 
that have hitherto been un thought- of or disregarded. 

When income permits a change men are no longer content 
with plain and nourishing food. They must have more tender 
meats, more select vegetables, richer and more varied desserts, 
older and more costly wines, and complicated mixtures instead 
of plain beverages. The manner in which the food is served 
becomes more formal, elaborate, and expensive; there must be 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



1907.] '' Bettering One's Position'' 147 

many courses, more and dearer chinaware, and much cut glass. 
The same process appears in relation to clothing. After the de- 
mands of reasonable comfort have been met, there will rise the 
desire for a greater number of suits, a more frequent replace* 
ment to conform to the fashions, a better quality of materials, 
and a more high-priced tailor. All these and many other ex- 
pansions of the clothing-want become operative in the case of 
men, and to a ten-fold degree in the case of women. Witness 
the single item of jewelry. 

Intimately connected with and dependent upon the standard 
of shelter, food, and clothing, is that class of wants that is some- 
what inadequately called '' social." With increased expenditure 
for the former, the last-named want inevitably becomes more 
complicated and more costly. Entertainments and " functions " 
become more frequent and more elaborate; a notable increase 
takes place in the accessories of entertaining, such as decora- 
tions, flowers, attendants, etc.; and there is a considerable ad- 
ditional outlay for food and clothing. Finally, the desire for 
amusement and recreation is also capable of indefinite expan- 
sion. The person of moderate means goes to the theatre occa- 
sionally and occupies a cheap seat. The rich or well-to-do 
person goes more frequently, rides to and from the theatre in a 
carriage, pays much more for a seat, and not infrequently buys 
an elaborate luncheon after the performance. The pleasure trips 
and vacations of the poor and the moderately situated, consist 
of trolley rides and a few days spent in some near-by town or 
country district ; those who are rich enough to afford it pos- 
sess carriages and automobiles, spend months at the seaside or 
in the mountains, take long ocean voyages, and make extended 
sojourns in Europe. 

In the case of all but the few extremely rich, these five 
wants or classes of wants, comprised under the head of shelter, 
food, clothing, ''society,'' and amusement, can be expanded 
indefinitely, and can absorb all of a man's income. No matter 
how much a person spends in meeting these wants, he can still 
maintain, in accordance with the language and standards of the 
day, that he has merely '' bettered his social position." 

Now this indefinite striving after indefinite amounts of ma- 
terial satisfaction, is not an accidental feature of modern exist- 
ence. It is but the natural outcome of the prevailing theory 
of life. "The old Christianity," says Paulsen, who is not me- 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



148 '* BETTERING ONE'S POSITION'' [Nov., 

diaeval in his sympathies, ^* raised its eyes from the earth, which 
offered nothing and promised nothing, to heaven and its super- 
sensuous glory. The new age is looking for heaven upon earth ; 
it hopes to attain to the perfect civilization through science^ 
and expects that this will make life healthy, long, rich, beauti- 
ful, and happy" {A System of Ethics. Pp. 139, 140). Accord- 
ing to the dominant view, the loftiest object that man can pur- 
sue is the scientific knowledge of nature — not, indeed, for it- 
self, but because of the abundance of material goods that it 
will put at his disposal. Hence the practical conclusion of the 
practical man is that he should seek to enjoy as much of these 
goods as possible. *^ It is a favorite principle of the ethical 
materialism of our days that a man is all the happier the 
more wants he has, if he has at the same time sufficient means 
for their satisfaction " (Lange's History of Materialism. P. 239). 
Such is the prevailing conception of ^' wider and fuller life." 
Since life is merely, or at any rate chiefly, an aggregate of 
sensations, more abundant life means the multiplication of sen- 
sations, possessions, and pleasurable experiences. 

This theory of life is evidently false. Not the number but 
the kind of wants that a man satisfies is the important thing. 
Reasonable human life is primarily qualitative. It consists in 
thinking, knowing, communing, loving, serving, and giving, 
rather than in having or enjoying. When the demands of 
health and moderate comfort have been supplied, additional 
sense- satisfactions contribute little or nothing to the develop- 
ment of body, heart, or mind. They necessitate an expenditure 
of time, energy, and resources that might be employed in build- 
ing up the higher and rational side of man. They exert a 
damaging influence upon morals, mind, health, and happiness. 
Let us view the situation in some detail. 

First, as to morals and character. The qualities that are 
fostered through the activities of '' society " are, in great part, 
undesirable and ignoble. This assertion applies not only to the 
doings of the most wealthy and exclusive ^'set," but to all of 
those more or less formal and pretentious " functions " whose 
participants regard themselves as **\vl society," though they 
may belong within the middle class. Except in a very small 
proportion of cases, the functions and gatherings of '' society " 
do not make for true culture or for intellectual improvement. 
Their primary object is to entertain, but they have come to 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



1907.] *' Bettering ONE'S Position'' 149 

include so many factitious elements in the matter of dress, 
decorations, feasting, and other accessories, that one of their 
most common by-products is a group of unlovely and un- 
christian qualities. One of the most marked of these qualities 
is the desire for social pre-eminence, the passion for distinction, 
the wish to be thought at least as prominent as any other 
person in one's social set Thus the desire to excel, which is 
in itself laudable and useful, becomes, in the case of a large 
number of society person?, an ambition to outdo one's neigh- 
bors in the splendor of gowns, the elaborateness of feasting, 
and not infrequently in the ostentation and costliness of the 
entertainment generally. In the pursuit of this ambition are 
developed the vices of envy, hypocrisy, vanity, and snobbishness. 

The realm of the animal appetites presents anothei instance 
of the damaging e£Fects of the excessive pursuit of material 
satisfactions. In the matter of food and drink the line between 
sufficiency and gluttony is easily passed. Immoral indulgence 
takes place under the name of a more thorough, more discrim- 
inating, and more refined satisfaction of the desire for nourish- 
ment. Those who are guilty of this inordinate indulgence often 
do not realize that they are acting the part of animals, rather 
than of rational beings, in whom the higher nature ought to 
exercise a controlling influence. Again, violations of the pre- 
cept of chastity are apt to increase rather than diminish when 
the personal expenditures of the individual pass beyond the 
limits of moderate and reasonable comfort. Excessive satis- 
faction of the other senses creates unusual cravings in the sex 
appetite. And these cravings are less likely to be resisted, 
precisely because the persons who experience them have be- 
come unaccustomed to deny the demands of the other appetites. 

Another evil e£Fect is the weakening of the religious sense 
and of the altruistic sense. It is a fact of general observation 
that after the stage of moderate income and plain living has 
been passed, there follows in probably the majority of instances 
a decay of religious fervor and of deep and vital faith. The 
things of God are crowded out, "choked by the cares and 
riches and pleasures of life.'' Owing to the essential selfish- 
ness of the process, inordinate satisfaction of material wants 
also weakens the feelings of disinterestedness and generosity. 
Hence the rule is almost universally valid that persons above 
the line of moderate comfort give a smaller proportion of their 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



ISO '' Bettering One's Position'' [Nov, 

income to charitable and religious causes than those who are 
at or somewhat below that level. 

Did men put a true valuation upon material goods, they 
would increase the proportion of their income given to these 
causes whenever an increase took place in the income itself. 
For example, if the man with an income of one thousand dol- 
lars per year contributed four per cent of this sum, the man 
who received two thousand dollars ought to give more than 
four per cent. The bulk of the extra thousand dollars goes, in 
most cases, to satisfy less important material wants; conse- 
quently, a larger proportion of it ought to be expended in meet- 
ing the higher want, that is, benevolence. What generally hap- 
pens, however, is that the proportion decreases. The explana- 
tion is obvious; the receivers of the larger incomes become 
dominated by a false idea of the relative values of things, hold- 
ing the goods of the senses in higher esteem than when their 
income was smaller. 

Moreover, there are certain of the higher comforts and con- 
veniences whose net effect upon human welfare is probably 
good, which involve no self-indulgence that is actually immoral, 
and yet which are in a considerable degree injurious to char- 
acter. For example, the habit of using parlor cars, electric 
bells, and street cars, in season and out of season, makes us 
dependent upon them, and renders us less capable of that meas- 
ure of self-denial and of endurance which is indispensable to 
the highest achievement. These and many other contrivances 
of modern life, are undoubtedly an obstacle to the develop- 
ment of that invaluable ingredient of character which consists 
in the power to do without. They contribute insensibly yet ef- 
fectively, to a certain softness of mind, will, and body which 
is no advantage in life's many-sided struggle. It does not fol- 
low that these conveniences ought not to be utilized at all; it 
follows that they are not the unmixed blessing which they are 
commonly assumed to be. 

Nowhere are the harmful effects of this materialistic con- 
ception of life that we are considering, more manifest than in 
the phenomena associated with the reduced birth rate. The 
deliberate limitation of offspring is as yet chiefly confined to 
the middle and upper classes, to the persons whose elementary 
and reasonable wants are already fairly well supplied. They 
wish to be in a position to satisfy a larger number of material 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



1907. J '' Bettering One's Position*' 151 

wants in themselves, and to ensure the satisfaction of a still 
larger number in their children — if they have any. They speak 
much of aiming at quality rather than quantity in offspring. 
They do not realize that the special qualities developed in the 
artificially restricted family are almost entirely materialistic, 
while the qualities that go to make up strong and virtuous 
characters are almost inevitably neglected. In o.ne word, the 
theory of life- values, which impels men and women to decline 
the burdens of a normal family, makes for enervating self-in- 
dulgence and perverted moral notions in parents, a morally and 
physically enfeebled generation of children, a diminishing pop- 
ulation, and a decadent race. 

So much for some of the damaging results to morals and 
character. It seems inevitable that mental powers and activi- 
ties must likewise suffer. A people devoted to the pursuit of 
material things, of ease, and of pleasure, does not seem to pro- 
vide the best conditions for achievement in the higher and more 
arduous fields of mental effort. Even to-day an ever> increas- 
ing proportion of our college and university students choose 
those courses of study that have a " practical ** rather than a 
theoretical or academic object and outcome. Whether or not 
this training is as effective as the 'Miberal" branches in devel- 
oping the mental powers, those who select it will almost all 
devote their energies in after life to the business of money- 
getting. This means the exercise of the lower powers of the 
brain and intellect. The products of their mental activity will 
be material things and mechanical progress, rather than the 
thoughts and ideas and knowledge that make for the intellec- 
tual, moral, or spiritual improvement of the race. While the 
proportion of our population that is educated has greatly in- 
creased, there is reason to doubt that the proportion which 
reads serious, solid, and uplifting literature, is any greater to- 
day than it was fifty years ago. The great mass of the read- 
ing public is now satisfied with the newspaper, the cheap mag- 
azine, and books of fiction, good, bad, and indifferent. . Half a 
century ago the majority of those who read, had access to only 
a few books, but these were generally serious and high-class, 
and were read again and again. It is maintained by some that 
the general quality of literature itself has deteriorated. Thus, 
Mr. Frederick Harrison, whose Positivism would naturally dis- 
pose him in favor of the present age and spirit, recently wrote : 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



152 '' BETTERING One's Position'' [Nov., 

'' As I look back over the sixty years since I first began to 
read for myself, English literature has never been so flat as it 
is now. ... In my student days, say, the mid-40's and 
mid-50's, our poets were Tennyson, the two Brownings, Fitz- 
gerald, Rosseti — all at their zenith. So were Dickens, Thack- 
eray, Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley, Disraeli. The Brontes, TroUope, 
George Eliot, Swinburne, Morris, were just coming into line. 
Year after year Ruskin poured out resounding fugues in every 
form of melodious art. Our historians were Carlyle, Grote, 
Milman, Macaulay, Kinglake — then Froude and Newman. Our 
philosophers were Mill, Buckle, Newman, Hamilton, Mansel. As 
I look back over these sixty years, it seems to me as if Eng- 
lish literature had been slowly sinking, as they say our east- 
ern counties are sinking, below the level of the sea. . . . 
Railroads, telegrams, telephones, motors, games, 'week ends,' 
have made life one long scramble, which wealth, luxury, and 
the 'smart world' have debauched. The result is six- penny 
magazines, four-and-six-penny novels, 'short stories' in every 
half- penny rag — print, print, print — everywhere, and 'not a drop 
to drink' — ^sheets of picture advertisements, but of literature 
not an ounce." Among the forces responsible for this deca- 
dence Mr. Harrison mentions " the increase of material appliances, 
vulgarizing life and making it a scramble for good things" 
(Quoted in the Literary Digest^ March 9, 1907). 

The indefinite pursuit of material satisfaction is, in consid- 
erable measure, injurious to health. Rich and varied food is 
not always more nourishing and healthful food. Usually it 
perverts the taste, and artificially stimulates the appetite to 
such an extent as to produce serious ailments of the digestive 
organs. The inordinate and feverish endeavor to increase in- 
come, the mad race for social distinction, and the unceasing 
quest of new enjoyments, new ways of satisfying tyrannical and 
jaded appetites, is disastrous to the nervous system. As a con- 
sequence of this two-fold abuse of their physical and mental 
faculties, a large section of the American people are already 
confirmed dyspeptics or confirmed neurasthenics. The injurious 
physical effects of unchastity and intemperance are too obvious 
to need extended comment 

Even the claim that a larger volume of happiness will result 
from the development and satisfaction of a larger volume of 
wants, is unfounded. For the greater the number of wants that 



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1907.] ** Bettering One's position'* 153 

have become acrive, the greater must be the pain or inconven- 
ience suffered while these wants are unsatisfied. The more nu- 
merous the wants that clamor for satisfaction, the greater is 
the likelihood of disappointment, the greater is the care and 
worry needed to meet them, and the more numerous are the 
instances in which satisfaction leads inevitably to satiety. The 
more frequent and the more varied the satisfaction accorded to 
any want, the more must the stimulus or satisfying object be 
increased in order to produce the former measure of enjoy- 
ment In a sense, we are all slaves to the wants that we ha- 
bitually satisfy; consequently, the greater the number of in- 
dulged wants, the greater is the slavery. Socrates thanked the 
gods because they had given him but few wants; both Epi- 
curus and Diogenes sought happiness in freedom from wants. 
As the author of the Simple Life says : '' The question of food 
and shelter has never been sharper or more absorbing than 
since we are better nourished, clothed, and housed than ever. 
It is not the woman of one dress who asks most insistently 
how she shall be clothed. Hunger has never driven men to 
such baseness as the superfluous needs, envy, avarice, and the 
thirst for pleasure.'' 

Not only the rich but the middle classes experience in- 
creased discontent as a result of yielding to the ** higher-stand- 
ard-of-living '' fallacy. An effective illustration of this fact is 
contained in an article by Annie Webster Noel in the New 
York Independent^ October 26, 1905. Following are some of 
its most pertinent passages: ''We married in New York City 
on twelve a week. ... If our friends would only be hap- 
py our great trouble would be removed. They do enjoy stay- 
ing with us. It is the plunge (into a cheaper house and neigh- 
borhood) that is hard. The fact is that our happiness, without 
so many of the things being striven for, is a slap in the face. 
• . . We kept house on twelve dollars a week for three 
months, on fourteen a week for six months. Then we had 
twenty a week. We have come to the conclusion that twenty 
a week is about where poverty commences. Below that content- 
ment is found in meeting living expenses. But above that new 
wants begin to take shape. If one hasn't a dollar, one stays 
at home and is content. But whoever went out to buy some- 
thing for a dollar and did not see just what she wanted for 
two? . . . We have reached the critical stage in our men- 



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154 ''BETTERING ONE'S POSITION'' [Nov., 

age. We are spending a little more here, a little more there. 
We are entertaining a little more. We are mixing more with 
people of larger means. . . . Through a. gradual increase in 
our income we have been reduced to poverty." In other words, 
the increase of income brought into practical consideration new 
but purely material wants, whose satisfaction or attempted sat- 
isfaction not only did not make for improvement of mind or 
character, but left this woman and her husband less contented 
than before. 

The worst effect of the failure to find increased happiness 
in the increased satisfaction of material wants, is the realization 
of this fact by the seekers. The disillusion and disappointment 
not infrequently makes them pessimists in the view of life as a 
whole. Having cherished for such a long time a false concep- 
tion of what constitutes true worth and rational living, they do 
not readily return to saner views. In this connection the work 
of Paulsen, already quoted, furnishes some significant passages. 
After citing a document which was placed in the steeple- knob 
of St. Margaret's Church at Gotha in 1784, and which glorifies 
the modern age, with its freedom, its arts, and its sciences, and 
its useful knowledge — all pointing to greater material enjoy- 
ment and greater happiness — the author makes this comment: 
" When we compare the self-confidence of the dying eighteenth 
century, as expressed in these lines, with the opinion which 
the dying nineteenth century has of itself, we note a strong 
contrast. Instead of the proud consciousness of having reached 
a pinnacle, a feeling that we are on the decline; instead of joy- 
ful pride in the successes achieved and joyful hope of new and 
greater things, a feeling of disappointment and weariness, and 
a premonition of a coming catastrophe; . • . but one fun- 
damental note running through the awful confusion of voices: 
pessimism / Indignation and disappointment ; these seem to be 
the two strings to which the emotional life of the present is at- 
tuned. • . . What Rousseau hurled into the face of his times 
as an unheard-of paradox, namely, that culture and civilization 
do not make men better and happier, Schopenhauer teaches as a 
philosophical theorem : Civilization increases our misery, civiliza- 
tion is the one %x^dX faux pas" {A System of Ethics. Pp. 147, 148). 

This doleful picture is truer of Europe than of America. 
We have not yet adopted the philosophy of Schopenhauer. 
We are younger than the European peoples, and have less ex- 



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1 907. ] •' Bettering One 's Position " 155 

perience; consequently, we have more enthusiasm, more illu- 
sions, more hope, more faith in ourselves and in the satisfying 
qualities of the material riches that we will secure from a land 
lavishly endowed by nature. And yet the rapidly increasing 
number of persons among us whose creed is pessimism, indi- 
cates that with the coming of more years, more experience, 
and more mature knowledge, we too shall be of the opinion 
that " culture " — so-called — *' and civilization " — so-called — *' do 
not make men better and happier/' 

It is sometimes asserted that the indefinite pursuit of ma- 
terial goods is necessary ior the sake of beauty and refinement. 
Undoubtedly these have a legitimate place in any complete 
theory of right living, but their importance is only secondary. 
They ought not to be sought or obtained to the detriment of 
the primary goods of life, such as health, mentality, virility, 
good morals, contentment. Besides much of the so-called re- 
finement, that is so much prized and sought, is not genuine. 
It is largely imitation, effeminacy, artifice, vulgarity. True re- 
finement includes not merely elegance, polish, and delicacy — 
which often appear in very artificial forms — but purity of mind, 
feelings, and tastes. In the endeavor to satisfy minutely one's 
material wants, the latter qualities are often weakened instead 
of being developed. The search for beauty and magnificence 
also leads frequently to grave perversions. Professor Veblen 
maintains that the expenditures of the richer classes in Amer- 
ica are governed by " the principle of conspicuous waste." This 
means that a man or a woman — especially the latter — must 
strive in the matter of dress, entertainment, and equipage, to 
show that he or she is able to command the most costly arti- 
cles that money can buy, and then must treat them with such 
recklessness as to indicate that they could be immediately re- 
placed. And Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson tells us in The 
Home that, "woman puts upon her body, without criticism or 
objection, every excess, distortion, discord, and contradiction 
that can be sewed together. • • . The esthetic sense of 
woman has never interfered with her acceptance of ugliness if 
ugliness were the fashion." 

This superficial survey of a field that is so broad as to de- 
mand volumes for adequate treatment, and so difficult as to be 
nearly incapable of definite description, no doubt appears frag- 
mentary, vague, and possibly exaggerated. Nevertheless, the 



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156 '' BETTERING One's POSITION'' [Nov. 

hope is entertained that two or three points have been made 
more or less clear. First, that the theory of values and of life 
which impels men to multiply and vary and develop and sat- 
isfy indefinitely those wants that are grouped under the heads 
of shelter, food, clothing, social intercourse, and amusement, is 
false, and makes as a rule for physical, mental, and moral de- 
cadence. To those persons — ^and their number is legion — who 
explicitly or implicitly adopt and pursue this materialistic ideal, 
money is literally " everything." Money does, indeed, ** en- 
slave " them. And it is difficult to say which class receives 
the greater hurt — those who succeed to a considerable degree 
in realizing their aim, or those who utterly fail. Although the 
latter do not attain to that excessive satisfaction of material 
wants which is demoralizing, their incessant striving for it pre- 
vents them from adopting reasonable views of life, and their 
failure leaves them discontented and pessimistic. In the second 
place 99 out of every loo persons are morally certain to lead 
healthier, cleaner, nobler, more intellectual, and more useful 
lives if they neither pass nor attempt to pass beyond the line 
of moderate comfort in the matter of material satisfactions. 
Lest this statement be accounted too vague, let us hazard the 
assertion that the majority of families that expend more than 
$2,500 per year for the material goods of life would be better 
off in mind and character if they had kept below that figure. 
Because of this general fact, reflecting and discriminating per- 
sons have but scant sympathy with the ambitions of the mass 
of comfortably- situated country people who come to the city 
to "better their position," or with the desire of the highest 
paid sections of the laboring classes to increase their remuner- 
ation. To-day, as of old, the prayer of the Wise Man repre- 
sents the highest practical wisdom : '' Give me neither poverty 
nor riches ; give me only the necessaries of life." In this con- 
nection the hope may be expressed that the foregoing pages 
will have shown the "indefinite-satisfaction-of- indefinite- wants " 
theory to be directly at variance with the Christian conception 
of wealth and of life. Even the majority of Catholics seem to 
hold to the Christian conception only theoretically and vaguely^ 
not clearly and practically. In a subsequent paper an attempt 
will be made to apply this conception to the actual life of to- 
day, and to indicate more precisely the content of a reason- 
able standard of life. 



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ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN. 

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY."" 
BY FRANCIS AVELING. D.D. 

Chapter IV. 

gILENCE, save for the cheeping of the birds in the 
cloister garth, and the droning of bees over early 
flowers, 

Amoul walked along the echoing stone clois- 
ter and knocked upon the Abbot's door. Two 
sharp taps replied within; and pushing the door open, he en- 
tered the cell of the Abbot. It was a bare and small cell, like 
all the others in the monastery; and here the Lord Abbot 
worked and prayed and governed his community. He slept, 
with all the other monks of the house, in the common dormi- 
tory according to the rule. A few low wooden stools, a rough 
deal table, upon which lay two or three parchments, a hang- 
ing shelf holding a few folios lettered down the backs in heavy 
black-letter characters, a stand, and a large wooden cross on 
the wall, like the one in the refectory — this was the furniture 
of the apartment. 

The Abbot was seated at the table. He did not rise as 
Arnoul entered. The young man bent one knee, and kissed 
his ring; and then, taking his seat upon one of the other 
stools, he waited for the monk to begin. 

** I go to Citeaux next month.'* The Abbot spoke in 
French. 

"To the chapter ? '' 

''Yes, to the chapter. You are to accompany me as far as 
Paris." 

" So ! I am going to the University at last ? " 

"Without doubt I talked it over with your brother and 
the Bishop when we were at Exeter for the synod. We had 
thought of Oxford and our house there — but it is finally ar- 
ranged now. Paris will do you good. You will see the world 

* Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society of St. 
Paul the Apostle in the SUte of New York. 



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is8 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

and enlarge your mind there. You have not felt/' he continued 
almost wistfully, " any inclination to come back to us — to be 
one of us — in these two years ? " 

The Abbot was as gentle and tender as a mother towards 
all the members of his house. He was tenderness itself towards 
this lad who had dwelt so long under his protection. He who 
knew so well how to be stern and unbending in defence of the 
rights and prerogatives of his Abbey, who resisted unjust en- 
croachments so bitterly, even though they came from the papal 
tax gatherers themselves, that he had come to be looked upon 
by the outside world as a man devoid of kindly feeling, a monk 
in nature as in his dealings, with no thought but for the 
keeping of the rule and the aggrandizement of his house and 
order, he had a warm heart and a human under his black 
scapulary. His rigid exterior was but the mask for the kindli- 
est feeling and the gentlest care. He was always ready to 
spend himself for his community. 

" None, Father Abbot. Since you sent me to live with 
Budd, I have learned what it is to be free — free as the birds 
and the winds. I could not live again the life of silence and 
routine and obedience that I have lived as a boy. I should re - 
bel as often as I heard the bell ringing for an exercise. Forgive 
me, Father, if I pain you. You I love, and every monk of St. 
Mary's; yes, and every stone in the cloister, too. But I will 
not be a monk. I cannot take the vows. The schools of Paris 
will do me good. You are right, Father Abbot ; I must see the 
great world and live its life. I must be free! Yes, I must be 
free ! " 

*' Free ! " echoed the Abbot sadly. *' My poor boy, you lit- 
* tie know what freedom means. You will be free to come and 
go — yes; and free, perchance, to wreck your life and break 
your heart. Better far the calm freedom of our cloister, that 
strikes off the fetters of self-will. But, alas ! I see that it is 
vain ! " 

"Believe me. Father—" 

"Yes, I know what you would say. It was a dream, per- 
haps, a foolish dream of mine to see you in the cloister; and 
we live in a waking world — not a dreaming one. But I had 
hoped that you had felt some call, some desire, to come back 
to us at St. Mary's and — " 

"When do we set out?" 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 159 

''The chapter is in six weeks from now. That will give 
you time to make what preparations are necessary and to visit 
your brother at Woodleigh. He expects you there at the be- 
ginning of the week." 

''And what am I to take?'* asked Arnoul. "I shall need 
new clothes — and arms. Brother James told me of the stu- 
dents and their brawls when he last came from Oxford. And 
it is far worse, he says, at Paris. Think of it, Father Abbot, 
think of it — the narrow streets^ the citizens all armed, the 
students with their swords and cudgels 1 I must have a stout 
sword of my own 1 '' His eyes sparkled as he thought of the 
whirling life of a great city. "And my habit — see; the best 
I had to wear for our Lady's feast — all stained ; and torn, too, 
under the sleeve ! " 

" Brother George will see to your clothes. You can go to 
him to morrow for what there is need of. And I shall see the 
armorer myself at Totnes bridge. I fear you must indeed have 
a weapon of some kind if you are to travel. ' Qui acceperint 
gladium gladio peribunty* the Abbot murmured to himself. 
*' But you must only use it in self-defence, Arnoul, or in suc> 
coring the weak." 

The color came and went in the lad's cheek. He was think- 
ing far more of the new life he was to lead than of what the 
Abbot was saying. Still he answered: "Yes, Father Abbot, 
in self-defence." And the other continued: " Meanwhile, there 
is Woodleigh. You are to go next week. I shall be again at 
Citeaux every year ; but it may be long ere you will see Buck- 
fast or Woodleigh and your brother again. May God bless 
you, lad, and our Lady's protection be over you I" 

He made a sign that he had no more to say ; and Arnoul, 
kneeling, kissed his ring again. 

The moment the boy quitted the cloister he gave vent to 
his pent-up spirits. His hound was waiting for him at the 
monastery gate; and together they raced across the deserted 
green. 

" Budd I Budd I Where have you been all this time ? And 
where is Roger?" he shouted, as he came, hot and breathless 
in sight of the good man sitting at his open door engaged in 
feathering a sheaf of cloth-yards. " I am going to Paris ! At 
last 1 Think of that, Budd ! This time two months I shall be 
there ! " 



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i6o Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

The granger pursed up his lips in a low whistle and nodded 
his head. He was adding the finishing touches to an arrow 
that he held in his hand; and before he made any answer he 
examined it slowly and critically several times. Apparently it 
was to his satisfaction, for at last he let it drop thoughtfully 
upon the little pile lying beside him upon the ground. He 
gazed upon his handiwork meditatively, then up towards the 
sky. He scratched his head, rubbed the side of his nose with 
one finger, and finally summed up the situation in a compre- 
hensive " Umph I " 

The boy went on excitedly : '^ Paris, Budd ! What do you 
say to that, Budd ? Paris 1 And the Paris schools I Do you 
not hear me ; are you grown deaf ? And what have you done 
with Roger?" 

"Aye, I hear you well enough," grunted Budd. "You sing 
more loudly of Paris and your going there than Father Ambrose 
at his psalms at vespers. One would think that Paris was the 
gate of paradise, at least, to hear you. Have you no sadness 
in your heart at leaving Buckfast, boy, and us?" 

"Yes, Budd; of course I have. You know that right well 
— none knows it better. But, think I Paris, Budd, and the great 
houses there I The throng of students and the crowded streets I 
The knights coming and going, and the King himself, perchance 1 
The clash of arms, and the tourneys! I shall see the world, 
Budd. And the schools! I shall sit under the great doctors 
of Paris. All the world resounds with their fame. What is it 
the distich says?" He quoted the popular tag, translating it 
for Budd's benefit: 

" * Filii nobilium dum sint juniores 

Mittuntur in Franciam fieri dociores.* '* 

"Perhaps I shall gain my doctor's cap and come back to 
England with — " 

"With a broken head, an' you come back at all." The 
granger finished his sentence brusquely. "Methinks there is 
more of knights and tourneys than book logic in your thoughts; 
and more crowded streets and brawls than schools or doctors. 
Ah, lad ! did you but know it, there is more of peace and 
happiness in this quiet valley of the Dart than you can hope 
to find in the schools of Paris or elsewhere in the great world." 

"Oh! Buckfast, Budd, with its sameness audits quiet! Fa- 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 161 

ther Abbot wants me to become a monk; and you would have 
me find a lord and be his page. I am tired of it all, Budd ! 
Abbot Benet is kind, but he wearies me with his questions: 
* Have you felt no call to serve God at St. Mary's ? Would 
you not be one of us?' And you, too; would you have me 
be page to old Nonant of Totnes? No; I am weary of doing 
nothing in your quiet valley, I have no wish to serve de No- 
nant. I am tired even of wandering through the woods and 
being my own master. I shall — " 

"You will go to Faris^ lad, and learn. You have said it. 
Aye ! and when you have learnt all the doctors, your masters, 
have to teach you, what then? Will you teach in your turn, 
and sit preaching for the rest of your life to a crowd of frowsy 
clerks in some mean room or public square ? Will you manage 
to find a fat living or a bishopric and be ruled by your clerk 
and chancellor like my lord of Exeter ? Come hither, wife 1 " 
he called through the open doorway. " And you, Roger," he 
shouted. " Leave off drinking the good wife's cider and come 
here! Here is Master Arnoul all agog with news. He has 
settled it with his brother and our lord the Abbot; and he is 
going to Paris at the next chapter crossing." 

The woman, a tidy, motherly body, and Roger, flushed with 
— be it confessed — his numerous potations, appeared on the 
threshold. 

"To Paris! " ejaculated both in a breath — she with maternal 
solicitude, thinking of his scanty and ill- provided wardrobe; the 
man's heated brain scarce grasping what had been shouted at him. 

" That is what I said," retorted Budd dryly. " He goes to 
Paris when my lord goes to Citeaux." 

"And who will mend your rents and wash your clothes, 
Master Arnoul ? " asked the kindly woman. " Isn't Devon good 
enough for you, and Devon folk, that you must stand there 
smiling and dancing at the thought of leaving us? You have 
worn the clothes you stand in two years come Michaelmas, and 
heaven knows how often I have patched and darned them for 
you. And who will look after you and give you possets for 
your humors when you are sick? Your poor brother has no 
more sense than a baby, to let you leave us all at Buckfast." 

" Buckfast—! Paris— I " hiccoughed Roger thickly. " Who's 
going to leave Buckfast ? Who's going to Paris ? What, Mas- 
ter Arnoul ? Til not believe it ! It's not right ! It's as bad 

VOL. LXXXVI.— II 

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1 62 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov,, 

as being a monk " — that was his old idea — '' going away like 
that! And those rascally friars — " 

He tailed off in a muddled statement of his grievance against 
the Franciscans and the palmer who had joined him on the 
road in the morning. 

"Believe it or not as it liketh thee/' Budd interrupted, put- 
ting a stop to his meandering, and silencing his wife's bursting 
eloquence with a frown. '' It seems it is a fact ; and Master Ar- 
noul — sit down, man 1 Don't sway about like that I — Master 
Arnoul is to leave us." 

*' I won't believe it I " Roger reasserted himself emphatically, 
dropping upon the bench. ".Those cursed friars told me I 
should go to hell. I did not believe them ; and I won't be- 
lieve that our Master Arnoul is going away. What's the use — ? " 

" Silence, beast 1 " Budd was getting angry, even with his 
bosom crony. " Silence, thou fool 1 Of a surety thou shalt go 
to hell and burn eternally. If the holy friars said it, it is true. 
And, when all is said, what matters it if thou dost burn ? I'd pile 
the faggots up myself, would it keep the lad here at Buckfast I " 

" Budd 1 Budd 1 What art thou saying ? And thou a Chris- 
tian manl Fie, husband, fie! And thy best friend, tool But 
it isn't true, is it. Master Arnoul ? " she added, turning to the 
subject of the discussion. "You are not going to leave us?" 

" Yes, dame, it is true. In a few days I go to Woodleigh ; 
then off to Paris with Father Abbot. But why do you all look 
so glum? I shall come back again, never fear; come back a 
great doctor, perhaps, or a belted knight, and be a credit to 
you all. Think, Budd," he added, turning to the two men, 
" and you, Roger, think I The scholars — forty thousand of them ! 
Not like the fishermen and farmers of Devon, but scholars come 
together from the whole wide world 1 So many are they, that 
they cannot be ranked in colleges, but are divided among the 
four great nations 1 Aren't you glad, Budd ? Don't you con- 
gratulate me, Roger ? And you, dame, think 1 There is some- 
thing better than clothes and clouts, or being coddled with brews 
and possets. There is life in the great worid; and arms and 
glory and honor — " 

"Aye, and a cracked head," grunted Budd; "and a de 
profundiSf as I told you before." 

" And what of the fishing and the hunting ? " put in Roger, 
the truth beginning to break through upon his cider-bemuddled 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 163 

intellect. "There's no fish in France. There's no hares at 
Paris." 

''No; but there are knights templar, Roger, and the hos- 
pitallers. There will be feasts such as we never have at Buck- 
fast or Exeter ; and shows and tourneys never seen in all Eng- 
land. Aren't you both glad that I am going to see the world ? " 
he asked, scanning the faces of the two men, and oblivious of 
the fact that the good wife was furtively wiping away a tear. 
Poor woman, she had no living children of her own. 

"Glad, lad ? Aye, if it please you ! But we are sorry for our- 
selves." And the kind-hearted fellow blinked suspiciously himself. 

" Besides, there's no knowing when you are ever coming 
back. They say men spend half their lives studying at these 
great schools. And, Arnoul, lad, my good woman- and I may 
both be lying beneath the sod on yonder hill before you come 
back to your own country with a doctor's cap on your head or 
a white cross on your shoulder." 

" Why do you talk like that, dear Budd," the boy protested, 
throwing his arm impulsively around the man's neck. "Why, 
both of you will be hearty and hale for the next forty years ; 
and I shall have you both proud of me ere ten are passed, 
never fear I And, dame, you can give me a collection of your 
simples to take to Paris with me; and when I mix your po- 
tions or smear myself with your ointments, I shall think of you 
and Buckfast and make the more haste to learn, that I may 
soon come back again. Stop groaning, Roger 1 One would 
think you had heard my passing bell to see you shake your 
head so 1 Fie, man I The drink has got at your wits I Nay, 
don't blubber like that, good Roger 1 It was the heat, most 
like, and the fatigue of the day; and — and — I've yet a month 
at Woodleigh to say good-bye to you in." 

But Roger protested the more, with a thick utterance and 
many grunts, his unswerving devotion to his Master Arnoul, his 
undying hatred of the corded friars, who, he had now fully 
persuaded himself, were at the bottom of it all. And the wo- 
man dried her tears and tried her best alternately to smile at 
the boy's enthusiasm and frown at her drunken guest's maudlin 
mutterings. 

But Roger, if he saw her at all, was not to be silenced by 
a frown. 

" A curse upon these meddling vagabonds ! " he growled. 



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1 64 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

'' I shall flesh an arrow in the next psalm- droning friar I meet 
with. Put my young master in a cell and feed him upon rye 
bread and pease, indeed 1 And rope him with a greasy cord 1 
I will — " And he started up unsteadily to his feet to show 
the doughty deeds he would do when fate should come across 
his path in the shape of a Franciscan. 

'' A pest upon thee I " thundered Budd, now thoroughly out 
of temper with himself and the world in general. '' Wife, what 
hast thou been giving to this drunken fool ? " And then, not 
waiting to hear her answer — " He would have it " — in which 
home brewed white ale and hydromel figured as well as cider, 
he went on: 

'' A murrain on thee 1 And a pest upon the Lord Abbot 
and the schools of Paris as welll Come into the house, thou 
swine, and sleep thy addled brain sober 1 " 

He half dragged, half pushed the protesting Roger through 
the doorway and disappeared with him into the interior of the 
building, leaving the air thick with vociferations against every- 
body and everything, mingled with Roger's grunts and the 
drunken curses that he hurled at the unfortunate friars. 

Arnoul sighed. It was hard that there should be such a 
bitter drop in his cup of happiness. Budd angry and Roger 
in liquor. His experience gave him no key to the problem 
that was hazily before his mind. Of course, he was fond of 
them all, and of dear old Buckfast; but he did not know that 
the affection of eighteen is not that of maturer years. Excited 
with the idea of novelty, he could not understand the devotion 
of these simple people, their wish to keep him among them- 
selves. He sighed again — a puzzled sigh — and looked up. The 
woman was crying silently. He did not stop to think whether 
her tears were caused by her husband's rough words and implied 
censure, or by her own motherly love for himself. But she was 
crying. Without a thought, he flung his arms about her and 
kissed her on the cheek. 

And then he turned away and strode off rapidly in the di* 
rection of the river. 

Chapter V. 

The setting sun cast long shadows over the tiny churchyard 
at Woodleigh, as Arnoul rode towards his brother's dwelling. 
He had been deeply touched by the kindly and sincere affec- 



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xQo;.] Arnoul the Englishman 165 

tion of the simple folk at Buckfast with whom he had been 
living for the past many months; and the thought of leaving 
all his good friends the monks came home to him now as it 
had not done at his first thought of going to Paris. He had 
still several weeks to spend at Woodleigh before he set out 
for France in the company of the Lord Abbot ; and he would 
certainly, he resolved, make the most of them with his friend 
Roger and his brother Sir Guy, the priest of Woodleigh. The 
thought that he would never feel so young again came vaguely 
upon him, as an instinctive feeling rather than a definite thought. 
When he should return he would be older and changed. All 
the kindly folk he knew — the monks and the peasants — would 
have changed, too, and would have drifted apart from him. 
How long was he to be away from dear old Devon, after all? 
It might be, of course, years. 

Despite his desire to get away from what he knew so well, 
and to discover new things in the world that lay outside the 
valley of the Dart, it was not altogether a comforting thought. 
Why- did things change at all ? Why, above all, should he 
change, to find the same old hills and heather, the same patient 
and weather-beaten faces, so different when he did comeback? 
Ten years even would add little to the age of the moors. Even 
old Brother Paul, the gate-keeper at the Abbey, would be unal- 
tered. But to him, when he came back, nothing would be the 
same. He realized dimly that it is we who change and develop 
in action and feeling and outlook, far more than the old monu- 
ments, the old friends, the old ideas, that stand almost still as 
we outstrip them in the race of life. 

His brother, coming from evensong at the humble church, 
met him as he rode past the houses that lined the straggling 
street, and together they proceeded to the priest's lodging. 

'' So, Arnoul, you are here at last," said the priest, as his 
brother dismounted and walked, leading his animal, beside him. 
'' I have been expecting you all the day, and Roger has been 
up at least twice from his boat to ask if you were yet come. 
What has kept you so long upon the road ? " 

<< I rode by Totnes, brother. Budd had business in the town, 
or said he had, and came with me." 

'' But Totnes lies not far off the straight road that runs 
from Buckfast; and here evensong is done ere you are come." 

" It was the armorer, Guy, who kept us, by the bridge. I 
took Budd there to see if the Abbot had bought me my arms. 

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i66 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

No; the Abbot had not been seen there. But there were such 
fine arms and armor in the place. You should have seen theml 
And the armorer himself was fashioning so fair a blade, and 
his men were putting new rivets in the plates of old de Nonant's 
suit of mail. And he was so kind to us both. I told him that 
I was going to leave Devon for France and the Paris schools; 
and that the Father Abbot had promised me the arms I need. 
And he called his wife to bring us wine and cakes. ' Not so 
rich/ he said, pouring it into the cups, ' as the wine of Burgundy, 
but the best we can grow in this country, with its cold and un- 
generous climate.' And then he showed us his store — knives 
and daggers and swords, wrapped away in cloth rolls to keep 
them bright and keen, and greaves and inlaid breastplates hang- 
ing from the walls, and shining new casques, and old battered 
helmets, and a suit of chain armor brought from Italy — it was 
of Saracen work and came from the crusades — that would lie 
within your two palms, so small it was, and yet would cover 
all your body. And he set aside two or three things that he 
said would do for a fine fellow like me — going abroad to the 
great University — to show the Abbot when he came. And he 
told us tales — a tale for every piece or armor — of knights and 
wars and burgesses and — " 

"And so you sat there and gossipped and wasted your 
time. Bethink you, Arnoul, you are no longer a boy to sit 
listening to a mercer's tales who wants to sell you his wares. 
And Budd I Budd is an old dotard to encourage you in it ! " 

"Still, brother, the sun was high and the day hot; and it 
was pleasant at the armorer's — " 

''Well, say no more about it. Though why you are so sud- 
den become warlike I know not. Here we are now, at any 
rate. Take your horse to the stable and give him drink and 
fodder ; and then come yourself and eat. Isobel will be grumb- 
ling that the supper is spoiled." 

The curate entered the house; and Arnoul, having stabled 
his beast, shaken down a good litter of straw, and placed a gen- 
erous measure of com in the manger, followed him into the low 
raftered room in which their evening meal awaited them. 

Old Isobel, for a servant, was a privileged person. She had 
been with her master's father before Arnoul was born; and 
looked upon him as, in a sense, her own especial property. 
Like most of the Buckfast and Woodleigh people, she idolized 
the lad. And, indeed, his frank, boyish spirit, as yet untouched 

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1907.] Arnoul the englishman 167 

by those preoccupations and cares that flow from either the joys 
or the sorrows of maturer years; his open smile, bestowed upon 
any who smiled upon him ; his handsome, sunburnt features, 
made it hard for any one to do other than like him. But, as 
I say, Isobel was privileged. She it was who had nursed and 
cared for him in the place of his dead mother. Roger could 
not boast of that 1 Until, at his father's death, he had gone 
to Buckfast — and that was a bitter time for her — she had watched 
him growing up and had done her best to cure him of the 
childish ailments that he had had. He had never been a strong 
boy, and when they took him away from her to the alumnate 
at the Abbey, she had given his brother a very bad hour of 
indignant protest and angry vehemence. 

Nevertheless he had gone; and Guy, well knowing the 
sterling devotion and honesty that were hidden under the old 
creature's rough exterior, had taken her to live with him, and 
be his housekeeper. 

''Sit you down, Arnoul, and eat. You must be famished 
after your ride," his brother began, setting the boy a good ex- 
ample by falling to heartily himself. 

" And ne'er a word, or a look, or a greeting for old Iso- 
bel I " put in the old woman from the kitchen doorway, where 
she stood, arms akimbo. '' Ah ! Master Arnoul, 'twas always to 
Isobel you used to come first; but now, what with your horse 
and your journeys and your goings abroad, poor old Isobel is 
clean forgot." 

" Isobel 1 Of course, you dear old thing I I have a greet- 
ing for Isobel ! Have I not been thinking of you and the good 
things you have been getting ready for us all the way hither 
from Totnes ? How are you, Isobel ? And how are the fowls ? " 
he added, remembering her pride in the few ragged birds that 
pecked and clucked about the kitchen door. 

" Well ! well 1 I cannot grumble at the health the good God 
gives me. And my fowls are well, too, thanks be to heaven 1 
Only the brown hen is dead — the one that laid the big brown 
eggs. She died now three weeks agone. But get to your sup- 
per, laddie, or 'twill be cold." 

As Arnoul fell upon the food with hearty zest and appetite 
Sir Guy and old Isobel kept up a running comment upon the 
boy's appearance. Here they agreed. He had never looked 
more healthy in his life. But when the conversation veered to 
his approaching departure, the old woman used her privilege of 

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i68 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

saying to the full exactly what she thought. She argued and 
wrangled and stormed at her master for being so foolish as to 
trust his young brother alone to the unknown dangers of a 
town such as Paris then was — full of thieves and robbers, des* 
peradoes and murderers from every quarter of the globe. In 
her excited imagination she saw naught but ruffians and cut- 
throats parading the narrow streets. She blamed Sir Guy and 
Abbot Benet and the Bishop with every censure she could lay 
her tongue to ; nor did the reasoning of the one, nor the sooth- 
ing words of the other, suffice to stay the flow of her eloquence. 

"You took him away from me before, and now you will 
send him away again," she cried ; '' and he will be murdered, or 
die of the plague.'' 

"Hold your tongue, you foolish old woman," commanded 
Sir Guy, exasperated. But not heeding him, she continued with 
still stronger vituperation and abuse, until he bade her begone 
and leave them in peace ; and she vanished, amid the banging of 
pots and ladles and spits, into the sanctuary of her own kitchen. 

Arnoul and his brother sat well into the night, discussing the 
problem of the boy's future. Sir Guy was a good priest — a 
very good priest, as things went — but he found it hard some- 
times to make ends meet at Woodleigh, especially when he saw 
others enjoying the easy fruits of richer benefices. 

"You might," he suggested, "come back to a canonry — or 
even be an archdeacon — when you have finished your course. 
Indeed, perhaps the Bishop will offer you a canonry before you 
go, so that you will not have any money matters to worry 
about when you get there. Or, if it is not a canonry, at least 
let us hope for some benefice or other that will enable you to 
finish your studies. I know the Bishop likes you. Then there's 
the Abbot, too. He told me he would help. And I, of course, 
shall do all I can. If I only had all your opportunities, now — ! 
Or there are the military orders — the knights of the Temple, for 
example; there's a chance to get on, too, if one is a templar. 
But work hard at Paris, whatever you do, Arnoul ! Knowledge 
is all the thing now. It pays everywhere — Or, if you have 
no vocation, and no one offers you a benefice, if the life of the 
templars does not attract you, there is the law. Why, even 
Master Bartholomew, the notary at Totnes, makes a pretty sum 
drawing up his deeds and instruments. But, 'ware the Jews, 
Arnoul I Paris is full of Jews, so 'tis said. And never borrow 
what you cannot pay back." 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 169 

Thus he continued, giving advice and putting before the lad 
the various chances of his possible careers, until the boy's an- 
swers became fewer and fewer, until he saw the tired head nod- 
ding and the closing eyes told him that it was high time for 
them both to get to bed. 

" One thing more/' he added, as Arnoul shook himself awake 
and stood there, ready to say good-night and retire. " I am 
going to Moreleigh to-morrow. The anniversary of Vipont's 
wife is near ; and his own Mass priest is ill. It is probable that 
I shall have to read the Masses for him. You have not for- 
gotten how to answer the Mass since you left the alumnate, have 
you ? No ? Well, if I go, I shall take you with me. You will 
like the castle; and Sir Sigar is an open-handed man, if he is 
bad-tempered. But for such as he I could not live at all." 

Arnoul thought rather perhaps of the hardness of Sir Sigar's 
hand than of his generosity. He would see Sibilla again, too, 
if he went to Moreleigh. At least, he hoped so. So he pro- 
fessed himself willing to go and perfectly able to answer the 
priest's Mass. He was very sleepy. The excitement of the last 
few days was telling; and he had had a hard, long day of it. 
He hardly heard his brother's last words to him, as, with a 
tired good-night, he made his way to the door and retired to 
bed. 

Chapter VI. 

The morrow dawned bright and warm, a light mist gently 
rising from the valleys as the sun shone forth in its splendor. 
Arnoul was up betimes, and had tended his horse before Sir 
Guy came back from the church. They broke fast together and, 
when the sun was well risen in the heavens, set out towards 
Moreleigh. 

All the scents and sounds of spring accompanied them. The 
buds had all broken into leaf on the trees and hedges ; and flowers 
peeped out, yellow cowslips and purple violets clustering to- 
gether in the green sward. The odor of grass and leaves, just 
fresh from the morning dew, and that sweetest of all odors, 
damp, wholesome, mother earth, came upon their nostrils. 

It was a day to be alive in. Both the brothers felt the 
charm and witchery of the woods. Arnoul threw out his chest, 
inhaling the fragrant air. 

They talked on the way of many things, but always recur- 
ring to the main theme that was uppermost in their minds — 

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I70 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

the lad's approaching journey and the life he was to lead at 
Paris. 

At length they came in sight of Moreleigh. The castle lay 
upon a plateau that sloped away precipitously behind it and 
upon either hand. The frowning gateway that broke the monot* 
ony of the embattled wall was flanked at either side by short, 
projecting towers, their narrow openings giving upon the entrance 
and commanding the iron-studded portcullis itself, as well as all 
that part of the plateau by which access to the castle was possible. 

Sir Guy and Arnoul walked leisurely down the slope to the 
plateau, and passed unchallenged beneath the portcullis. There 
were a few of the retainers and a page standing together in the 
courtyard, of whom Sir Guy asked if their Lord were in the 
castle. One surly fellow answered that he was not yet come 
from his ride; that he would return anon. 

"No matter," said Sir Guy. "Time does not press so but 
that I can await him." And he moved a little to one side. 
The men continued talking. 

" I tell you " — it was the surly man who spoke — " that it 
was my Lord's favorite hawk." 

"Nothing of the kind," broke in another. "He cared no 
more for one than for another. 'Twas the page William that 
angered him." 

"An't please you," the boy answered for himself, "I did 
not anger him at all ; he was already in a rage when I bore 
him his horn of mead, and he dashed it to the ground." 

"Well, 'tis all one," grumbled another. "When you have 
served Sir Sigar Vipont as long as I have, you'll learn to take 
him as you find him. He is angered because — ^because he is 
angered, that is all; and there's no more to be said about it. 
Talking will not mend it ; and knowing the reason of his anger 
will not make him one whit the less angry." 

" That, at least, is true," the surly one commented. " I 
pity the man or maid who crosses him." 

Sir Guy turned again and made a step towards the group. 
"If Sir Sigar be yet some time away, perchance the Lady Si- 
billa is in the castle with her women ? " 

"The Lady Sibilla will be now in the antechamber of the great 
hall, waiting my Lord, her father. It is her custom to meet him 
there when he returns from his ride. Would you speak with 
her ? Hither, page ! Acquaint thy Lady that Sir Guy, the priest, 
would speak with her. Follow the page. Sir Priest ! " 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 171 

The two brothers waited at the foot of the steps leading to 
the hally until the page returned and bade them go forward. 
They passed up the low and broad flight of stone steps and 
found themselves in the antechamber where she stood, a hand 
resting upon one of the sculptured lions that guarded the en- 
try. Arnoul noticed the device of the Viponts between the 
stone paws — a device repeated in a hundred places throughout 
the apartment. The chamber was dark, with its hanging tapes- 
tries on the walls and its carvings overhead. It was lit only by 
two narrow lancet windows above the entry. Behind the maid 
was the door that led to the great hall itself, covered now by 
heavy curtains of rich, thick brocaded work. 

The Lady Sibilla made Sir Guy and Arnoul welcome, com- 
ing forward to meet them. She was dressed in a gown and 
kirtle of some loose flowing material of a pale grass- green, held 
in at the waist with a girdle and clasps. The expression of her 
brown eyes was thoughtful and serious — too thoughtful and too 
serious, perhaps, for a maid of her years. But a smile lurked 
ever in their liquid depths and played about the comers of her 
lips. She was pale, too, with an unusual pallor, intensified by 
the clustering masses of dark flowing hair that escaped from 
beneath the golden fillet with which it was bound and rippled 
down over her shoulders. 

Sir Guy bent over her hand respectfully and named his 
younger brother to her. The lad saluted her with an inclina- 
tion half awkward, half stately, with a sort of innate grace and 
courtliness. He felt abashed and unaccustomed in her presence. 
But she put him at his ease at once with a kindly word and 
frank, open smile. 

" I remember," she said, " I remember you long, long ago, 
when you were but a little lad, and I a tiny maid. Besides, I 
saw you at the feast at the Abbey; and knew you then, too." 

The lad colored. Had Sibilla seen him as he gazed after her 
at Buckfast? He hoped not, at any rate. But she continued, 
speaking with Sir Guy: 

" My father will return before long. I know, or at least I 
can guess, what you want with him — to arrange, is it not, the 
Masses for my poor mother's soul ? " 

Sir Guy nodded his assent. "Yes"; he said, "that has 
brought us to Moreleigh." 

As for Arnoul, he could not tear his eyes from the maiden's 
face. 



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172 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov., 

The Lady Sibilla spoke again: ''I avi^ait my father here. 
It is his custom to ride every day, and he always expects to 
find me here on his return. Since he cannot now be long, I 
pray you tarry in the guest-room till he come." 

They saluted her again and descended the steps. The page, 
waiting for them in the courtyard, conducted them to the 
guest-chamber, which gave upon the hall. And there they seated 
themselves waiting for Sir Sigar's return. 

The Lady Sibilla stood alone, she also waiting to greet her 
father. 

A clatter of hoofs in the courtyard. The running to and 
fro of many feet. A volley of curses and a cry. The girl 
knew the voice. It was the younger of the pages — a delicate, 
fair-haired lad — who had tasted his master's riding lash. The 
whip whistled again through the air, and again the shrill cry 
rang out. She could hear the horse snorting and plunging on 
the stones. Her own breath came and went quickly. Should 
she go to her father in the courtyard? Should she stay and 
await his coming ? She made up her mind quickly, as she heard 
a third shriek following on the whistling descent of the lash; 
and hiding the misery of her heart by a brave, if piteous, smile, 
she turned to go. 

But hurried steps neared her. The clank of spurs rattled . 
on the stone stair. The hangings were parted violently — torn 
asunder. Her father stood before her. But he did not stop to 
embrace her. He passed her by as though he did not see her, 
and stamped up, cursing the whole length of the great echoing 
chamber, to the head of the oaken table that measured it. 

And there he flung himself down at the furthest end, still 
muttering and swearing, in the carved seat at the head of the 
table. His dog slunk in and lay beside his master. And the 
man frowned and glared, beating with his clenched fist and with 
his riding whip upon the board before him. The great swollen 
veins stood out upon his brow, and the thin lips were drawn 
back over his gums, so that his teeth glistened like the teeth 
of some wild animal. The pages trembled in the courtyard 
below. The old seneschal and the handful of retainers kept 
themselves prudently out of sight ; for they knew that Sir Sigar 
Vipont, Lord of Moreleigh, had given himself up, body and 
soul into the grip of an ungovernable fury. 

Poor Sibilla stood trembling and fearful at the farther end 
of the hall. She had never seen her father like this, now al- 

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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 173 

most inarticulate with rage, his curses coming so thick and fast 
from his lips that they sounded like the snarlings and yelpings 
of some wild beast. She sent up a prayer to her dead mother 
and to her patron saints, as, summing up her courage, she 
drew near to the furious knight and laid her little hand upon 
his sleeve. 

He shook her off roughly with an oath. His visage was 
demoniacal. The unhappy maiden wrung her hands and sobbed. 
The dog's bristles rose as he growled and came snifEng, first at 
the weeping girl, then at his furious master ; but a brutal cut 
of the whip sent him howling away ; and he slunk back whim- 
pering into a comer. 

Again the girl came forward, pale and resolute. Her voice 
had no trace of tears or sobs in it, as she addressed him : 

" Why do you beat the hound. Father ? " she asked. " He 
has done no wrong. And why did you strike poor Oswald ? 
What had he done to anger you ? '' 

The knight's face grew purple, and the muscles of his throat 
and jaw worked convulsively as her reproachful voice fell upon 
his ear. He was beside himself with anger as he started up, 
throwing the great oaken chair with a crash to the ground in 
his violence and brandishing the heavy riding whip in his up- 
lifted hand. 

'* By God 1 and by the wounds of God ! " he shouted. '' I 
will brook no interfering meddling in my house, not even from 
you, Sibilla I Is it not enough to be served by carrion vultures, 
that my own daughter must turn against me and ask me for 
reasons for doing as I please?" 

He broke into a string of brutal curses and raised the whip, 
the thonged end in his hand, above his head to strike her. It 
was a dangerous weapon for an infuriated man to use. She 
knew he did not mean it — how could he mean it, her own fa- 
ther, so loving and so kind ? — ^but she shrank before him trem- 
bling, lifting her arm above to guard her head and cowering 
towards the arras. 

The dog sprang forward, growling, its bristles erect, its eyes 
showing red, towards his mistress. Vipont struck at it again 
and again, rolling out a torrent of blasphemous cursing and 
abuse. But the beast kept out of reach, showing its fangs and 
growling the more; and the girl, shrinking and cowering, the 
tears dried in her eyes by very fear and shame, passed the long 



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174 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Nov., 

length of the hall, crouching by the arras, praying to God that 
none should see her father thus possessed. But his mad rage 
held; and he followed her the whole length of the empty room, 
upbraiding and cursing. 

The seneschal and the pages, with two or three of the bow- 
men, crept silently to the antechamber. They knew — far better 
even than his own daughter — what Vipont was capable of doing 
in these mad outbursts of ungovernable, unreasoning wrath. 
Still they never dreamed that any harm could come to the maid 
at her father's hands. Most like 'twas only the dog that an- 
gered him, they thought, and he would be shouting for them 
to bear the carcass forth — for Vipont was ever ready with the 
steel when in his rage. The clamor filled the courtyard and 
the whole castle. 

Arnoul pulled at his brother's cassock. '^ Come," he said, 
" hasten, there is murder done I " 

He dashed up the short stairway and, tearing the heavy cur- 
tains apart, burst breathless into the hall. The men entered 
behind him and stood about the door, Guy's pale face strange- 
ly outlined against the dark paneling of the lofty chamber. 

None too soonl 

Vipont — a furious light, as of madness, in his eyes, his face 
twisted and distorted — stood over his daughter, the heavy whip 
lifted in his outstretched hand. The g^rl uttered low cries and 
moans, turning her white face, drawn with grief and fear and 
shame, away from the sight of her maniacal father. The sun's 
rays struck upon her dress through the diamond panes of a 
narrow lancet window and stained it red as blood. The hound 
snarled and growled, turning fierce eyes and bared fangs towards 
its master. The men at the (loorway caught their breath in a 
quick, sibilant hiss and started forward to protect the girl. The 
outstretched arm seemed poised through an eternity — an arm 
of stone, of steel, of nerves and sinews petrified. With an oath, 
the tense muscles relaxing, he flung himself upon her. 

But Arnoul was quicker. He leaped at the man like a wild- 
cat and caught the descending hand, shouting the while to the 
others for help. Vipont writhed and struggled, turning his rage 
now upon the boy, cursing and fumbling for the dagger at his 
side. But the lad's wrists were strong as steel and he kept his 
grip, though he was shaken about and worried like a rat. 

With almost superhuman strength, Vipont lifted him from 

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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 175 

the floor and whirled him, hanging from his wrists, towards the 
ground. This was the opportunity. The men rushed in from 
behind him, and caught their Lord's arms above the elbows, 
dragging them backwards till they almost cracked. The senes- 
chal wrested the heavy whip from his hand, and Arnoul stood 
back, gasping and panting, his heart beating and thumping on 
his ribs, a queer, choking sensation in his throat. It was all 
over in an instant There would be a heavy reckoning with 
their Lord, no doubt; but murder would surely have been 
done without some such interference. 

Vipont stood there, held fast by his own retainers, impotent 
and furious. His hands worked convulsively at his sides, the 
veins standing out like whipcord upon his brow, torrents of 
oaths still falling from his working lips. Sibilla had risen from 
the ground and was weeping silently. Her bosom swelled with 
sobs. Her pride, her love, her honor, had been so cruelly 
wronged. 

Then Sir Guy came forward and led her away from the 
great hall, back to her women. Not a word did he speak. 
Only he took her hand and led her forth weeping. And Vi- 
pont struggled and cursed and clawed at his side for the wea- 
pon as she went. The pages and the remaining bowman stood 
open-mouthed at the door, until the seneschal motioned them 
away. 

And then Arnoul was witness of a strange thing. The veins 
subsided on Sir Sigar's forehead and his hands ceased to claw 
and fumble at his side. He seemed on a sudden to collapse 
and shrink into himself. Instead of oaths, sobbing groans came 
from his lips. His rage had left him spent and broken; and 
he trembled and shook like a man — ^a very old man — shaken by 
the palsy. The seneschal bade the archers loose their master 
and lead him to a seat. Still cowed and broken he fell, all 
huddled together, into the chair they brought him. Only the 
tears ran down his two cheeks and choking sobs shook his en- 
tire body. 

'' Let him be," whispered the steward. '' He will come to 
himself now. The fit never lasts, but wears itself away like 
this. Only the poor maiden I Poor child, she has never seen 
her father in this his worst of moods. Never before has he 
raised his whip to her. Indeed, he has never lost himself like 
this before." 



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176 Arnoul the Englishman [Nov. 

Vipont had folded his arms upon the table before him and 
bowed his head upon them hiding his face. The sobs still shook 
his frame and echoed through the vast spaces of the room. He 
looked so pitiful and old — that heaped- up figure sobbing in the 
lonely oaken chair — so crushed and old and broken, that the 
boy had it in his heart almost to pity him. But he remem« 
bered what he had seen, and became stern and hard again. 

The seneschal signed to him to follow him ; and together they 
withdrew, leaving the knight alone, sobbing in the great empty 
hall. 

''Surely/' said Arnoul, as soon as the heavy curtains had 
closed behind them, hiding the pitiful figure. ''Surely the 
maiden is not safe with him. He is mad — stark mad! Has 
she no place where she could go, no people of her own to save 
her from a repetition of such danger?" 

"There is her aunt at Exeter, the Abbess of the Benedic* 
tines there," replied the seneschal. "But she would never go. 
No; she certainly would never consent to go. Nothing would 
tear her from her father." 

" But she must go," insisted the boy imperatively. " She 
must be got away from such a madman. Guy shall speak with 
her and persuade her. Abbot Benet will reason with Sir Sigar 
himself. Surely he will listen to reason when once he is calm 
again ! And, if need be, the Bishop — " 

" She will not listen ; and Sir Sigar will hear no reason. 
Let be ! young sir, let be I " repeated the seneschaL " I know 
what I am saying. The Lady Sibilla will never be persuaded 
to leave her father. But, see ! there is your brother. Sir Guy," 
he went on. "You will want a bite, both of you, and a sup 
before you return to Woodleigh. And all your journey here 
in vain I Alas ! it is not to be helped 1 A pity I Yes ; a pity ! 
Come, Sir Guy 1 Come, young sir I " — the good seneschal's 
thoughts turned from his present anxiety to the comforting of 
the inner man — "we shall find a cold pasty, doubtless, and a 
flagon or so of wine, if we do but look for it. And, after so 
arduous a morning's work, so disquieting a scene, so terrible 
an adventure, faith of God I we all need it ! " 

So saying he disappeared through a low archway, Sir Guy 
and Arnoul following close at his heels. 

(to be continued.) 

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JORIS KARL HUYSMANS. 

BY VIRGINIA M. CRAWFORD. 

|HE death of Joris Karl Huysmans has followed, at 
a few months' interval, the death of Ferdinand 
Brunetiere, and the Church in France to-day is 
the poorer through the loss of these two dis- 
tinguished converts to Catholicism. No two men 
could have been more dissimilar, no two could have been 
brought to an understanding of divine truth by more diverse 
paths; yet it was given to each, in his own sphere, to com- 
bat the materialism of the century and to labor in the in- 
terests of the Church to which each had submitted in middle 
life — Bruneti^re by the eloquence of his speech and the aus- 
tere probity of his character even more than by his pen ; Huys- 
mans by the sheer power of incomparable literary expression. 
In what form and with how great an intensity will their mem- 
ories survive among their countrymen? 

Contemporary events seem to make it easier than is usu- 
ally the case to arrive, so soon after his death, at some per- 
ception of the ultimate place to be filled by Huysmans in the 
literary history of his adopted country. He died (May 13, 1907) 
at a moment when France was in the throes of an an ti- religious 
campaign, of which the permanent consequences are still beyond 
our vision, but of which the first and most obvious result has 
been the uprooting of that monastic ideal which has flourished 
with such amazing luxuriance on Gallic soil ever since the day 
when Lacordaire — most characteristic of French friars — preached 
in Notre Dame in the proscribed habit of St. Dominic. 

One of the most distinctive features of the Renaissance of 
Christianity in France during the nineteenth century, after its 
temporary destruction during the Revolution, has surely been 
the very large part played in it by the religious orders, their 
influence, their wealth, their rapid growth. Whether it be a 
feature to rejoice over or to be deplored, it is a fact no one 
cares to dispute. It is surely not without significance that on 

VOL. LXXXYI.-'ia 



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178 JoRis Karl HUYSMANS [Nov., 

the eve of the outburst of hatred and bigotry which has cul- 
minated in their forcible disruption, a man of letters of the 
first rank should have come forward as the champion of this 
modern efflorescence of monasticism, as the interpreter of its 
mystical significance and the commentator of its most minute 
observances. 

It is this, I venture to think, that constitutes Huysmans' per- 
manent right to a niche in his country's temple of fame. He 
has chronicled, in letters of gold, a state of life which, maybe, 
as far as France is concerned, has passed away beyond recall. 
To this task he devoted his strange genius, his varied erudition, 
and the mature powers of his later life. And into it, with the 
unerring judgment of the true artist, he has woven the history 
of his own spiritual growth, transforming what might have been 
a mere historical retrospect into an absorbing psychological 
study. In other words, he has given us a revelation of the 
human soul almost without parallel in literature, tracing its 
painful upward course from the horrors of Satan- worship to 
the very doors of the cloister. 

Huysmans so identifies Christianity with the monastic life 
at its purest, that it becomes scarcely an exaggeration to as- 
sert that without Solesmes and without La Trappe his conver- 
sion would never have been effected. Hence the identification 
of himself and his own spiritual welfare with that of the many 
religious houses — Carmelite, Benedictine, or Cistercian — that he 
visits and dissects. No one save he could have produced the 
wonderful trilogy of En Route^ La CathidraU^ and VOblat^ and, 
I venture to think, it is for these three books that he will be 
remembered by posterity. 

Few men have been endowed with so complex a nature as 
Huysmans; few have brought their work to so unexpected a 
climax. Descended from a family of Flemish painters he pos- 
sessed by birthright that gift of minute observation so charac- 
teristic of the Flemish school. His memory was prodigious, 
scarcely less remarkable, indeed, than the industry with which 
he accumulated vast stores of out-of-the-way items of informa- 
tion with which his pages are strewn. His senses were abnor- 
mally developed; he was peculiarly sensitive to odors; and in 
the joys of the palate he was an unblushing adept. He was 
indeed avid of sensations in every form; yet, like all epi- 
cureans, he was a prey to boredom and mental lassitude. In 



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1907.] JORIS KARL HUYSMANS 1 79 

general his was a singularly lonely existence, and in later years, 
even when he was living in his apartment in the Rue de Sevres, 
it was that of a student and recluse, wholly destitute of domestic 
joys and lightened only by a few chosen friendships. He had 
a morbid horror of the ugly and commonplace, and an almost 
physical repulsion to every form of suffering, which in itself 
would account for much of his periodical depression of spirits, 
although in his case it was balanced by an exquisite sensitive- 
ness to beauty. Yet it is to be noted that the beauty he loved 
was rather that of art than of nature, the beauty of pure color 
and sculptured line and soaring column. Very rarely does he 
dilate on landscape or scenery, and when he writes of plants 
or flowers it is often merely as a peg on which to hang some 
quaint botanical lore. Yet one has scarcely the right to criti- 
cise his aesthetic limitations, when it is remembered how wide 
were his powers of appreciation, and to what admirable use he 
put them. To no single branch of art was he indifferent: 
music, sculpture, painting, architecture, he studied them all, 
loved them all, and assigned to each its appointed place in the 
harmony of created things. 

Given his time and his temperament, it was inevitable that 
Huysmans should make his debut in literature as a disciple of 
Emile Zola. His "Sac Au Dos" (1880), describing the brutali- 
ties of barrack life, appeared in the celebrated composite volume, 
the Soirees de Medan. A number of pessimistic stories, sordid 
and unpleasant both in subject and treatment, belong to the en- 
suing years: Les Sceurs Vatard ; A Vau L'Eau, {1882); Un DU 
lemme (1884); Croquis Parisiens ; and the notorious A Rebours. 
Soon, however, the revolt against materialism was to come, and, 
like Rosny, Paul and Victor Margueritte, George Moore, and 
other writers less known to fame, Huysmans threw off his 
allegiance to the founder of the naturalist school and, uncon- 
sciously to himself, his mind began to turn towards the things 
of the spirit. 

For, realist as he was in one aspect of his character, he 
was mystic and dreamer in another. Repulsive as A Rebours 
is in many of its features, it nevertheless does forecast in a 
curious way the change that was to come over its author's life. 
This may be seen on the one hand in the characteristics with 
which he endows his hero, the Due des Esseintes — a love of 
theological niceties, a vague sense of the Church's greatness. 



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i8o JoRis Karl HUYSMANS [Nov., 

and a certain familiarity with religious writers, the outcome of 
his Jesuit training ; and on the other, in the realization the book 
betrays of the vanity of mere material things. The decadent 
and neurotic des Esseintes creates for himself a wholly egotistic 
paradise, from which was to be excluded every sign and sound 
which could jar on the most delicate organization, and the ex- 
periment fails miserably. 

Amid the turmoil of criticism aroused by the book few had 
the penetration to perceive whither the author was being led. 
That robust and original genius, Barbey d'Aurevilly, discerned 
it, as years before he had discerned a similar promise of con- 
version in Baudelaire. In an article in the Constitutionnel 
(July 29, 1884) he drew attention to the humble pathos of the 
prayer that brings the volume to a close, begging mercy "for 
the Christian who doubts and for the unbeliever who fain would 
believe," a prayer wrung from the lips of des Esseintes in a 
moment of acute desolation of soul. In Barbey d'Aurevilly's 
judgment it was Huysmans himself who gave utterance to the 
prayer. Yet, twenty year later, in a preface to a privately- 
issued edition of A Reiours, the author was able to assert that 
at the time he wrote it he felt no conscious leanings towards 
the Christian faith, and no sense of the need of reformation 
in his own life. 

His conversion, indeed, was still eight years distant. In the 
interval there appeared both En Rade and Lh-Bas^ books that 
few Catholics will care to open. Yet La^Bas, despite its truly 
horrible revelations concerning the Black Mass and obscure forms 
of Satan-worship both in the Paris of to-day and in the Paris 
of the seventeenth century, possesses for the psychologist the 
interest of bringing on the scene, for the first time, Durtal, the 
man of letters, the hero of the three ensuing novels, the proto- 
type of the author himself. In the intense subjectivity of all 
Huysmans' writing it is not easy to discriminate between fiction 
and personal experience, but it is admittedly no injustice to him 
to assume that the history of Durtal's soul's progress is, in its 
main features, closely autobiographical. None the less, the or- 
dinary reader may well be content to make acquaintance with 
his career only at the stage entitled En Route. 

This wonderful book appeared in 1895. Three years previ- 
ously the author had suddenly left Paris, and had made a re- 
treat in the little Trappist monastery of Notre Dame d'Igny. 



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1907.] JORIS KARL HUVSMANS 181 

Here he made his peace with God and received Holy Commun- 
ion. The event, when known, produced not a little curious 
speculation in French literary circles, to be followed by an out- 
burst of excited controversy when the whole story was given 
to the world. Unbelievers, while praising the work of art, 
poured scorn on the conversion, and Catholics were too scandal- 
ized at the sinner to credit him with any sincerity of purpose. 
His reconciliation was declared to be unreal, his repentance 
sensational, his whole attitude a mere literary pose. 

Happily a few men, such as the late Mgr. d'Hulst, Francois 
Coppee, and the Abb^ F. Klein, besides his trusted friend, the 
Abb^ Mugnier, discerned from the first something of the true 
greatness of a book so daringly outspoken and so full of start- 
ling paradoxes that the conventional Christian failed to recognize 
the repentant soul of the Prodigal Son returning to his Father's 
house in so unwonted a guise. Of the literary merit of the 
book there could scarce be any question. The uncertainties, 
the tentative experiment of earlier works, here disappear. With 
none of the usual stock-in-trade of the novelist — no love episode, 
no heroine, no plot — he holds the reader by the unbroken unity 
of the theme treated in a style so incisive, so picturesque, so 
varied in imagery as to carry one unfatigued through his long- 
est and most learned dissertations. Few writers have so vast 
a vocabulary at their command as Huysmans, and his frequent 
use of unusual words is a continual tax on the foreign reader. 
In this he scarcely falls short of Balzac or Flaubert. 

The ultimate test, however, of a book such as En Route 
as, I may surely add, of the Confessions of St. Augustine, must 
lie, not in its purely literary qualities, but in its essential sin- 
cerity, and its reliability as an unvarnished record of a soul's 
conversion to God. Judged from such a standard, I confess it 
is hard to understand that any unprejudiced person can remain 
unmoved by Huysmans' confessions. Our passion for the sen- 
sational and mock-heroic which has caused us to embellish be- 
yond all recognition the simple records of early hagiographers 
in order to bring them more into accord with our own false 
standards of what is edifying and becoming in saints and mar- 
tyrs, often blinds us to the real nature of man's heroic struggle 
against evil in daily life. Huysmans has an unequalled capacity 
for reproducing not only the doubts and hesitations of the hu- 
man mind, the petty pretexts on which we would fain put from 



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1 82 JORIS KARL HUYSMANS [Nov., 

us some unwelcome duty, the paltry cowardice that clogs our 
powers of action, but also the fierce onslaughts of temptation 
to which human nature is prone. Durtal is never heroic, as 
we are wont to understand heroism, but he is amazingly, con- 
vincingly, human ! 

Another point which testifies to Huysmans' transparent sin- 
cerity is that when it comes to the definite question of the 
cause of his own conversion, he, adept as he is in self-analysis, 
remains dumb. ** Providence was merciful to me," he writes 
simply in the preface to A Rebours, already referred to, "and 
the Blessed Virgin was kind." Elsewhere he speaks of Dur 
tal's weariness of life, of the prayers of relations, of the com- 
pelling power of Christian art as contributory causes. He ex- 
claims : 

Ah ! the true test of Catholicism is surely the art that it 
provided, the art that no man has been able to surpass : the 
Primitifs in painting and sculpture, the mystics in verse and 
in prose, plain chant in music, and in architecture the Roman 
and the Gothic (^En Route. P. lo) . 

These, however, are the more external reasons and leave 
much unaccounted for. After all, who can apportion and de- 
termine the workings of the Holy Spirit within us? Are not 
most stories of conversions singularly unconvincing documents ? 
Yet a lesser artist than Huysmans would certainly have made 
the attempt. 

Having once embraced Catholicism, Huysmans' attitude, in 
all essentials of faith, partook of the receptive docility of child- 
hood. He seems to have been wholly untouched by — indeed 
quite uninterested in — the intellectual problems that cause dis- 
tress to so many in our day. So, too, he had no leanings to- 
wards liberalism, whether within or without the Church. Poles 
asunder as they were by nature, his religious attitude, in its 
simple directness, reminds me at times of that of the Breton, 
Ernest Hello. They had in common their vivid sense of the 
Communion of Saints, and their intimate knowledge of Holy 
Scripture, rare among Frenchmen. Both are wholly free from 
the sin of human respect. To Huysmans religion could never 
be a matter of outward observances, a conventional formula. 
To him it meant nothing less than the familiarity of the soul 
with God and the diligent cultivation of such a state of life as 



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1 907. J JORIS KARL HUYSMANS 1 83 

renders the familiarity more real, more continuous. For the 
majority of souls such favorable conditions can scarce be found 
outside the cloister. Hence his enthusiasm for La Trappe, the 
wonderful picture of which supplies the most enchanting pages 
of En Route. No writer of our day has penetrated more in- 
timately than he into the mystical beauty of the cloistered ideal, 
the far-reaching power of prayer, the awful reality of repara- 
tion for the sins of others. 

His knowledge of the writings of the great mystics of the 
Church, more especially those of Spain and Flanders, is such 
as few laymen can pretend to. Living thus, as he did, in his 
later years, in touch with the highest conceptions of Christian 
truth, his mind steeped in the symbolism and the liturgy of the 
Church, it was perhaps only human that he should betray un- 
due impatience of the worldly compromises of every -day Catho- 
lics. The fashionable preacher, the theatrical cantiques of the 
Mois de Marie^ religion reduced to a matter of painted statu- 
ettes and candles and chromos, the 'Mmbecile literature" and 
'Mnept press" of Catholic France, all excite his unmeasured 
scorn, and if his picturesque language is over- emphatic, and 
his denunciations unduly sweeping, who can deny the basis of 
right upon his side ? He is a literary Savonarola, who would 
joyfully have lit a bonfire on the Parvis Notre Dame, in which 
to fling all those trivial objets de pieti which he believed to 
stand between the soul and God. None the less, one must re- 
gret that his generous defence of the religious orders should 
have led him into an undue depreciation of the French secular 
clergy. It is reassuring to learn from the Abb^ Br^mond, in 
a sympathetic appreciation of his friend, in Le Correspondant 
(June 10, 1907), that the invectives to be found in Huysmans' 
books were much attenuated as they fell from his own lips, 
and that his innate kindness of heart took from them all their 
sting. Apparently his complex nature included a certain Flem- 
ish thick-skinnedness, for we are told that he was genuinely sur- 
prised and distressed on learning that his ferocious plain-speak- 
ing had caused pain in many quarters, and it is to be noted 
that his latest writings are comparatively free from personalities. 

After the mysticism of the Church was to follow its sym- 
bolism, after Notre Dame de I'Atre, Chartres Cathedral. To 
most people Chartres has been but one among the many beau- 
tiful Gothic churches of France. For readers of La Cathidrale 



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1 84 JORIS KARL HUYSMANS [Nov., 

it will ever retain a loveliness all its own, as the home par ex* 
cellence of the Blessed Virgin, as a " blonde aux yeux bleus^*' as 
** the most superhuman and exalted art the world has ever 
seen/' Never has Cathedral been celebrated by so fervid and 
penetrating a chronicler. Never has the symbolism of mediae- 
val sculptors and builders been subjected to a more searching 
analysts. There are exquisite romantic pages telling of the 
erection of the great building, of the wave of religious emotion 
that brought together a motley army of rich and poor to toil, 
as on a new Crusade, for the greater glory of the Mother of 
God. There is a wonderful picture of the vast nave at early 
dawn, in which the clustered pillars are compared with forest 
trees. And there is a long, detailed study of the incomparable 
statuary that decorates the exterior, a study in which every 
variation of line and expression is keenly noted. To Huysmans 
each stone figure is as a living witness of the past, an indi- 
viduality endowed with all the characteristics of the saint or 
prophet whose name it bears, and to be written about, there- 
fore, in tones of reverent admiration. Here is a charming pas- 
sage referring to the group of royal ladies who adorn the 
Western porch: 

What say they to each other, they who have watched St. 
Bernard, St. Louis, St. Ferdinand, St. Fulbert, St. Ives, 
Blanche of Castile, and so many of the elect, pass by them be- 
fore penetrating into the starry gloom of the nave ? Do they 
speak of the death of their companions, of those five statues 
that have disappeared forever from their little circle? Do 
they listen, through the half-closed doors, to the moaning of 
the desolate wind of the psalms and the roaring of the great 
waters of the organ ? Can they hear the preposterous ex- 
clamations of the tourists who laugh at seeing them so tall and 
stiff ? Can they detect, in common with so many saints, the 
odor of sin, the stench from the slime of the souls that brush 
by them ? If it were indeed so, one could no longer lift one's 
eyes to them . . . and yet Durtal continued to gaze, for 
he could not drag himself away ; they held him by the never- 
tailing charm of their mystery. In fine, he said to himself, 
they are extra-terrestrial, in spite of their material form. 
Their bodies do not exist though their souls are free to dwell 
in their sculptured vesture ; they are thus in perfect unison 
with the basilica which, it also, is disincarnated from its stone 
walls, and rises far above the earth, in a flight of ecstasy. 



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1907.] JORIS KARL HUYSMANS 185 

Of actual story, there is in La Cathedrals even less than in 
En Route, We follow the neophyte into the comparatively 
serene atmosphere of the Cathedral city, where his worst trials 
are his states of dryness and spiritual lassitude, under which he 
groans in a frankly human fashion and lives through as best he 
may. The incomparable Madame Bavoil supplies the only touch 
of femininity in a volume which might well be studied for its 
learning apart from its literary qualities. Not only are there the 
long disquisitions on statuary and stained glass which legitimate- 
ly find a place in an architectural work, but the author has in- 
troduced in addition elaborate studies of Fra Angelico, of the 
German Primitif school, of the symbolism of gems and of plants, 
of odors and of colors, and of the marvels of mediaeval besti- 
aries. 

That the average reader is somewhat overwhelmed by so 
continuous a stream of unfamiliar information poured out be- 
fore him cannot be denied, in spite of the skill with which 
Huysmans sifts and tabulates the quaint wisdom of mediaeval 
students and chroniclers. And, in point of fact, the digressions 
are not wholly lacking in method, for they are all off-shoots of 
study from that of the liturgy of the Church which, as years went 
by, became to Huysmans an ever- increasing pre- occupation, 
whether in Paris or Chartres, at La Trappe or Solesmes. 

With him it was a passion as genuine and as reverent as 
that which has given us Dom Gu^ranger's many and invaluable 
volumes. Even before Durtal's conversion, his love for the 
Church's Office, rightly rendered, had led him, a rapturous wor- 
shipper, to vespers in the chapel of the Benedictines in the Rue 
Monsieur, and later, wh^en the death of the Abbe Geuresin de- 
prived Chartres of any special claim as a place of residence, it 
was the determining influence which established him, after much 
mental hesitation, in the character of an oblate in the Benedic- 
tine Abbey of the Val des Saints — the Ligug^ of real life. 

It is no small proof of Huysmans' wide powers of apprecia- 
tion where the religious orders are .concerned that, having been 
reconciled to the Church at La Trappe, and thrilled through all 
his being by his vision of the Cistercian ideal of silence and 
penance and vicarious suffering, he should have grasped, with 
scarcely less enthusiasm, the spirit of the benign rule of St. 
Benedict. It was the solemn and dignified rendering of God's 
worship with the daily recitation of the divine office in full choir 



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1 86 JORIS KARL HUYSMANS [Nov., 

as the central feature of monastic life, implying, as is the case 
in Benedictine houses, the sole use of his beloved plain chant 
and the entire exclusion of figured music that appealed so strong- 
ly to Huysmans. Next there was his subtle appreciation of the 
somewhat ill-defined position of an oblate, bound by no vows, 
yet participating in some measure of monastic routine, and shar- 
ing in many of the spiritual privileges of a dedicated life with- 
out that entire surrender of time and intellectual interests which 
to many men in middle life becomes a practical impossibility, 
however piously disposed. 

All these themes are meditated and commented on in VOblat 
in a mood more placid and equable than that of its predeces- 
sors. The ordinary events of cloistered life, the great feasts of 
the Church, Holy Week, Durtal's own clothing and profession as 
an oblate, are so many pegs on which to hang learned disser- 
tations on art and music and, above all, on the right rendering 
of the Church's liturgy. A pleasant touch of gentle satire is 
introduced in the presentment of the devout Mile, de Garambois, 
who shares in the author's own weakness for '' de bons petits 
plats^* and gives him an outlet for the display of his culinary 
lore. The dispersal of the community under the Associations 
Law not only brings the trilogy to a sad close, but, in a meas- 
ure, seems to cut short the work of interpretation of the mysti- 
cal life to an unbelieving generation, which Huysmans had made 
in a special sense his own. His countrymen at least made it 
clear that they had no national use for centres of prayer and 
sacrifice among them. 

Huysmans had, however, several years of work still before 
him. Reluctantly he returned to his solitary life in Paris on 
the closing of the Abbey at Ligug^ and in spite of impaired 
health was able to see through the press two new books, which 
complete in different directions his studies of religious phenom- 
ena. The first was the long- delayed Life of Sainte Lydwine de 
Schiedam^ a Flemish ecstatic of the early fifteenth century, whose 
powers of taking on herself the sins and sufferings of others 
render her one of the most extraordinary figures in mediaeval 
hagiography. Needless to say, Huysmans is no disciple of the 
modern critical school of historians, although the biography 
opens with a vigorous and wholly unconventional picture of the 
moral condition of Europe at the birth of the saint. He rarely 
cites an authority, and he appears to place an equal value on 



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1907.] JoRis Karl Huysmans 187 

all the narratives he reproduces. His treatment, more especially 
in regard to physical and medical details, is as realistic as any- 
thing in Zola. Yet the awe-inspiring, pathetic life is lit up by 
the passion of love that inspired it, skillfully reflected in the 
pages of a biographer who is able to appreciate to the full the 
mystical significance of events that to men of the world are 
wholly incomprehensible, and which alone render possible a 
life of such acute and ceaseless suffering. 

The book on Lourdes, published in 1906, proved a last act 
of homage to the Blessed Virgin, to whom Huysmans attributed 
so large a share in his conversion. From the venerable and 
solemn beauties of Chartres to the cheap modernity of Lourdes 
was change indeed I And it says much for Huysmans' spiritual 
vision that, although his aesthetic senses suffered so acutely at 
Lourdes that he was obliged to have recourse to a theory of 
direct diabolic influence to account for the all-pervading hide- 
ousness of building and statuary, his belief in the miraculous 
nature of the cures effected never wavered. He moans over 
the entire absence of liturgical life, over the mutilated vespers 
and the Low Masses, accompanied by popular hymns — **de pie^ 
uses dure-Iures^^ — he calls them — and asks why even the Little 
Office of our Lady finds no place in any of her sanctuaries at 
Lourdes. Critical as he is in all that concerns religious art, and 
oppressed as he becomes at times by the noise, the crowds, the 
surging popular life of the place, and the impossibility of find- 
ing a silent, empty corner from which to converse with our 
Lady in peace, his testimony is emphatic as to the spiritual mar- 
vels of the place, and the extraordinary exaltation induced by 
the prayers and chants of vast multitudes of people. There is, 
as he says, in spite of all that may jar upon one, '^so much 
faith, so many prayers, so much love." He sums up the Grotto 
as a vast hospital let loose in Neuilly fair, yet admits that there 
the Virgin at times is more living and more accessible than 
elsewhere. He has generous praise for the inexhaustible char- 
ity of nurses and brancardiers, and declares that at Lourdes 
alone may be found a veritable fusion of classes. And as a fi- 
nal proof of the strong spiritual influences at work, he dwells 
on an aspect of the pilgrimages that is too often overlooked : 
the resignation and peace of soul habitually vouchsafed to those 
who leave with body uncured. There is no despondency, no 
despair, when the waters fail to straighten the crippled limbs. 



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1 88 JORIS KARL HUYSMANS [Nov. 

but instead an infusion of courage and hope and patience for 
the future. 

The suffering that stirred such real sympathy in Huysmans' 
heart was soon to fall to his own share. Lovers of that most 
engaging of family records, the Recti d'une Sceur^ for whom no 
circumstance connected with the La Ferronaye family can be 
indifferent, will remember how Pauline Craven, most brilliant 
of conversationalists even in her brilliant circle, spent the last 
two years of her life paralyzed and speechless, deprived utterly 
of the one gift in which she had taken pride, and with what per- 
fect resignation she made what, for her, was the hardest sacrifice 
of all. A somewhat similar fate was reserved by Divine Provi- 
dence for J. K. Huysmans. The man endowed with an abnor- 
mal sensitiveness of taste and smell, with an intense shrinking 
from disease and ugliness in every form, was to die by inches 
from a malady loathsome to himself and to those who waited 
on him. For six months he lingered, struck down by cancer 
of the palate, and if even after La Cathedrale and LOblat there 
were still some incredulous critics who doubted of the sincerity 
of his conversion, they must surely have been silenced forever 
by the patience and courage with which he bore the slow prog- 
ress of the one disease for which science can supply no remedy 
and but little alleviation. 



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AN UNCIVIL ENGINEER. 

BY JEANIE DRAKE, 

gEWISTON-ON-THE-SEA had never had a boom. 
It was, indeed, a question with its more con- 
servative class whether anything so modem could 
be desirable. Bearing with proud endurance the 
reverses following an unequal war, it viewed with 
distrust any threatening ripple of commercial prosperity as some- 
thing rather common. However, when through its senator the 
Department decided to build at this point a model navy yard, 
there was a certain communal thrill. 

"Dem Yankees gwine gib us a good long job o'work," 
cheerfully concluded the African contingent, even more cheer- 
ful when unemployed. 

''Let us hope Senator Cotesworthy did nothing unworthy 
of his distinguished grandfather in helping this matter through," 
declaimed the serious- faced, elderly men. 

And the prim, little old ladies in black flitted in and out 
of each other's houses and sighed : '' Another influx of strangers, 
my dear ! " 

None of these took into account that the wheels of time 
move steadily, and that youth's expectant gaze is for a day 
freshly dawning rather than for one already set. Thus the 
young men and maidens rejoiced surreptitiously over visions of 
new and interesting people coming in, and consequent festivities 
and what not. 

Hartwell, officer in charge of the dry dock, taking a con- 
stitutional along the sea wall, was hardly conscious of two 
charming maidens who met and passed him. But these were 
perfectly conscious of him, having noted his approach when he 
first came up the steps of the Battery High Walk. 

"Child," whispered the taller and older excitedly, "that's 
the one I told you about — the new man up at the yard. Isn't 
he fine ? Such lovely auburn hair — and eyes I " 

" Auburn eyes ? That's a new variety," commented the 
younger, dark- haired girl. But she also took sufficient interest 
to curve her vision in a miraculous feminine manner around her 

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190 AN UNCIVIL ENGINEER [Nov., 

shoulder without turning her head. '* He has a tolerable figure/' 
she conceded. " What does he do ? " 

" Civil engineer." 

" Is an officer a civil engineer, Sue ? " 

*' Oh, I don't know. What does it matter ? A rose by any 
name — With that lordly air, be sure he bosses the job, what- 
ever he's called." 

Their musical tinkle of subdued laughter went with Hart- 
well, again near-by, as the sea-breeze fluttering their white 
gowns, and the sunset glow across the harbor waters, merely as 
part of pleasant surroundings. For he was mentally intent on 
problems connected with levers and parallelograms and darkeys 
who wouldn't half work. And presently against the gorgeous 
orange sky they saw him pass prosaically to his dinner. But 
the girls, lissome and buoyant, strolled and whispered and 
tinkled as these young things do until, in the dusk, they were 
sought by one of the prim little ladies in black, who was the 
younger's Cousin Maria, and led home with the gentle reproof: 
•* You know, my dears, well-bred girls — ^young ladies — shouldn't 
be out late." 

Subsequently to this afternoon it became a custom with Sue 
Biddleson to rush tempestuously upon Amaryllis Lane, or vice 
versdf with such remarks as : ''I was coming from music-lesson 
to-day, child, when what do you think? I met the Civil!" 
Or: ^'The Civil passed our house this afternoon, and he look- 
ed — stunning ! " 

Then Sue, who had been '' out " for two seasons, whereas 
Amaryllis would not make her bow to society until after Christ- 
mas, announced cruelly: "I expect to meet the Civil Thursday 
night at the ball ; and I'll think of you, dear, when I'm danc- 
ing with him." 

Amaryllis widened her eyes pathetically and leaned her little 
head, with its weight of dusky tresses, on one side like a vivid 
blossom on its stem, in a way she had. 

" Well," she responded, the humor of the situation evoking a 
dimple or two, ''give him my love. But what if he shouldn't go ?" 

" Not go ! When he has cards to a St. Ursula ! " It was 
Susan's firm conviction that these festivities were the social 
events, not so much of the earth as of the universe. She held 
from her parents a simple faith that the Czar of all the Rus- 
sias would feel flattered by an invitation to one. And when 
her more traveled friends spoke of presentations at centuries- 
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1907.] AN UNCIVIL ENGINEER 191 

old courts, or of Admirals' brilliant flag- ship receptions to 
royalty, she would ask in ingenuous provincialism: "Have you 
ever attended a St. Ursula ball ? " Thus, when Thursday had 
come and gone, it was with reluctant and astonished admission 
of his absence that she spoke of '' the Civil." 

" Has been invited to everything, Frank Dascom says, but 
goes nowhere. Too busy, maybe; but he's at the club some- 
times — and the men all like him." 

Amaryllis accorded sympathy to this discomfiture, though 
with shining eyes. '* Papa has a contract up at the yard," she 
volunteered, after a while. " He is going there this afternoon."^ 

"The very thing," pronounced Susan briskly, who was by 
no means like the poor cat in an old adage as regards "let> 
ting 'I dare not' wait upon *I would.'" 

"I — don't — know — " hesitated the more scrupulous hearer; 
but the indulgent Mr. Lane found himself with two fair com- 
panions on his visit to the navy yard. 

'' You understand, of course, girls, that this is exceptionaL 
Visitors are strictly excluded at present ; but, as I go on busi- 
ness, there's no great harm in taking you, if you keep quiet 
and out of the way." 

To an unobservant father, their becoming simplicity of toilet 
and sparkling demureness of manner promised this; so he over- 
looked, and Susan never saw, though Amaryllis noted sensitive- 
ly, a fleeting expression of surprise on Captain Hartwell's face 
during the introduction. 

"Sorry we are too busy properly to do the honors just 
now," he said briefly. " My assistant, Mr. Dascom, is absent \ 
but I will detail a man to show the young ladies around while 
we attend to business in my office, Mr. Lane." 

Then the girls found themselves gravely inspecting the basin 
of the dock and the half-finished sea wall and the foundations 
of the officers' quarters, under the escort of a respectful and 
painfully well-informed marine, while Mr. Lane was closeted 
with ''the Civil" for a long hour or more. At length, gra- 
ciously but determinedly, Amaryllis dismissed their guide that 
she might give way to mirth. 

"A friend's father's business call is not the chance of a 
lifetime, is it. Sue ? " 

" It's a beginning," said that dauntless damsel. Which she 
maintained in the face of Captain Hartwell's perfunctory remark or 
two on joining them, and evident preoccupation as they drove away.. 

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192 An Uncivil Engineer [Nov., 

** Government's got an admirably efficient officer there/' said 
Mr. Lane. "Pleasure to do business with him." 

" Isn't his manner rather — rather — ? " hinted Amaryllis. 

"Not at all. His time is valuable. You girls had an un- 
usual chance to go over the works. You must have enjoyed it." 

" Oh, we did I " said his daughter gleefully. " Didn't we, 
Susan ? " 

"Certainly," answered that young person dryly. Her en- 
thusiasm, however, was rekindled when next she descended in 
a whirl upon Amaryllis' sanctum. "Amaryllis, darling, such a 
piece of news! He's a hero!" 

" Who ? " 

" The Civil." 

"What kind of a hero?" 

" 0\you know. A regular hero"; said the literal Susanna. 
" Carried a flag all by himself up San Juan. Or — no— no — res- 
cued some wounded Spanish sailors at risk of almost certain 
death from a torpedo; no, that's not it; Frank Dascom'll tell 
you. All the men think it splendid, and his picture has been 
in all the papers. Frank might have told us before ! " 

Then she tiptoed to the door, shutting it with noiseless care, 
and produced from her shopping- bag two cabinet- sized, indif- 
ferently good photographs of Hartwell. "Dolby had 'em," she 
said triumphantly. "Told me he'd sold dozens just after the 
war, and always kept one in his show-case until Captain Hart- 
well asked him to take it out. Now what we want is his auto- 
graph on the back." 

" I certainly do not I " protested Amaryllis. 

"Yes, you do; and I've arranged an easy way to get it. 
We'll go up to the Country Club — to play tennis; and then, 
instead of getting out there, we'll go on to the yard ; and, as 
we're acquainted, we'll just ask him." 

" Susan, what would your father say ? " She knew very well 
what her own and her Cousin Maria would say. 

"They won't know," said Susan calmly. "Why, at Darton 
College, the girls used to go to matinees and get the leading 
man's autograph under the very nose of a cantankerous chaperon. 
I'd rather take risks for a hero's name myself." She might not 
have prevailed with the younger against the ingrained instincts 
of fine breeding, but that her lesser years made Amaryllis shrink 
a little from the charge of "working for a halo." 

It happened that the afternoon Susan elected to go auto- 



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1907.] An Uncivil Engineer 193 

graph-hunting closed a troublous day for Captain Hartwell, in 
which constant struggling with unreliable and insubordinate 
negro labor had terminated in something approaching riot. He 
heard the sunset gun with a sigh of relief, and was indulging in 
his first moments of relaxation, when the vexed strain returned 
to his brow at the announcement : '' Ladies to see you, sir." 

<< Wouldn't it be Fate's irony to send me a book-agent just 
now I " he muttered derisively, returning to his oiEce. 

Amaryllis had just lent impetus to her failing courage by 
murmuring in desperate jest : *' Suppose — suppose he should be 
Hobson in disguise I '^ when the door opened, admitting an un- 
willing host. 

'' Good — afternoon," he said formally, '' what can I do for 
you, ladies?" 

" We have heard so much," said Susan, " of your — your 
great act of heroism; and — and — will you, please, write your 
name on these? " 

He took the pictures without a word, picked up a pen, and 
scrawled a signature across each, returning it. Then he looked 
gravely at his visitors, recognizing them now as the pretty girls 
who had accompanied Mr. Lane, and continued standing, tall 
and straight. 

'' I beg your pardon," he said, '' but I am much older than 
you — have seen the world — so I venture to tell you that it is 
better for young ladies to come here just now — if at all — with 
escort. I fancy your fathers — being Lewistonians — would hard- 
ly sanction anything unconventional, even to get the entirely 
worthless autograph of an insignificant soldier." 

'* Insignificant ! " exclaimed the denser Susan. '' Oh, no ; Mr. 
Dascom told me — " But she was unheard, his attention being 
fascinated by the wave of color which swept over Amaryllis' 
face and then subsided, leaving her so pale that her dusky hair 
and lashes and scarlet lips showed startlingly vivid against her 
great white hat. 

A fear, unfounded but paralyzing, that she might cry was cut 
short by a brick which came crashing through a window-pane 
close to her head. He had pushed them back unceremonious- 
ly, and was out, revolver in hand, running with his few assist- 
ants towards the riotous laborers, before the girls knew what 
had happened. From the window they saw him, stern and de- 
termined, cow the threatening, tumultuous mob ; saw him drive 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 13 



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194 ^N UNCIVIL ENGINEER [Nov., 

them backward through the gate, which was barred behind 
them, and saw him return composed and competent. 

'' They have been giving trouble," he explained shortly. 
" Drinking, probably. It might not be safe for you to go back 
that way. I will take you in the launch to one of the wharves, 
where you can get a car." 

''We are more than sorry to add to your trouble," said 
Amaryllis in a toneless voice. 

''I am only concerned for your safety," he replied as un- 
movedly. No other word was spoken while the little launch 
went cleaving her way to their wharf; and they parted with 
the slightest of farewells. 

Then Susan was at liberty to call him : '^ Crank I Frump 1 
Freak ! Boor I " and other epithets, which she did with free- 
dom and relish. 

''You leave me nothing to remark," commented Amaryllis, 
with a forced smile. " But let's be fair. The man is good- 
looking enough, if he is a bear. Why not just call him the 
Uncivil? That would fit." She was tearing her picture slowly 
into very small pieces and strewing the pavement with them. 

" ril keep mine," said the philosophic Susan. " The girls'll 
think he gave it, and envy me." 

When imported workmen and peace and routine had re- 
turned to the yard, Hartwell had time to remember a girl, slim 
and graceful, with dark eyes, and lashes resting on a cheek of 
damask-rose, which had gone suddenly white at his words. 

" I am a beast I " he thought repentantly. " I have lived so 
long with work and without women that I begin to be a savage. 
What harm was their thoughtless escapade, that I must preach 
at them like a venerable mentor 1 But I was over-strained — 
and I do feel such a fool when people babble about heroism I " 
He winced again, recalling that blush and sensitive lip's quiver. 

The subject of his thoughts was passionately arraigning her- 
self at this time. " Oh, how could I — could I — could I do such 
a thing ? Give a man a right to lecture me — me^ Amaryllis Lane ! 
But he must have seen that it was just a foolish prank — that we 
were ladies — and it was cruel in him — and — and ungentlemanly!" 

When they chanced upon " the Uncivil " now, Susan would 
grant the merest nod of her fluffy, flaxen head ; but from Ama- 
ryllis' graceful indifference none could have guessed, save its ob- 
ject, her deeper resentment. Frank Dascom, Hartwell's secre- 



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1907.] An Uncivil Engineer 195 

tary, being with them on one of these occasions, remarked with 
his wonted levity : 

''What a charmingly cordial way you Lewistonians have of 
bowing to strangers I I nearly fell upon your necks and wept 
with delight when I first encountered your farthest north man- 
ner. 

''It's a wonder you didn't/' said both maidens, with whom 
the lanky, spectacled, irreverent youth was a favorite. 

"There is still time to repair the omission," he suggested 
hopefully. " But what's the matter with the Chief that you so 
freeze him f " 

" His own manner being so genial ? " said Miss Lane sweetly. 

" I don't know. He's all right with men. They say he's 
rather avoided women since he lost his sweetheart by a very 
sad accident ten or twelve years ago. Did you know that your 
father had asked the Chief and me to dinner to-morrow ? Please 
invite Miss Biddleson to meet me. I am doing noble mis- 
sionary work in reclaiming her from ancestor-worship. She be- 
gins to worship me instead, which must in time prove civilizing." 

So this was what came, Amaryllis thought, of withholding 
confidence from her father. She must receive a coldly- critical, 
disagreeable man, whom she deeply disliked. At least Susan 
should share the situation. 

As to Hart well, this first invitation accepted by him in 
Lewiston had been accepted eagerly. " I can reassure that 
flower* like girl that I am not quite a bear," was his unacknowl- 
edged reason. To find himself at her right hand, with shaded 
candle-light illumining glass and silver and flowers, and above 
all, her radiant self in shimmering drapery, seemed in spite of 
more then a decade's seniority and acquaintance with many 
countries, an event. He talked well and easily, yet was all the 
while well aware of an intervening film of ice. 

" I am hopelessly unforgiven," he decided, when this stately 
young nymph, whose pomegranate blooms vied with her checks 
and lips, preceded him from the room. He soon found him- 
self relegated to his host's attentions, while the younger trio 
chatted and sang and laughed intermittently in the contiguous 
music- room. His interest wandered thither. He heard mirth- 
ful protest from Sue, and Frank Dascom reiterate that : " It 
would be the proudest day of Dascom Senior's life when his 
son should stand before him and say : ' Father, I have brought 



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196 AN UNCIVIL ENGINEER [Nov., 

you a Biddleson ! ' " and then telling her that he had seen a por- 
trait of her " renowned grandfather " somewhere, and that she 
was a considerable improvement on thaty 

" Gently, gently, children," urged good little, prim little 
Cousin Maria, passing through. 

" Wouldn't that jar you? " commented the graceless secretary. 

" You forget that's my Cousin Maria," remonstrated a laugh- 
ing girl. 

*' Is it my fault that she's not also mine ? Say but the word, 
and I am at your feet." 

Hartwell frowned ; he too used to sing and talk nonsense 
not so very long ago; but — but — there should be limits. Miss 
Biddleson, now — . He took his leave shortly, drawing the re- 
luctant secretary in his wake. 

" Delightful house to visit at," observed the latter, lighting 
his cigarette. '' Charming people, the Lanes. Miss Biddleson's 
a nice girl, too, or will be some day. She no longer quotes her 
papa and mamma to me as an ultimatum. She begins to under- 
stand that the great outside world is larger and livelier than 
their cemetery lot. I fancy I have taught her a thing or two 
during our acquaintance." 

His chief smiled grimly in the dark. He also had been 
fatuous enough to assume the office of teacher. 

With the evening of Amaryllis' first ball, there came to her, 
without card, a mass of such roses, pearly and opalescent, as 
eclipsed all her others. She hovered over these, then, quite 
unsuspectingly, carried only them. 

'* You are a thing of beauty and a joy forever," declared 
Frank Dascom, when he could get near her, " and I want eight 
dances." 

'' I have just two left and you may have one," she smiled 
in pretty sovereignty. 

" And I the other ? " said a deeper voice, and its owner had 
written his name and left them. 

'' I call that brazen cheek," grumbled Dascom. '' Hardly 
acquainted and swipes one of my dances I But you could have 
knocked me down with a feather when I found him here. Looks 
well in evening dress — doesn't he ? But the Chief frivolous I 
Not that a St. Ursula is really frivolous. Heaven forbid I It 
is a grave and solemn function. Am I wearing the regulation 
funereal smile ? For your old President has cocked an eagle eye 

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1907.] An Uncivil Engineer 197 

at me— or is it at your loveliness ? I understand he called me 
a chattering idiot at the Yacht Club, because I proved one of 
his dates mistaken. Mustn't differ, in Lewiston, from a Colonial 
Dame over forty. Admire the Chiefs nerve ; he's bearding the 
lion in his den — actually talking to his nibs 1 " He would never 
have guessed that Hartwell at that moment was envying the 
talent for utter nonsense which brought her frequent smile. 

When it came the officer's turn to lead out the fairy princess 
in white and silver, his mind was quite made up. He forestalled 
the anticipated, cold excuse. '' If you do not care to dance 
— for any reason — I know a pleasant place, quiet and cool " ; 
and led her, surprised into acquiescence, to a vine-screened 
corner. Then he began with his old abruptness : '^ When you 
came in carrying my roses, I took it for an omen that my cause 
admitted, at least, of some special pleading. Your indignation 
since that afternoon is natural. I cannot say to soften it that 
my words were incorrect ; but that it was not for me to speak 
them." 

Her little head was held high, making such a picture that he 
drew a deep breath. '' You not being our parent or guardian." 
'' No ; thank heaven 1 " At this she could not forbear a smile 
even now. But he caught at it, speaking more earnestly : 
" Some acrimony I beg you to forgive in a man very tired, 
much harassed, and — fasting. Also, it is, to me, the last straw 
when any one alludes to some trifling, matter-of-course affair 
of duty, as a thing remarkable. What comes up is all in the 
day's work; and an officer would be a coxcomb who fancied 
himself exceptional." 

''I understand," she said, looking at him now quite simply 
and directly. Then, with a charming, coquettish lowering of 
the lashes: '*You had the advantage that afternoon. You were 
looking upon real heroism. It took e — nor — mous courage to 
do something — very foolish and forward." 

" Let's absolve each other of heroism and begin anew," he 
suggested, with boyish happiness of manner. ''Then you will 
give me this extra and let me take you in to supper ? " 

" Can I believe my eyes?" said Sue Biddleson later. " There 
goes Amaryllis to supper with that animal of an Uncivil I And 
she looks like a happy dream I " 

" Yes " ; assented Frank Dascom rather heavily. " Perhaps 
he is taking lessons in civil engineering." 



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THE CRISES OF CATHOLICISM. 

BY CORNELIUS CLIFFORD. 

~E musty indeed, be a detached observer of the the- 
ological horizon who has not felt his religious 
emotions stirred in the presence of the unrest 
which seems to prevail to-day in nearly every no- 
table centre of Catholic thought. The publica- 
tion at Rome, a few weeks since, of a new Syllabus of Errors 
trenching upon some of the most vital points of Christian teach- 
ing, and the grave emphasis given to that act more recently 
still by an Encyclical Letter from the Holy Father himself, may 
be said to have directed the minds even of the least regardful 
to a condition of things which we have not been accustomed 
to associate with the easy flow of orthodox opinion for the past 
three dozen years. 

Yet it may be doubted whether the Catholic public, clerical 
or lay, in this country, quite realizes the extent of the unrest 
to which we refer, however sensible it may be, owing to the 
Papal documents in the case, of the drift of the movement that 
has caused it. In London and at St. Beuno's, at Stonyhurst, 
at Oscott, and at Old Hall in England; at Milltown Park and at 
Maynooth across the Irish Sea; in Paris and in Toulouse; at 
Louvain, at Bonn, at Tubingen and in Munich ; at Innsbruck 
and in Vienna; in Northern Italy, and even in the Eternal 
City itself, where, from the nature of the case, neither specu- 
lation nor original research can be expected to be venturesome, 
there is a well-defined feeling that, in making provision for the 
coming generation, much will have to be altered in the schools. 
And what is known to be true of the Old World is vague- 
ly or distinctly perceived in proportion to the reach of their 
outlook by the better-read among the purveyors of theological 
opinion in the New. The times are big with change. It is not 
merely that the bulk of that yearly growing body of uneven 
knowledge, with which the exponent of Catholic thought is 
bound in loyalty to make himself familiar, is felt to have 90 



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1907.] The Crises of Catholicism 199 

increased in weight that the centre of gravity of the scholastic, 
as apart from the dogmatic, world may be said to have shifted 
its position, it is also that a new sky has been forming above 
our heads, new planets, new constellations have swum quietly 
into our ken ; and we are in need of a fresh orientation. So 
much may be admitted without contention. Liberal or Conser- 
vative, thinker, student, or popular controversialist, all may meet 
on the neutral ground of this common desideratum. The com- 
parative calm of the past six and thirty years shows signs of 
breaking up ; and all who have an interest in the Church's in- 
tellectual life, as distinguished from her deeper, moral, and sac- 
ramental existence, are in danger of finding themselves in the 
welter once more. 

It would be easy, of course, to misread this altered condi- 
tion of things, easy to exaggerate it, and so spread mischief and 
irritation and a most illogically un- Catholic feeling of alarm. 
How effectively this has been done at various times during the 
past few years we need scarcely remind the reader who has 
kept himself in touch with current theological happenings. A 
group of well-intentioned scholars, whom it would be superflu- 
ous to name, because every single-minded student of our time 
is their acknowledged debtor, have permitted themselves to 
speak as though the mountains which are round about Jerusa- 
lem were destined speedily to disappear in a vast cataclysm of 
*' higher- critical " conjecture, without leaving a vestige of the 
more obvious aspects of present-day Catholicism to survive. 
Vaticinations of that sort only serve to darken counsel. Like 
the too-citatory Paget in Tennyson's " Queen Mary," whom Car- 
dinal Pole feels constrained to rebuke '' in tropes," they have 
possibly confounded a substance with its shadow. 

It was the shadow of the Church that trembled.* 

On the other hand, it is almost as easy to shut one's eyes 
to the situation and ignore it altogether. Of the two alterna- 
tives, it is not difiicult to say which is likely to present the 
more depressing consequences. It has ever been one of the in- 
explicable ironies of Church history that the not-undiscerning 
among the unco guid should be so ready to prolong their slum- 
bers, not alone while the devil is scattering his crepuscular coc- 

•" Queen Mary." III., Iv. 



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200 THE Crises of Catholicism [Nov., 

kle among the wheat, but even long after the Lord of the har- 
vest has ordered it to be gathered into his barns. 

Catholicism has been an indubitable and obvious factor in 
Western civilization for at least eighteen centuries past. Though, 
in a sense, it has always been on its trial, frequently fighting what 
to the over- confident outsider has inevitably appeared as here 
and there a losing battle, it has successfully encountered three 
remarkable crises in its long career wherein the secret of its 
amazing vitality has all but palpably been revealed. These crises 
have long formed one of the common-places of the picturesque 
ecclesiastical historian; but familiarity can never stale their sig- 
nificance for him who holds, as the Catholic seems bound to 
do, that the past is a key to the enigma of the present much 
more than the present is a key to the enigma of the past; 
that if God is in heaven, he is in history too, and that his Son 
is in the midst of the world, slowly shaping it, through its own 
sins and blunders, to that image of himself which he holds up 
for human guidance in the age long growth of an indefectible 
Church. "A man," says the late Mark Pattison, "who does 
not know what has been thought by those who have gone be- 
fore him, is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas." 

The melancholy truth needs to be applied to centuries and 
epochs and to men in the mass as well as to men consideied 
in their separate lives. Wisdom looks backward as well as for- 
ward ; and never lets go of the sheer continuity of things. The 
crises of which we speak were separated by wide intervals of 
time ; and the first one came when Catholicism was unwittingly 
put upon its trial at Alexandria in the earlier outbreaks of 
Gnosticism and afterwards under Pantaenus and Origen. 

It is no part of the scope of this essay to dwell upon the 
details of the movement which took its rise in the intellectual- 
ism of that period ; but we know how Catholicism emerged from 
the test. If it spoke thenceforth with a conservatism more un- 
yielding than any that ever characterized it before, it did so 
with an altered accent that enabled it to lay a spell upon all 
that was best and most representative in Greek genius for the 
next two centuries to come. It proved then, what it has proved 
many a time since, amid circumstances not wholly dissimilar, in 
drift at least, that the truths which it had inherited from Christ 
through a handful of Galilean peasants, could be substantially 
reformulated in the most elusive terms of current philosophy 



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1907.] The Crises of Catholicism 201 

without losing any of that meaning for the solitary conscience 
or forfeiting any of that personableness^ so to call it, which is 
ever found to attach to them in the presence of " men of good 
will." 

Another and hardly less insidious crisis was successfully en- 
countered nearly a thousand years later when Scholasticism 
became perilously articulate in the undisciplined universities of 
Western Europe, and when '' Aristotle, who had made men athe- 
istic " at Alexandria, was now declared capable of making them 
intelligently Christian at Paris, under the guidance of a young 
Dominican friar, whose name, mysteriously suspect at first, be- 
gan after an interval to be quoted with unusual honor in the 
schools. 

At length, when Scholasticism had more than accomplished 
its mission, and become, in consequence, like a worn-out beast 
of burden, a parable and a derision to the wits of a genera- 
tion that owed not a little of its mental wealth to so demoded 
a source, the last and most familiar crisis came under the stress 
of a problem which, in many s*enses, may be said still tragic- 
ally to endure. It was the crisis known popularly as the Refor- 
mation ; the most difficult, perhaps the most poignant, crisis that 
Catholicism will ever know. For the first time in its history the 
religious, as distinct from the moral or political, unity of West- 
ern Christendom, was effectively broken up. What was worse, 
the break seemed in a very short while to be irretrievable and 
permanent; and dissidence suddenly found itself in the enjoy- 
ment of a numerical importance and a political prestige, for 
which it is impossible to find a parallel in Church annals, until 
we go back to the brief but triumphant progress of Arianism 
during the strenuous sixty years that were ushered in by the 
great pronouncement at Nicaea. Though the Reformation, with 
its peculiar ethos^ has gone, the pressure created by its problems 
is on us still. One detects it in the sharper emphasis laid upon 
the idea of authority, and in the more pronounced preference 
manifested for practical, as apart from purely speculative, ques- 
tions of theology, which have been so distinctive a note of the 
schools of Latin Christianity since the days of Trent. 

While each one of the three crises which we have described 
will be found on examination to have its own individual qual- 
ity, conditioned largely, of course, by the spiritual fibre of the 
epoch that produced it, the two earlier may be said to be pre- 



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202 The Crises of Catholicism [Nov., 

dominantly intellectual in tone. In making this assertion we do 
not mean to imply that there were no moral issues involved. 
On the contrary, not only under the stress of Arianism, but 
under the more insidious, because freer, play of the vague forces 
of Scholasticism, as it prevailed in the universities of Europe 
until St. Thomas purged it of all Averroistic infiltration, the in- 
ner life of the clergy and, indeed, faith itself were compromised. 
But none the less the movement in each case was character- 
ized by intellectual rather than by moral preferences. It began 
in a passion for an actually unattainable completeness of theo- 
logical statement. Dialectical servitude rather than religious 
emancipation was the ideal it pursued. The prevailing inter- 
ests were of that syllogistic sort described so remorselessly by 
Prudentius : 

Fidem minutis dissecant ambagibus 
Ut quisque lingui est nequior; 
Solvunt ligantque quaestionum vincula 
Per syllogismos plectiles.* 

On the other hand, the interests aroused by the crisis known 
as the Reformation were of an entirely different order. Where 
these had been largely intellectual before, they were profoundly 
and unalterably pragmatical now ; and this, too, in spite of the 
storm of controversy which the movement evoked and the over- 
whelming flood of statement 9nd exposition on both sides which 
accompanied it. For the next three hundred years Catholicism 
was to be occupied with a form of self-justification which may 
be described as disciplinary and sacramental rather than intel- 
lectual. The inversion — or, should we say, reversion? — is signifi- 
cant. As it will account, in great measure, for the extraordinary 
activity, the remarkable inward development that characterizes 
the Latin Christianity of this period ; so will it serve, perhaps, 
to explain some day the long misunderstandings which such a 
process of self-realization necessarily engendered. 

Even now, it is felt, we are once more drawing towards a 
term. The Northern and Teutonic peoples of the world, for 
whom conduct is more important than theory, and for whose 
return to religious unity true reformers like St. Ignatius of 
Loyola, St. Philip Neri, and the wise Theatine Caraffa worked 

•Apotkeotis. 



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1907.] The Crises of Catholicism 203 

and prayed, are beginning to show signs of an interest in latter- 
day Catholicism which is as inspiring as it is difficult to justify 
on any purely rational or political grounds; while the South- 
ern or semi-Latin races of Europe and America, in their turn, 
are apparently about to experience a similar change of heart 
Already there are tokens of it for those who can read. The 
ultra< secularistic movement, for instance, with which these peo- 
ples have been largely identified for the past sixty or seventy 
years, if not yet arrested, is at least confined to more decorous 
channels ; much of the old insensate rancor of their leaders has 
disappeared; and there is unmistakable evidence, in more than 
one quarter of the horizon, that the public opinion of the Eng- 
lish-speaking communities of mankind may direct them towards 
the pursuit of ideals which, when accepted, may yet furnish 
Catholicism with a hundred social opportunities and outlets for 
its zeal, beside which the political prestige of the past will 
dwindle into insignificance. 

Men advert to these possibilities to-day and interpret them 
variously, according to their knowledge and their bent. But the 
really noteworthy thing about them all, as about the crises 
which bulk so large in the past history of Catholic thought and 
practice, is that out of every peril thus successfully encountered 
there seems inevitably to emerge a new, if somewhat elusive, 
note. It is a note, moreover, which serves appreciably to mod- 
ify the key of all subsequent teaching, even while it defies any 
Analysis that would sharply differentiate it from what may be 
called the dominant accent of the past. No student of Catholic 
opinion would think of confusing the note of Alexandria with 
the note of Paris — to cite but one instance out of many, which 
will best typify Scholasticism in its most classic and perhaps 
its most effective phase ; nor again would one be tempted to 
identify the sub-Tridentine note as found either in individual 
apologists like Stapleton or Holden or Bellarmine — to say noth- 
ing of influential schools like Ingolstadt, Louvain, or the Sor- 
bonne — with the supposedly same note heard above the theolog- 
ical controversies of the past forty years. 

Cardinal Franzelin was in his generation an admittedly fresh 
and inspiring thinker; his reading was both wide and profound ; 
and his attitude towards contemporary thought singled him out 
as essentially a " modem " in the better and more orthodox 
sense of that now sinister word; yet, without going so far as 

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204 The Crises of Catholicism [Nov., 

to raise contentious or unprofitable debates on his relative im- 
portance in the roll of Catholic teachers, one may safely affirm 
that in following him over the intricately mapped field of dog- 
ma, one misses much that Suarez, or the two de Lugos, or the 
distractingly learned Petau would have found it pertinent to say. 
It is not precisely that the outlook of the great Jesuit school 
of divines, from whose ranks we have advisedly drawn these 
honorable contrasts, has narrowed or become enfeebled in any 
way ; but rather that an altered mental environment has uncon- 
sciously suggested altered preoccupations. 

If this instance, however, of the Austrian Cardinal be objected 
to as inconclusive, we may take the case of his English con- 
temporary and admirer, Cardinal Newman. Here we have a 
man who, whatever we may think of his familiarity with the 
shibboleths of Neo> Scholasticism, was, at any rate, an original 
thinker who stirred profoundly many of the more reflective and 
searching spirits of his time. What is more, his supremacy still 
endures, and his influence gives every promise of widening as 
the interest in the problems he thought out for himself moves 
yearly down to broader levels in the world of religiously-affected 
men. His life, it is true, bristles with anomalies; and the 
achievements of his personality read perilously like " signs to 
be contradicted." What was said by an admirer of his preach- 
ing in the old Oxford days might be applied with equally tell- 
ing effect to his later theological ventures, both as a Protestant 
and as a Catholic. He was great at the cost of every known 
rule expounded in the schools for the benefit of ordinary men. 
His excursions into history and philosophy were undertaken 
reluctantly and through the stress of occasion, quite as much to 
satisfy his own intellectual needs as in response to the troubled 
questionings of others. Though he left many who failed to un- 
derstand him in his day under the ironical delusion that he was 
at best what Sir Thomas Browne would have called a student 
in the " parergies of divinity," subsequent events and " the sure 
future" to which he appealed, have lifted him to his rightful 
place among the religious thinkers of his century. Cautious, 
hesitating, tentative, rather than magisterial, in method and in 
manner, strongly individualist in outlook and in treatment, be- 
traying the instinct of the pioneer rather than the academic as- 
surance of the accredited guide along the pathways of seminary 
lore, he yet became, even before his death, the instructor of an 



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1907. J The Crises of Catholicism 205 

audience incalculably more important in numbers, in intellectual 
antecedents and possibilities^ than the most distinguished that 
the shy Roman professor, with whom we have coupled his 
name, ever aspired to reach. 

Take the note of such a life, then, and you will find that, 
while its ineradicable conservatism helps you to interpret the 
past — a past, be it observed, much remoter than Scholasticism 
reveals — the sureness of its faith and the subtlety of its inward 
ear will enable you also to catch the first indeterminate ac- 
cents of a new dialect of the spirit, in which Catholicism seems 
to speak once more as one having authority^ not only over the 
contented millions whose fathers have known it and blessed it 
from within ; but over the challenging multitudes whose fathers 
have not known it, but have spoken ill of it, and perhaps blas- 
phemed it from without. 

Though it would be inexact to say that Newman failed to 
receive adequate recognition from the official side of Catholicism 
before his death, his star nevertheless appeared late. Was it be- 
cause its true rising was veiled in envious eclipse? Whether 
he would himself have admitted it or no, he was a true child 
of his age, and was, from first to last, not a pilgrim, as he 
loved to describe himself, but a questioner and a pioneer. In 
this he represented, more completely, perhaps, than any of his 
contemporaries, the true spirit of his time ; and it is in his life, 
accordingly, that the Catholicism of the time seems to take up, 
in behalf of all sincere questioners, the ''burden and the task 
eternal," of commending the magnalia Dei in an idiom which 
can easily be recognized as both ancient and new, if only it be 
listened to with evangelical good will. If the re- edited Oxford 
Sermons^ the Essay on Development^ and the profounder Essay 
in Aid of a Grammar of Assent justify any appreciation, they 
justify an appreciation like that. 

Instances like those we have cited would seem to prove that, 
whatever else may be alleged against Catholicism as an histori- 
cal whole, it can never be alleged against it that it is intellec- 
tually moribund, or hide-bound, or out of touch with the true 
actualities of the age in which it lives. It is always pertinent, 
because it is always alive. Opinions may differ as to the qual- 
ity of that life or its value as a force- distributer in the upward 
movement of the race. But alive it certainly is at every stage 
at which the student turns to examine it, even amid the most 



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2o6 The Crises of Catholicism [Nov., 

untoward surroundings, intellectual or ethical, making variously 
for obscurantism or for moral decay. 

Its power of renewal seems never to fail it. When it all 
but dies along with the crumbling classical world in Northern 
Africa, it suddenly takes root beyond the Danube and the 
Rhine, where it flowers primarily in the gorgeous figure of a 
suzerain church and ramifies under a score of guises, religious, 
political, or economical, which one feels can only be inadequate- 
ly expressed and summed up in the recondite theologies, the 
symbolisms, the naive complexities of the art and life of the 
Middle Age. Amid all its moral sinuosities and adaptations to 
environment, as intricate and as diflicult to decipher sometimes 
as the traceries of its unique cathedrals, it never loses its origi- 
nal definition of type, and is, even in the face of the all-scruti* 
nizing modern world, more completely of a piece with its Roman 
and Palestinian beginnings than is any oak of the forest with 
the buried tap- root out of which it springs. 

So may Catholicism not ineptly be described in bare rhe- 
torical outline; if, indeed, one ought to be content with a de- 
scription which depends^ from the nature of the case^ rather upon 
art than upon inspiration for an account of its exuberant pleni- 
tude of life. We say from the nature of the case advisedly. 
For Catholicism is one thing; and accounts of Catholicism are 
quite another. Whether we make use of rhetoric, or poetry, 
or painting, sculpture or architecture, whether we mount higher 
still into the resources of the technical soul and seek in music 
a mysterious vehicle of prayer, we are still dealing with sym- 
bols which are a kind of abstraction ; and Catholicism is more 
than a symbol, as it is surely more than an abstraction. It is, 
like the Incarnation, an Economy, a divine adaptation of di- 
vinely human means to a divine end ; or rather, it is the Incar- 
nation itself writ large ^ as with a certain geographical and secu- 
lar largeness ; a projection of the Mystery once hidden from 
the foundation of the world into the vastness of all actual and 
possible human needs. It has been set forth as a system and 
described in terms of Plato and Aristotle. Thomists have en- 
riched its schools with a persuasive completeness and simplicity 
of vocabulary. Scotists have pleaded in behalf of its sacra- 
mental mercies and almost enhanced them by arguments that 
still stir the consciences of its ministering priests. Descartes 
has armed apologists in its defence; Kantians and Neo*Kant- 



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1907.] The Crises of Catholicism 207 

ians> and the followers of even Hegel himself^ have furnished 
considerations out of which later thinkers have attempted — no 
doubt sincerely and consistently — to rationalize, not only its 
more recondite mysteries, but also the incredible beginnings of 
its remote past. Essays similar to these will in all probability 
be made again. In a sense they are inevitable ; though author- 
ity from time to time may irown upon them, and possibly con- 
demn them, because they seem to lay hands upon the intangi- 
ble and look like attempts to reduce to an abstract formula 
what is too vast and real and vital and concrete for adequate 
expression in the thought-forms of any school. 

Perhaps, when all is said and done, the best account of the 
Mystery will be found in a necessary and confident adaptation 
to our present needs of Christ's eternal account of himself. 
Catholicism is more than a system; because it is a Way; the 
Way; it is more than a philosophy; because it pretends to be 
a Truth; the Truth; it is more than a venerable and historic 
religion; because it inevitably reveals itself as Life. How it 
still performs that three-fold function in a world which has ever 
been too prone to prophesy its approaching demise, will be 
shown in subsequent articles in this Review. Our concern in 
these introductory remarks has merely been to direct attention 
to the many lessons lying behind the crises by which Catholi- 
cism invariably vindicates afresh its eternal right to endure. 

StUm Hall, South Orange, N, J, 



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LISHEEN; OR, THE TEST OF THE SPIRITS.* 

BY CANON P. A. SHEEHAN, D.D.. 
Autk^of"My New CuraW* ; "Luke Delmeie** ; " Glenanaar," etc. 

Chapter X. 

LISHEEN. 

E three months swiftly swung around; and the 
time for the liberation and triumph of the evicted 
owners of Lisheen was at hand. Immense prepa- 
rations were made on all sides for the great event ; 
and it was decided that the occasion was one 
that demanded a great public demonstration. 

Pierce and Debbie McAuIiffe had been dismissed from prison 
a week prior to the liberation of their parents; but they were 
detained by friendly hands in the city, on the plea that all 
should go home together. But they were kept quite ignorant 
of all the important events that had occurred during their im- 
prisonment. They didn't know they had a home to go to ; and 
Pierce was speculating about employment in Tralee. 

When at length the great day arrived, the city was thronged 
with cars and vehicles of every description — side-cars, country 
carts, covered cars, traps ; and the whole country, side seemed 
to have poured in its population to take part in the great 
ovation that was to be given to the now triumphant victims of 
landlordism. A deputation was drawn up outside the prison 
gate ; and the moment the poor old people appeared there was 
a mighty shout of welcome; and, to their infinite confusion, an 
address was read by the Secretary of the League, lauding their 
valor to the skies. But not a word about the triumph and sur- 
prise that awaited them. 

A few times Pierce tried to get through the impenetrable 
secrecy that seemed to surround everything connected with 
their liberation ; and he began to ask impatiently : 

" What is it all about ? Where are we going ? Sure we 
have no home now 1 " 

But he was always met with the answer : 

* Copyright. 1906. Longmans, Green & Co. 



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1907.] LISHEEN 209 

'' Whist, ye divil 1 Can't ye wait and see what the nabors 
have done for ye?" 

At most, they expected the shelter of a Land League hut. 

After much coUoquing and congratulations and toasts pledged 
twenty times over, yet still with the impenetrable veil of se- 
crecy hanging over everything, the triumphant cavalcade got 
under weigh. First came the local Lisheen Fife- and- Drum 
Band in a wagonette, over which a green flag, faded but un- 
conquered, was proudly floating. Next came a side-car with 
Owen and Mrs. McAuliffe, and two intimate friends. Then a 
succession of cars, every occupant waving green boughs. Here 
and there was an amateur musician, with a concertina or ac- 
cordion, playing for bare life, and in an independent man- 
ner ; for whilst the band thundered out '^ God save Ireland 1 " 
the minor instrumentalists played '^ The Wearing of the Green," 
or "The Boys of Wexford." In the centre of the procession 
there was another wagonette, in which Pierce and Debbie had 
prominent places ; and the remaining mile or two was occupied 
with all the other vehicles, each smothered in a little forest of 
decorations. 

Now and again the old couple, or Pierce, or Debbie, would 
ask wonderingly : 

" What is it all about ? Where are we going at all, at all ? " 

But the answer was: 

" Nabocklish I " or " Bid-a-hust I " or some English equiva- 
lent. 

At last they came to the old familiar place, where formerly 
a rickety, tumbled-down old gate, swinging on creaking hinges, 
opened into the boreen that led to the house. Here the cars 
drew aside, so that the McAuliffes might come up and enter 
their home together. The old people drew aside, refusing to 
recognize in the cemented and chamfered pillars, and in the 
blue, iron gate the entrance to their home. But they had to 
dismount and walk up the stoned and graveled passage, under 
the trim hawthorn hedges now bursting with foliage, and already 
showing the autumn haws, into the yard that fronted their 
dwelling. 

" Where are ye bringing us to at all, at all ? " the poor old 
woman would ask. " Sure, this isn't Lisheen 1 " 

" Whisht, will you ? Can't you wait till the play is over ? " 
was the reply. 

VOL. Lxxxvi.— 14 



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2IO LISHEEN [Nov., 

But when they came into the yard, and saw instead of the 
fragrant manure heap a plot of grass neatly laid out and bor- 
dered with huge stones, limewashed and irregular; and when 
they saw the old thatched barns no more, but well-built stone 
and slated houses, where seven milch cows were stalled ; and 
when they saw a high, well- thatched home before them, with 
large windows instead of the wretched holes that formerly let 
in, or were supposed to let in, light and air, their astonish- 
ment knew no bounds. 

All the neighbors had congregated in the yard and stood 
on the ditches, to see the ''coming home" of the victims of 
landlord greed ; and as they entered the yard there was a mighty 
cheer that rent the heavens, and a chorus of " Cead mille 
failtes I " and '' Welcome home ! " that stunned the poor people 
with its heartiness and sympathy. 

Then Hugh Hamberton and his ward came forward, and 
stood beneath the lintel of the door ; and the former putting up 
his hand to command silence, and drown the tremendous cheer 
with which his presence was hailed, there was an instant hush 
— the hush of great expectation and delight. 

Hamberton looked around slowly and contemptuously on 
the multitude that was thickly wedged together; and his silence 
made theirs the deeper. Then he spoke in the calm, even way 
that Englishmen affect; and, although he was good-humored 
and genial, he could not restrain a certain tone of disdain that 
accompanied his words. 

"My friends," he said, ''a certain English statesman has de- 
clared his belief that the Irish are a race of lunatics, and that 
this country is one huge, but not well-protected, asylum* (great 
laughter) ; and another English statesman has registered his 
opinion that the Irish are a race of grown-up children [much 
laughter^ but not so great). To this latter opinion I am dis- 
posed to incline. You're a wonderful people for seeing around 
a corner, or watching what is occurring at the poles; but you 
can't see straight before you, or what is under your eyes 
(slight tittering and rising expectation). For example, you have 
rushed to the conclusion that the reinstatement of the poor 
family in their farm and home is my work. (Cries of * So it is, 
yer anner I ' ' 'Twas you did it /* ' God bless you ! *) You were 
never more mistaken in your lives. All that I did was to act 
as a kind of agent or supervisor for the man that, in a spirit 



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1907.] LISHEEN 211 

of unbounded generosity, has brought about the happy event. 
I am pleased to be able to claim that much for myself ; but no 
more. (Cries of * You^d do it^ if you could! ' *'Twasn'tfroin want of 
the will! ') That's all right I But now let me explain ; and the 
best way to do so is in the form of a story." 

The great crowd pushed up, as they do at the sermon at 
Mass on Sunday in the country chapels, and hung upon, his 
words. 

'' In a certain club in Dublin," Hamberton said, " not many 
months ago, there were grouped together a number of land- 
lords, who had met to settle how they should deal with their ten- 
antry during the coming winter. They had almost unanimous- 
ly agreed that the good old system of grinding and crushing 
the tenantry should be kept up cries of ^ Bad luck to them!* 
' We wouldn^t doubt them ! ' etc) ; that there were to be no 
reductions and no sales. Well, one young gentleman ventured 
to protest. He had been reading and thinking a good deal 
about things in general. And he had come to the conclusion, 
which you will agree with me was utterly absurd, that he had 
some business to do on this earth besides squeezing the last 
farthing from tenants, and squandering it on horses and dogs. 
(Cries of * Oyeh! Begor^ that was the quare landlord!^ 'We 
wish we had more like him ! ') He also maintained that it was 
not quite true that the farmers lived better than the landlords; 
that they had fresh meat three times a day (great laughter) ; 
that there was a piano in every cottage ; and that each farmer's 
wife had a sealskin coat and silver fox furs (redoubled laughter). 
Well, he was contradicted and refuted ; and then — " 

Hamberton paused for effect ; and the silence became pain- 
ful from the suppressed excitement of the people. 

'' Then," he continued, '' this young gentleman was challenged 
to prove it ; he was challenged to go down and live amongst 
the peasantry for twelve months, as a common farm-hand ; to 
share their labor, their food, their hardships. Strange to say, 
he consented. He put aside everything that belonged to him 
as a gentleman ; and he went down and became an ordinary 
farm-hand." 

Here there was a great commotion in the silent crowd, for 
Mrs. McAuliffe was crying and sobbing, and trying to say some- 
thing, which her tears wouldn't allow. Debbie had turned quite 
pale. Hamberton sternly commanded silence. He knew the 



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2 1 2 LISHEEN [Nov. , 

secret was leaking out; and that would never do. He could 
not allow his dramatic ending of the story to be anticipated. 
But he was almost disconcerted by the fierce, anxious look 
which the girl now fastened on him. 

'' After tramping around here and there/* continued Hamber- 
ton, ''the farmers naturally refusing to employ such a white- 
handed, white- faced laborer, he came to a certain place, where 
he was at last taken in. He was footsore, hungry, tired, and 
heartily sick of his job, but he got good food and drink and a 
welcome there ; and there he remained for some months, not 
doing much, as you may suppose, because these landlords, 
whilst they reap the profits, are not much used to the labor. 
Then he fell sick, and was nursed as carefully as by his mother. 
At last, owing to one cause or another, the poor family, with 
whom he was housed, were flung upon the world. His heart 
was bleeding for them; but it was too soon to show himself; 
and besides, he wanted to see all that landlordism could do; 
and, again, he wanted to be able to build up the fortunes of 
that poor family so that they could never be disturbed again. 
The day of the eviction he interfered for that purpose, and, as 
is usual in Ireland, he was misunderstood. He got more curses 
than thanks, more kicks than half- pence. It is a little way you 
have in this country of rewarding your friends." 

Here old Mrs. McAuliffe got in a word: 

" I never misdoubted him, yer 'anner 1 I knew he was good ; 
and I said: ' Good-bye 1 and God bless himi'" 

This interlude excited now the greatest interest in the crowd. 
They were on the eve of great revelation evidently ; and they 
crushed in and around the speaker, their mouths wide open in 
expectation. 

" Hold your tongue, ma'am," said Hamberton sternly, "till 
I am done. Then you can talk your fill." 

*• Well," he continued, " the strangest thing remains to be 
told. This young gentleman, for amusement sake, was in the 
habit of going up alone into the hills, and there giving out 
aloud, or, as they call it, declaiming, certain passages from an 
obscure and legendary writer, called Shakespeare. Some of 
those were murderous and bloodthirsty, and some were soft 
and pleasant. The bloodthirsty ones were overheard by a cer- 
tain boy and girl, whose names I won't mention, but who acted 
as spies on his movements; and, in a moment of passion, in- 



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1907.] Lis HE EN 213 

formations were sworn against this young gentleman on tlie 
ground of murder; and he was arrested. I hope that young 
lady is sorry for her actions now; but it led the way to the 
revelation. He was obliged now to throw off the mask and 
show himself; and, besides, the time had come to accomplish 
the work on which he had set his heart." 

Hamberton paused, to emphasize the end of his dramatic 
story ; and there was the deepest silence now in the vast crowd. 

'' That work was this. He purchased the farm on which he 
had lived as farm laborer for so many months, and made over 
by deed, solemnly executed and witnessed, the fee- simple in that 
farm forever to the people who had so well treated him ; he 
had spent a sum of eight hundred pounds besides on the place, 
and made it a worthy residence forever for these poor people. 
I suppose I need hardly add that the farm is Lisheen; that it 
was the McAuliffes that sheltered this gentleman in his hour 
of need; and that that gentleman, who came down in disguise 
from his position to see and alter the fortunes of the people, is 
Rebert Maxwell, Esq., J.P. and D.L. for this County, late farm- 
hand at Lisheen, and still steward at Brandon Hall." 

There was silence during the revelation. Then a faint cheer. 
Hamberton was disappointed. He expected an earthquake. 

"You don't understand, I see," he said. 

They looked at one another, uncertain what to think. The 
truth was, that the story was so strange as to be almost in- 
credible. It seemed to block the avenues of their minds, and 
they could not take it in. They continued staring at one an- 
other and Hamberton irresolutely. Then he took out the deed, 
and calling Owen and Mrs. McAuliffe over to where he was 
standing, he read out the deed of transfer slowly and solemnly. 
And then he led them into their new house, theirs forever and 
evermore. 

At this juncture there was a wild burst of cheering, which 
was repeated when Hamberton again came forward and took in 
Pierce and Debbie. 

Once again he came forth, and said to some peasants stand- 
ing near: 

" Do you understand me ? I say it was Maxwell, my stew- 
ard and landlord, who has done this sublime and magnificent 
act towards his friends." 

'* We do— o — o," said the men hesitatingly. The fact was 



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214 LISHEEN . [Nov., 

they could not, all of a sudden, get over their feeling of hostil- 
ity towards Maxwell. 

"Then, d you, why don't you give one decent cheer or 

yell for him ? " 

" Why don't ye cheer ? " said one peasant. 

" Yerra, yes ; why don't ye cheer ? " said another. 

But they couldn't. And Hamberton, turning to his ward, 
said: "You see Maxwell was right in not coming hither. 
They'd have stoned him." 

But he said, with a gesture of contempt towards the crowd : 
" There ! There's two or three tierces of black porter in the 
barn. Perhaps ye'll cheer now I " 

They laughed at his eccentricity, and said to one another : 
" Begor, he's the funny man t " 

It was somewhat different in the interior of the cottage, 
when they re-entered to say good-bye to the occupants. 

" You understand, I suppose," he said, " that this place, and 
all things on it, and belonging to it, are yours for evermore; 
and that no landlord, or agent, or official of any kind can ever 
interfere with you again ? " 

The men looked too stupified to say anything. They couldn't 
realize it. The change from the direst poverty to affluence, 
from a prison to such a home, was too stupendous to be im* 
mediately understood. But the old woman grasped the situa- 
tion at once. 

"We do, your 'anner," she said. "An' sure the grate God 
must be looking afther us to sind us such a welcome t " 

" We — 11, yes, I suppose " ; said Hamberton, not quite un- 
derstanding where supernatural influences came in. "But you 
know, you understand, that it is Mr. Maxwell — the boy that 
was here, do you understand ? — that has done all this. These 
stupid people outside can't grasp it. But you do, don't you ? " 

" Oyeh, av coorse, we do," said the old woman. " And may 
God power his blessings down an him every day he lives ; and 
sind him every happiness, here and hereafter." 

" Nice return you made him for all his goodness," said Ham- 
berton, turning suddenly on Debbie. "You wanted to hang 
the man who was restoring to you and yours all you had lost." 

This was the first time that her parents had heard of Deb- 
bie's depositions against Maxwell. They looked amazed. Ham- 
berton saw it. 



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1907.] . LISHEEN 2 IS 

"Well," he said, "Tin not going to heap coals of fire on 
your head to-day. You can make your own apologies to Mr. 
Maxwell when he calls. But people should be careful of their 
passions." 

"I did it in a hurry an' a passion," said Debbie, hanging 
down her head. Then, feeling the eyes of Claire Moulton rest- 
ing on her with curiosity, she exclaimed with sudden energy: 
'' I wish to the Lord he had never darkened our dure 1 " 

She affected to be busy about some trifles, but soon added : 
'' An' av I had me way, we wouldn't be behoulden to him now 1 " 

It gave food for reflection to Hamberton as he drove home- 
ward. 

''There is no understanding this mysterious people," he said, 
''and imagine Englishmen, who do everything with rule and 
tape, attempting to govern them for seven hundred years I" 

"I can understand that girl's feelings," said his ward. 

"Well, yes; but such awful pride would be unimaginable 
amongst the peasants of Devon or Somerset." 

" I suppose so," she replied. " But I can understand it. 
These are the things that make criminals." 

" But what beats me," he said quite aloud, as he flicked the 
flanks of his horse with his long -whip, "out an' out, and alto- 
gether and intirely, as they say among themselves, is that I 
couldn't get a cheer for Maxwell from those dolts. They didn't 
seem to understand it ; and yet they say they ate a clever and 
quick-witted people." 

"I think I understand," she said. "Mr. Maxwell was play- 
ing a certain part; and they only knew him in that part. 
Their imagination, which is very limited, cannot conceive him 
just yet in any other aspect. Perhaps in three months, or six 
months, they will grasp it." 

" But they are said to be so quick — " 

"Yes, in matters concerning their own daily lives. But, 
you see, they are now carried beyond their depth. Mr. Max- 
well was quite right in not coming. He would have had a hostile 
reception at first; an indifferent reception even after you re- 
vealed his goodness." 

"Goodness? That's not the word, Claire I 'Tis greatness, 
generosity, magnanimity beyond fancy. How Gordon would 
have grasped his hand I " 

"Yes; it is very grand," she said. "Do you know, from 



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2i6 LISHEEN [Nov., 

the moment I saw him in that wretched cabin, I felt he was a 
hero/' 

"Then you kept your mind very much to yourself, young 
lady. I thought it was a feeling of repulsion you experienced 
from some remarks you made." 

" And so it was/' she replied. '' But I knew he was great- 
Probably that was the reason I disliked him." 

" I give it up/' said Hamberton, after a pause. '' Woman's 
mind and the Irish nature are beyond me. I suppose it is be- 
cause they are so much alike." 

'' I wonder is that a compliment ? " said his ward. 



Chapter XI. 

A DOUBLE WEDDING. 

In the early autumn Robert Maxwell and Claire Moulton 
were wedded. The affair was very quiet and unfashionable. 
But there were solid festivities at Brandon Hall ; and gala times 
for those employed by Hamberton. 

There was but one sorrowful soul; and that was Father 
Cosgrove. He loved them all. But now the great trouble of 
his life was passing into an acute stage. Would Hamberton 
now carry out his grim intention ; and, whilst concealing the 
infamy of it from the world for the sake of his ward, end his 
life in the Roman fashion ? The thing seemed inconceivable in 
the case of a man surrounded by every happiness that wealth 
and benevolence could obtain. But Hamberton was a philoso- 
pher who had ideas of life and death far above, and removed 
from, the common instincts of humanity. And there was no 
knowing whither these fantastic ideas might lead him. He was 
a great pagan and no more. 

With the exception of this one care corroding the breast of 
the good priest, all things else were smiling and happy. Max- 
well was genuinely glad that his severe probation was over, and 
that he had obtained his heart's desire as a reward. And Claire 
had found her hero. 

But why should we delay on such commonplace things, when 
the greater event of Darby Leary's wedding demands our at- 
tention as faithful chroniclers ? Let the lesser events fade into 



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1907.] LISHEEN 217 

their natural insignificance before the greater and more engross- 
ing record t Let the epithalamium yield to the epic. 

There was something like consternation in the mountain 
chapel the second Sunday after the conspiracy between Max- 
well and Darby had been hatched. For there was an appari- 
tion — of a young man with red hair and a sunburnt face, but 
clothed as no man had seen him clothed before. For Darby, 
habited in a new suit of frieze and corduroys, and with his red 
breast covered by a linen shirt with red and white stripes in 
parallel lines, did actually make his way to the very front of 
the congregation, and stand at the altar rails facing the priest. 
It was unheard of audacity ; but Darby, with keen, philosoph- 
ical insight, had made up his mind that it is audacity that en- 
trances and paralyzes the brains of men ; and that if he would 
escape endless chaff and jokes on his personal appearance, the 
way to do so was to brave public opinion and run the gaunt- 
let with open eyes and head erect. 

There certainly was a good deal of nudging and pushing one 
another amongst the boys and girls in his immediate vicinity ; 
but it was all more or less hushed and concealed whilst the 
priest was reading the Acts and the Prayer before Mass, For 
his eagle eye was upon them and upon the chart; and woe to 
the boy or girl who was otherwise than recollected and de- 
vout. 

But I'm sorry to say that when the priest's back was turned 
to the congregation there were many ''nods and quips and 
wreathed smiles " ; and when at last the people arose at the 
time of the sermon, and the tall, angular figure of Darby occu- 
pied a prominent place right at the altar rails, there were some 
whispering and smothered smiles that made the young priest 
who was addressing them pause and look around with some se- 
verity. This was all the greater because he was speaking to 
them on a solemn and mournful subject ; and he had hopes of 
touching their sympathies, and even beholding the tacit expres- 
sion of their feelings in a few tears. Instead of this, he was 
shocked to see grave men smiling, girls tittering, boys whisper- 
ing behind their hands; but he went on slowly, watching the 
opportunity of setting free the floodgates of his anger. At last 
he stopped; and the old and venerable verger, who was hardly 
second in importance to the priest, and who was even more 
dreaded, alarmed by the sudden silence of the priest, came forth 



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2 1 8 LISHEEN LNov., 

in an angry and inquiring mood from the vestry. He cast an 
eager glance around, under which many an eye quailed; and 
then hobbled over to the rails, and bending down, he whispered 
angrily to a group of girls : 

"What's the matter wid ye, ye gliggeens?" 

'' Yerra, 'tis Darby, sir I " said one of the girls, stuffing her 
shawl in her mouth. 

The mystery was explained ; and leaping over to where 
Darby was standing, defiant and indifferent, he hissed at him: 

" Kneel down, or sit down, you mad'an ! " 

Darby instantly obeyed; and the old man, turning to the 
priest, said with an air of condescending affability: 

" You may continue yer discoorse, yer reverence 1 " 

Strange to say, the little incident saved Darby from much 
worry outside. The public exposure satisfied the desire of hum- 
bling him ; and when the congregation was dispersing, he only 
got a few smart slaps on the back and a few hurried questions : 

" Well wear, Darby ; and soon tear, and pay the beverage ! " 

" We'll be lookin' out for the young wife now, plase God ! " 

'' What blacksmith made thim breeches, Darby ? I want a 
new shirt meself soon I " 

But Darby was indifferent. He gave back joke for joke, and 
lingered behind, with one idea uppermost in his mind. He 
seemed to be looking straight before him; but he had eyes 
only for a little figure in a faded shawl, that was mixed up 
with a lot of others as they crushed through the outer gate. 

It is hard to discern or define the secret laws that guide 
the currents of our lives, and bring together the individuals 
that are to be mated for good or ill. If you stand near a 
stream that has been vexed into foam by rocks or sands, prob- 
ably you would guess forever before telling what specks of foam 
or air- bubbles would meet far down the river and coalesce in 
their journey to the sea. And we fail to tell how it was that 
the many members of this Sunday congregation fell away as 
they passed down the hillside, and left Darby and Noney to- 
gether. The two were silent for a while, and then Darby, open- 
ing his new frieze coat to show his magnificent shirt-front all 
the better, said, in a loud whisper : 

" Noney 1" 

"Well?" said Noney, looking steadily before her. 

" Noney, did ye see me the day ? " said Darby. 



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it' 

ti 



1907.] LISHEEN 2 1 9 

** I did/' said Noney. '' It didn't want a pair of spectacles 
to see you." 

'* And what did ye think of me ? " said Darby, quite sure 
of himself. 

'' I think you were nicer kneelin' than standin' " ; said Noney. 

** Wisha, now/' said Darby, a little abashed. '' I shuppose 
'twas bekase me back was turned to ye." 

There was an awkward pause of a few seconds; and then 
Darby, getting on a different tack, said : 

"I have a grate secret for ye, Noney." 

" Indeed ? " said Noney. 

'Yes"; replied Darby. "Me and you are made for life." 
Me and you?" replied Noney saucily. ''And what have 
we to do with wan another, may I ax ? " 

'• Oh, very well I " said Darby. " Maybe, thin, Phil Doody 
will tell you." 

'* An' what have I to do wid Phil Doody ? " said Noney, in 
frigid anger. ''Phil Doody is nothin' to me more nor to any 
wan else I " 

" Say that agin, Noney," replied Darby ecstatically. 

"I say that there's nothing between me an' Phil Doody, 
more than any other bhoy I " said Noney. 

"I thought there was thin/' said Darby. "But people will 
be talkin'. Nothin' can shut their mout's." 

" Phil Doody is a dacent enough kind of bhoy," said Noney, 
after an awkward pause. " I believe his sisters are well off in 
Ameriky." 

"So they do be sayin'," replied Darby, who did not like 
the allusion at all. " I suppose they'll be takin' him out wan av 
these days." 

" I don't know that," answered Noney. " They say he's got 
a new job at home; an' I suppose he'll be settling down next 
Shrove." 

"I suppose so," said Darby innocently. "I hear there's a 
good many looking after him." 

" Is there thin ? " said Noney. " I think he's made his chice." 

"But shure you said this minit," said the tormented Darby, 
"that there was nothin' between you." 

" Naither there isn't," said Noney. " Shure he could make 
his chice widout me/' 

Darby felt he was not making much headway here, so he 



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220 LISHEEN [Nov., 

tacked. Affecting great lameness, he sat down on a hedge, 
where he crushed many a pretty flower and wild shrub, and 
said : 

'' Noney, these boots and shtockin's are playin' the divil in- 
tirely wid me feet. Bad luck to the man that invinted thim. 
Shure there's nayther luck nor grace in the counthry since the 
people began to wear them." 

And without further apology Darby removed them, and 
breathed more freely. 

" Who giv 'em to you. Darby ? " asked Noney, full of curi- 
osity. "They're rale fine brogues." 

" Ah, thin," said Darby sighing, '' the man who'd give us 
much more, an' make us the happy couple av you'd only say 
the word, Noney." 

" Indeed," said Noney pouting, " an' who is he ? " 

*' The masther," said Darby. Then, after a pause, he con- 
tinued : " Listen, Noney, an' I'll tell you what I wouldn't tell 
morchial alive, not even me mudder. The masther was up the 
other day at the house, an' whin he was goin' away, he winked 
at me, unbeknown to the ould woman, to come wid him. So I 
did. And then he tould me that he was gettin' married him- 
self to a grand, out an' out lady, wid lashin's of gowld and di- 
mons, nearly as much as the Queen of England herself. Oh, 

I'm all blisthered from thim d boots," he said suddenly. 

''Bad luck to the man that invinted yel" 

And Darby began to chafe the foot that appeared to be 
most troublesome. Noney was on the tiptoe of expectation, and 
Darby, the rogue, knew it. 

" I think we'd betther be goin' home, Noney," he said, 
glancing sideways at her. 

"Betther rest yourself," said Noney. "You could never 
walk home wid dem feet an ye." 

" Thrue for you," said Darby, gaining new confidence. " Be- 
gor, ye'd have to be carryin' me, Noney; and wouldn't it be 
a nice ' lady out of town ' ye'd be playin'." 

" But what about the wedding ? " said Noney, who lost her 
diplomacy in her curiosity. 

" Is it our weddin' ye mane ? " said Darby. " Shure, whin- 
ever ye like. Ye have only to say the worrd." 

" I didn't mane that," said Noney angrily, " an' you know 
it, you omadan, youl I meant the masther's weddin'." 



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1907.] LISHEEN 221 

'' Ah, share, 'tis all the same/' replied Darby. '^ Bekase the 
masther s^z^ sez he : ' Til never get married, Darby, onless you're 
married the same day.'" 

" Did he say that ? " asked Noney, who began to have larger 
conceptions of the " bhoy." 

"Pon me sowl," said Darby, ''an' more'n that. He said, 
sez he: 'There's a purty little lodge at the grate house. Darby, 
as nice as iver you saw, wid little windeys like dimons, and a 
clane flure, an' a place for the bins and chickens; and whin 
you're married to Noney Kavanagh,' sez he — 'I'm tould she's 
the rale jewel of a girrl out an' out, and there isn't her like's 
in the barony for beauty,' sez he — ' you can come here. And 
sure you can have lashin's and lavin's from our own kitchin,' 
sez he ; 'an' you won't be wantin' for a bit of fresh mate,' 
sez he ; ' for we haves fresh mate every day,' sez he ; ' and some- 
times two kinds of mate the same day. And sure, Noney, whin 
she's Mrs. Darby Leary,' sez he, ' can kum up and help the 
missus,' sez he; 'an' sure we can be all wan,' sez he; 'and 
whatever's mine is yours. Darby,' sez he ; ' and whatever's yours 
is mine,' sez he." 

Darby here drew a long breath, but watched Noney steadily 
out of the corner of his eye. He was evidently making a deep 
impression on the girl. He went on : 

" ' But, mind you, Darby,' says he, ' I'm not puttin' any 
spanshils on you. You may tink you're too young a bhoy to 
marry,' sez he; 'or yer mudder mightn't like it,' sez he. 'But 
that makes no matther at all, at all. Only I'd like us to be 
married the same day,' sez he. ' But,' sez he, ' av you don't 
feel aiqual to it now, you can come,' sez he, ' and get into the 
lodge all the same; and there are some little colleens,' sez he, 
'up at the grate house,' sez he; 'and maybe, afther a while,' 
sez he, ' wan of them would be lookin' your way; and sure,' sez 
he, ' av Noney wants to marry Phil Doody,' sez he, * lave her — ' " 

" I don't want to marry Phil Doody, nor anybody else but 
you. Darby," said Noney, putting her apron to her eyes; and — " 

The day was won. 

When the priest called afterwards at Mrs. Kavanagh's, and 
told the good mother what a fancy Mr. Maxwell had taken to 
Darby, and how he had given him five real gold guineas for 
the immediate wants and necessities of that young man, with 
an implied promise of much more in future, Noney nearly 



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222 LISHEEN [Nov., 

fainted at the thought that she was very near losing such a 
chance, and forever. 

She snubbed poor Doody badly. For Phil was a professional 
joker; and he couldn't help cracking a joke about Darby. 

"Wasn't he the show to- day?" he said, in an incautious 
moment. ''Begobs, 'twas as good as a circus. I thought the 
priesht would fall off the althar." 

" Who was the show ? " asked Noney saucily. 

''That cawbogue from the hills. Darby," he said. ''Who 
the divil did he kill or rob to get such clothes?" 

" Darby Leary is no cawbogue," said Noney. " I think he's 
a clane, dacent bhoy enough ; and sure what he wears is his 
own." 

" He was the laughing-stock of the congregation to-day," 
said Phil. 

•' They had betther been mindin' their prayers," said Noney. 
" Some people soon may be laughing at the wrong side of 
their mout'." 

Doody looked keenly at the girl. 

" Begor, wan would think there was a somethin' betune ye," 
said Phil, "the way you stand up for him." 

" And what if there is ? " said Noney. 

" Oh, nothin', nothin'," said the abashed Phil. " Good-bye, 
Noney, and may yer ondertakin' thry with you I " 

Of course there were troubles. Nothing is worth having 
without trouble. Noney wavered in her allegiance when people 
spoke of Darby as a fool, as an omadan, as a half-idiot. Noney 
relented when she visioned the pretty lodge, and had from the 
priest's own lips the testimony of the deep interest Maxwell was 
taking in Darby. The great trouble was with Darby's mother. 

That good woman fumed and swore, and asseverated that 
no daughter-in-law should ever darken her door, and dethrone 
her. She broke the bellows across Darby's back when he en- 
tered unsuspectingly his cabin, where the news had preceded 
him. She poured out upon him a torrent of contempt and 
scorn in the too- accommodating Gaelic, which would have with- 
ered up and annihilated any one else. Darby only winked at 
nothing and held his tongue. Then she went to the priest, and 
asked his reverence would he have the conscience, or put the 
sin on his soul, to marry such an imbecile as Darby. 

" I don't think Darby is a fool," said his reverence. " I 



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1907.] LISHEEN 223 

think he's more of a rogue ; and the Canon Law of the Church 
makes no provision for that. At least, I never heard of an 
impediment in that direction." 

'* Wisha, thin, yer reverence/' she said, " he isn't a rogue 
but a poor gomaral, who doesn't know B from a bull's foot." 

" H'm," said his reverence. ** It seems to me that a young 
man who has robbed his master, and secured such a girl as 
Noney Kavanagh for his wife, is not the innocent you take 
him to be." 

'< Wisha, thin," said the old woman, giving in, '^ I suppose 
your reverence is right. But may God help him and her. 'Tis 
a cowld bed she's makin' for herself." 

'Tm not so sure of that," said the priest. 

So matters went gaily forward ; and, as a matter of fact, 
the same autumnal sun that shone on the nuptials of Robert 
Maxwell and Claire Moulton lent his radiance to the humbler 
but more demonstrative bridals of Darby Leary and Noney 
Kavanagh. 

Noney had stipulated with the good priest that, in the fear 
of a great popular demonstration, it would be more compatible 
with her humbler ideas to have a very private ceremony in the 
vestry-room, unknown to all but the two witnesses required by 
the Council of Trent. But the profoundest secret will leak out 
in these inquisitive days; and long before the hour appointed 
for the marriage, suspicious groups began to gather around the 
corner of the street where stood the rural chapel. 

The marriage was celebrated quietly enough ; but when the 
happy pair emerged, and had got beyond the friendly shadow 
of the priest, they were met by a tumultuous crowd, who cheered 
and whistled and chaffed the young pair good-liumoredly ; and 
accompanied them, to the discordant music of tin whistles, to 
the maternal home. 

Darby was sublimely unconcerned. He did not say so, for 
his vocabulary was limited, but he felt, as many a wiser man 
should feel under similar painful circumstances, that it was a 
mere " incident " in the happy life that was opening up before 
him, and therefore not to be noticed. Noney was annoyed at 
this demonstration which, if it was friendly, was also more or 
less disrespectful ; but Darby whispered : 

" Hould up, Noney ! Think of the lodge and the two sorts 
o! mate," 



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224 LISHEEN [Nov., 

And Noney bore the humiliation ; and only determined, deep 
down in her woman's heart, on a subtle revenge ; and how she 
would invite some of these grinning girls to see her over there 
at Brandon Hall, and show them all the glories of the lodge, 
and kill them with envy. 

But, as the night wore on, all these ugly feelings disappeared, 
and there was nothing but real ceol at the widow Kavanagh's 
house. And Darby danced, his bare feet (ior he wouldn't have 
any more to do with shoes and stockings) making soft music 
to the sounds of the fiddle. And Noney danced ''over agin 
him '' at the other side of the door that had been laid as a 
platform on the floor. And, somehow, people began to come 
round from their contemptuous and critical attitude, as they 
always do when you keep on never minding them; and before 
the night was over it was unanimously agreed that a gayer or 
a handsomer pair had never left the parish. 

Chapter XII. 

THE ROMAN WAY. 

Why did Cato leave that dread example to the world of 
opening of his own free will and accord the door of life that 
leads out into the night of eternity ? And why did so many 
of his fellow-countrymen, who had not the excuse of dripping 
skies and modern nerves, follow that example; and calmly 
open the veins of the life-current in their gilded baths, or 
slide from life even under more gruesome circumstances ? The 
Emperor is displeased; and Petronius goes down to his villa 
at Pastune, calls his friends together, gives them a glorious 
Lucretian supper, makes a pretty speech, ending with Vale^ 
Vale, longum Vale! lies down on his couch, his favorite slave 
by his side, and closes his eyes on the world- drama by open- 
ing some little hidden chamber in the casket of his body. Or, 
Symphorianus is a little tired of this comical and uninteresting 
world, and wants to see what is at the other side of things; 
and — goes to see! Or, Lydia is tired of being told forever 
Carpe diem, tired of all these unguents and bathings and cos- 
metics, and, in sheer weariness of spirit, she runs through her 
breast that very stylus with which she pricked the bare arms 
of her slaves. Or, Leuconoe has seen one gray hair, and de- 



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1907.] LISHEEN 225 

cided that life is no longer bearable; and the little reptile will 
just kiss her arm, and she will pass into the dreamless sleep. 

Now, Hamberton had read a good deal, knew all about 
these Roman methods, was an artist and had taste, was. refined 
and hated a mess ; and yet, strange to say, he elected to make 
his bow to the human auditorium in a vulgar and unclean 
manner. He had none of the excellent Roman reasons for 
leaving life, absolutely none. He simply made his choice, just 
as he would purchase a ticket for London, and then set about 
accomplishing his design. 

Maxwell and his ward had not been long married, and 
the former was down at Caragh for a few days' fishing, when 
Hamberton one night, on entering his bedroom, thought he 
would experiment a little with his weapons, and toy a little 
with death, before finally embracing him. 

He had kissed good-night to Claire, and she had entered 
her own room, and had been some time in bed, when Ham« 
berton, having donned his dressing-gown, went over to a large 
mahogany wardrobe, opened a drawer at the top, and took out 
a small, silver- chased revolver. He handled the deadly toy 
with ease, and fitted in the little cartridges, each snug in its 
own cradle. He then went over to his dressing-table, and sat 
down. 

There was no sound in the house. The hoarse wash of the 
sea came up through the midnight darkness^ and that was all. 
He listened long to catch the faintest sound that would show 
that his niece was sleeping; but he heard nothing. He laid 
the revolver on the table, and began to think. 

'' If now I were to use that deadly weapon on myself — 
just a short, sharp shock — no pain — bow would it be with me ? '' 
And his stifled soul seemed to sob out: ''Silence, darkness, 
rest for evermore 1 And for them ? Horror, shame, despair ! " 

" Pah ! " he cried in his own cynical way, " I would be for- 
gotten the day they had buried me. These young people are 
engrossed in one another too much to heed a poor suicide." 

"And for the world ? A newspaper paragraph to-day ! To- 
morrow, oblivion as deep as that which sleeps above an Egyp- 
tian sarcophagus!" 

He leant his head on his hand, and looked long and earn- 
estly at the face that stared him from the mirror. It was a 
strong, square face, somewhat pallid, and pursed beneath the 

VOL, LXXXVI.— IS 



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236 LISHEEN [Nov., 

eyes ; but it was a calm face, with no trace of anything morbid 
or nervous or hysterical. "They cannot say: 'Temporary In- 
sanity/ " he thought. "Although the Irish will sometimes per- 
jure themselves through their d d politeness." 

He took up the weapon, examined it, and raised it carefully 
and slowly, placing the tiny mouth of the muzzle against his 
right temple, and pressing it so that it made a tiny circle of 
indentation on the flesh. He kept it steadily in this position 
for a while. Then he stole his index finger slowly along, until 
it touched the trigger. Very gently he moved the soft papilla 
of the finger along the smooth side of the steel, thinking, think- 
ing all the while : " Only a little pressure, the least pressure, and 
all was overl'' Then suddenly, as if for the first time, the thought 
struck him that he would make a dirty mess of blood and brains 
in this way ; and how the servants would find him thus in the 
morning and handle him rudely, and lift him with certain scorn 
from his undignified position; and how the rude doctor, that 
detestable Westropp, the drunken dispensary physician, whom 
he would not let inside his door, would paw him all over and 
talk about his well-known insanity; and how a jury of his own 
employees would sit on him, with Ned Galway in the chair. 

He laughed out with self- contempt and loathing, and in his 
own cynical way he muttered: 

" The Romans had the advantage over us — they folded their 
togas around them as they died; and no d d hinds and 
idiots dared disturb their dignity in death." 

And he threw the weapon down on the table. There was 
a flash of fire, one little tongue of flame« and a puff of smoke, 
and Hamberton fell backwards, not stricken, but in affright. 

"That little pellet was not fated," he thought, ''to find its 
grave in my brain." 

And then, as another idea struck him, the strong man grew 
pale and trembled all over, and the sweat of fear came out and 
washed all his forehead with its dew. 

For as he looked he saw that the still smoking muzzle of 
the revolver pointed straight to the wall, or rather thin parti- 
tion, that screened Claire's room from his ; and a dreadful 
thought struck him, as he gauged the height at which the bul- 
let struck, that just at that height, and just beyond that par- 
tition, was the bed on which his ward was sleeping. His heart 
stood still, as he held his breath and listened. No sound came 



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1907.] LISHEEN 227 

to reassure him that she had been startled, but not hurt : " What 
if that bullet, with which he had been criminally experimenting, 
had pierced through that lath and paper, and found its deadly 
berth in the heart of the only being on earth whom he really 
loved ? How could he explain it ? What excuse could he give ? 
How would he meet Maxwell?" And the words of Father Cos- 
grove came back and smote him: 

" You cannot go out of life alone ! " 

He stood still and listened. If Claire had only screamed 
he would have been reassured. But, no; not a sound broke 
the awful stillness, only the hollow thunder of the sea in the 
distance. The strong man sat down, weak as a child. 

Then he thought he should solve the mystery, or die just 
there. So he crept along the carpet of his room, softly opened 
the door, and passed down the corridor towards his ward's room, 
where he listened. No ; not a sound came forth. '' She is dead," 
he thought, "killed in her sleep and in her innocence." He tapped 
gently. No answer. He tapped louder. No answer still. He 
then, trembling all over at the possibility of finding his worst 
fears confirmed, opened the door and said in a low, shaky tone : 

" Claire ! " 

Still no answer. 

Then in despair he almost shouted the name of his ward. 

The girl turned round and said in a sleepy voice: 

"Yes; who is it? What is it?" 

" It is only I," he said. " I thought you might be unwell ! " 

"Not at all," she said. "What time is it?" 

" Just midnight," he replied. " Tm so sorry I disturbed 
you. Go to sleep again." 

And he drew the door softly behind him and re-entered his 
room. There he did an unusual thing for him. He flung him- 
self on his knees by his bedside and said: 

" I thank thee, God Almighty, Father of heaven and earth 
for this mercy vouchsafed thy unworthy servant." 

He buried his face in the down quilt, and heard himself 
murmuring : 

" There is a God ! There is a God ! " 

Then he rose up, took the dangerous weapon, drew the re- 
maining cartridges, and placed them and the revolver in the 
cabinet, undressed, and lay down. But he had no sleep that 
night. 



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228 LISHEEN [Nov., 

The dread horror of the thing accompanied and haunted 
him for several weeks; and then, as is so usual, it died softly 
away, and the old temptation came back. But now he had de- 
termined that, if he should succeed in passing away from life, 
it should be in such a way that the most keen- eyed doctor or 
juryman should see nought but an accident. Because, for sev- 
eral days after that dreadful night, he was distrait ; and often 
he caught Claire's great brown eyes resting mournfully upon 
him, and as if questioning him about the meaning of that mid- 
night visit. And he found himself perpetually asking: ''Does 
she know? Does she suspect?" Until, somehow, a deep gulf 
seemed to yawn between them of distrust and want of confi- 
dence ; and he said : '' It is the new love that has ejected the 
old!" And she thought: ''Does uncle fear that I have for- 
gotten him in Robert?" 

But it seemed to accentuate his desire to be done with 
things — to pass out to the dreamless sleep that seemed to be 
evermore the one thing to be desired. 

One evening, late in the autumn, he was out on the sea in 
Ned Galway's fishing boat. He enjoyed with a kind of rapture 
these little expeditions ; and the more stormy the weather, and 
the rougher the elements, the greater was his ecstasy. Ned 
always steered, for he was an excellent seaman ; and Hamber- 
ton used to watch, with mingled curiosity and admiration, the 
long, angular figure, the silent, inscrutable face, with the red 
beard hanging like so much tangled wire down on the deep 
chest ; and the care and watchfulness with which the man used 
to handle his boat, despite his apparent forgetfulness and si- 
lence. He seemed always to rest in that humble posture of 
silence and quiet, as if dreading to disturb Hamberton ; and he 
never dared speak, except to answer some question. 

Hamberton on calm seas would rest in the prow of the boat, 
half inclined on a cushion, reading or watching the play of the 
waters. When the weather was rough, he stood on the thwarts, 
supporting himself with his arm around the mast; and swaying 
and dipping with evety plunge of the boat. 

This autumnal evening was black and lowering as if with 
brewing tempests; and the sea was heaving fretfully under a 
strong land-breeze that made the breakers smoke near the shore. 

Keeping the boat's head steadily against the rush of the in- 
coming tide, Ned managed to avoid the dangerous troughs of 



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1907.] LISHEEN 229 

the seas; and there was no inconvenience, except for the ship- 
ping of a few seas that left but tiny pools, which Ned soon 
baled out with his free hand. This evening Hamberton stood 
up on the very last thwart near the bow, yet so that he could 
support himself against the mast ; and the old temptation came 
back with terrible force. 

''Only a little slip of the foot — only a momentary loss of 
grasp — and all is over. There, there beneath these sweet salt 
waves, is rest if anywhere." 

He began to dream of it, as he watched the waters swirling 
by the boat, or the fissure in front where the prow cut the 
waves, and sent the hissing sections aft; until he felt himself 
almost mesmerized by the element. The continuous watching 
of the green and white waters seemed to obliterate and confuse 
his sight; and with the dimness of sight came dimness of per- 
ception, until at last he began to think that he had accomplished 
his dread design, and that he was actually beneath the waves. 
Again and again the delusion returned, each time with more 
force, until, at last, reason and imagination became merged to- 
gether, and the former was about to topple over, even as he 
loosed his hold, when he was recalled to existence by the harsh 
voice of Ned Galway : 

•' For the love of God, yer 'anner, come down out o' dat 1 
If you fell over, nothin' on airth could save my nick from the 
hangman ! " 

For a moment Hamberton did not understand him. Then 
he laughed with a grim humor, and silently sat down. Present- 
ly he asked : 

" How is that, Ned ? If I toppled over, what is that to 
you ? " 

" Everything," said Ned. " On account of our dissinsions, 
you know, the whole say wouldn't wash me clane before a jedge 
and jury ! " 

Hamberton saw the truth of the observation at once; and 
at once realized again the truth of Father Cosgrove's words: 

'' You cannot go out of life alone ! " 

But he said : 

" It wouldn't make so much difference, Ned, to the world, if 
you were hanged and I was drowned." 

A remark that convinced Ned fully that the '' masther was 
tetched in his head " ; and made him doubly eager to steer for 



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230 LISHEEN [Nov., 

that little light that burned far away across the tumbling seas 
in his little cabin. 

But the spell of the temptation was broken for Hamberton. 
He sat very still and said no more, not even when the boat 
had touched the side of the pier and both sprang ashore. 

But now, like an oft-expelled and conquered disease, that 
comes back with greater fury, and gathers fresh strength at 
each return, the terrible idea recurred more frequently, until it 
became an obsession. The great question now was: "How to 
accomplish the evil design, and make the world believe it was 
an accident." He knew he could count on Father Cosgrove's 
silence. He turned over many means in his mind of meeting 
death; but there was always some difficulty. He had quite 
abandoned the thought of a sea death, as he said it would cer- 
tainly compromise either Ned Galway or any other boatman; 
and, if he went out alone to his death, it would be a manifest 
suicide. 

At length, the occasion rose up with the temptation. For 
one evening, as he walked slowly along the edge of the sand 
cliff that fronted, and was gradually fretted away by, the sea 
in the vicinity of the village, he saw far down beneath him some 
children playing. There were a few grown girls, and two or 
three little ones, amongst whom he recognized one for whom 
he had a curious affection, because her mother was an outcast 
from the society of men. As he passed the child shouted up 
to him to come down and play with them ; and the invitation 
from the child woke a strange, dead chord in his soul, and a 
certain spirit of tenderness seemed to possess him. He waved 
back his hand, and shouted down: 

''All right. I shall be down soon 1 '' 

And he went on, musing on the possibility of falling gently 
from the cliff, and meeting an easy death beneath. All would 
say it was an unhappy accident. But, clearly, he dare not throw 
himself among those innocent children, whose lives he would 
thus imperil. 

He walked along, thinking over the dread thought, until sud- 
denly he heard a shout from a fishing boat in the bay, and look- 
ing around saw the men, who were far out, wildly gesticulating. 
He ran back, and watched where their fingers pointed. Then, 
when he came quite opposite to where the children were, he 
saw the danger. They were nearly surrounded by the incoro- 



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1 907. ] Lis HE EN 2 3 1 

ing tide, for here the shore dipped sudddenly, and the frothing 
waves came up with a hiss and a rush. The elder girls had 
run away, and were screaming at a safe distance; and the two 
little ones, one of whom was his favorite, were standing paralyzed 
with terror. For here there was a hollow in the cliff, and two 
barriers of rock hemmed in the sands. He looked, and saw the 
children vainly trying to mount the jagged stones, and follow 
their companions. He saw them run backward screaming, while 
the angry waves leaped in and swept around their feet. For- 
getting death, and now wooed by the desire of saving life, Ham- 
berton stepped forward, and trod a narrow boat- path that ran 
down the side of the cliff. But the screams of the children be- 
came more importunate. He left the path, and leaped forward 
to a ledge of rock that seemed to slope down to the chasm 
where the children were imprisoned. But the impetus of the 
fall was too great, and he felt himself driven forward by his 
own weight. In that perilous moment he could not help think- 
ing: 

" I have had what I desired. Yea, there is a God ! " and 
the next moment he was huddled up on the sands, having bare- 
ly escaped involving in his own ruin that of the children he 
had bravely determined to save. 

(to be continued.) 



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THE RECENT RESULTS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH. 

BY GEORGE M. SEARLE. C.S.P. 
(CONCLUDED.) 

T seems unnecessary to adduce further evidence in 
support of the demonic or diabolic theory of the 
phenomena and communications obtained in the 
practice of spiritism. We cannot undertake to ab- 
solutely demonstrate it, least of all to those who 
are determined not to admit the existence of the fallen angels ; 
and it is, of course, difficult to convince those of it who have 
never had any instruction as to their existence, and may insist 
on some independent proof that there are such spirits. But 
Catholics, if well instructed and sound in faith, can have no 
doubt on this point, and Catholic theologians have, we think, 
always adopted this theory of spiritism, so far as its phenomena 
appeared to them to be genuine. And the Church itself, in its 
official action, has, in uniformly condemning and prohibiting 
necromancy (which is only another name for spiritism), made 
the same judgment of the matter. In so doing, it has simply 
followed the precepts of the Scriptural and Divine law, as pro- 
mulgated by Moses. 

The only reason why Catholics, whether well instructed or 
not, have not been unanimous in this judgment, seems to be 
that they have been inclined to regard the phenomena as due 
to fraud or trickery of some sort. Occasionally, even now, some 
one comes out in the newspapers, explaining tricks practised 
by mediums, and many still think that everything can be ex- 
plained in this way. They would find, however, on looking 
into the matter more thoroughly, that spiritists themselves free- 
ly confess the existence of such frauds; that they are prac- 
tised is perfectly well known. But this in no way impairs the 
evidence of such genuine phenomena as we have described in 
the experiences of Mr. Stainton Moses, or as observed by Sir 
William Crookes and other eminent scientific men. Indeed that 
frauds would be practised might be confidently predicted. For 
it is plain, whether we hold the demonic theory or not, that 



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1907.] Recent Results of Psychical Research 233 

the genuine phenomenon is not producible by the medium when- 
ever he may so will. In the private practice of spiritism, this 
is recognized, of course ; and if the phenomena cannot be ob- 
tained, one has to go without them, and simply wait for some 
more favorable occasion. But the professional, public, or ad- 
vertising medium is evidently likely to substitute something else 
for them when they are not forthcoming, as for him it is a 
matter of business, or of making his living. It would be sur- 
prising if he did not Explanations of these frauds are, there- 
fore, quite superfluous. It is on private experiences such as 
those mentioned above, which are immensely abundant, that the 
case rests; and we think must be confessed to rest with abso- 
lute security. No one, we believe, who has examined the sub- 
ject thoroughly, has expressed any doubt as to this. 

It is, or should be, plain enough to every one that in spir- 
itism we are encountering an agency, and a very powerful one, 
exercised by beings outside of ourselves, and over whom we 
have no control. And it should also be plain enough to any 
one that the matter is a dangerous one to handle. And to 
Catholics, and even to other Christians, warned by the Scripture 
of the existence of devils, the danger of it should be very much 
more evident. Furthermore, with regard to the great truth of 
our survival after bodily death, of which others, not having 
our faith, are so anxious to be assured, spiritism can give us 
Catholics no information. We know by faith all that God vouch- 
safes that we should know in general on this point. We may, 
by spontaneous apparitions, or in some other way, learn some- 
thing as to individual cases of persons in whom we are inter- 
ested; but by endeavoring to force such information by spirit- 
istic practices, we can obtain none that is reliable, and, more- 
over, incur most serious peril. There is, therefore, no excuse 
whatever for our joining in such practices, even if we do not 
feel sure, as we should, of the formal condemnation of them by 
the Church. 

But it still remains a matter of interest, in a scientific way, 
to discover the properties of material substance, and the laws 
of nature generally, of which the spirit agencies in this particu- 
lar matter, and human agencies — even our own, perhaps — in 
others, in the general field of modern psychical research, avail 
themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to produce the very 
remarkable effects which, from time to time, appear. And keep- 



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234 RECENT RESULTS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH [Nov., 

ing within prudent limits, and avoiding of course anything like 
the invocation of the dead by spiritistic practices, it may be 
safe enough to investigate these interesting questions; to ob- 
serve and study the phenomena which occur in our own ex- 
perience. And it is certainly safe to examine those which have 
occurred to others. 

In studying some of them, personally at any rate, great care 
is, however, needed. Particularly is this true in the matter of 
hypnotism. We have not treated of that in these papers, for 
the subject is so extensive that it would require very much 
greater space, and, moreover, it is one that cannot be treated 
properly except by experts in it. But, though good results 
may often come from it, the subjection of one's own will and 
interior mental operations to those of another is obviously at- 
tended by great danger, so that great caution is needed in hav- 
ing anything, personally, to do with it, at any rate in the pas- 
sive way of subjecting ourselves to it. We need say no more, 
especially as attention has often been called to this danger, and 
it is so very evident. 

Clairvoyance is another matter which needs and has received 
very extended consideration and treatment. It is, in its actual 
occurrence, evidently much mixed up with telepathy. For in- 
stance, in the case of Mr. Wilmot, which we have given, to 
whom an apparition of his wife occurred in a dream while at 
sea, being visible also to his room-mate, who was awake at the 
time, the apparition can be referred to telepathy, as the lady 
had her thoughts concentrated on him at the time. His pre- 
cise location at sea was, of course, unknown to her, but in tel- 
epathy, as in wireless telegraphy (the similarity forces itself on 
our attention), such knowledge seems unnecessary. 

But she also perceived his surroundings; the location and 
appearance of his room, and of the steamer generally, and also 

saw his room-mate, unknown to her. As Mr. W was not 

consciously fixing his mind on her, or anxious about her in any 
way, her impression seems hardly to be telepathic, but one of 
simple clairvoyance. The same remark holds for the first case 
which we gave of telepathy at a distance, that of the San Fran- 
cisco doctor; and the cases, indeed, of this phenomenon are 
innumerable. In these cases, in a word, there seems to be a 
percipient, but no agent; which is precisely the idea of clair- 
voyance. 



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1907.] Recent Results of Psychical Research 235 

Crystal vision, to which allusion has also been made, is a 
special form of this. It is practised by steady gazing into some 
polished or reflecting surface, as that of a crystal, a mirror, or 
a liquid, and very remarkable results are sometimes obtained. 

The difficulty about this matter of clairvoyance is, of course. 
Somewhat lessened by the "astral body" hypothesis, as this 
supposes an actual transference of the astral body forming the 
apparition of the person to whom it belongs, to some other lo- 
cation than that occupied by his ordinary material one. If this 
astral body, so transferred, can produce impressions of sight or 
hearing on others, why, it may be asked, cannot it also receive 
them, or receive them without producing them ? Apparitions 
seem sometimes to hear and answer what is said to them ; if 
they can receive auditory impressions, why not also visual ones ; 
and why can it not do so without being itself visible or in any 
way perceptible to the persons from whom it receives them ? 
Similarly, why can it not receive them from inanimate objects, 
houses, rooms, or furniture, for instance, near the location to 
which it is transferred ? That it should be perceptible to per- 
sons near that location, indeed, may require special conditions 
in their own organism. 

But the astral body hypothesis, after all, is only a hypothe- 
sis. The phenomena of spiritism indeed seem to indicate that 
a spirit may form a visible and even tangible figure out of 
some unknown form of matter, as we have seen ; but it does 
not follow that this figure, as such, is possessed of senses of 
sight or hearing such as an ordinary human body would have. 
In these cases of ''materialization," as in those of spontaneous 
apparitions, it may just as well be supposed that telepathic com- 
munication is established between the appearing spirit and the 
one to whom it appears, each acting both as agent and percip- 
ient. This would not enable the appearing spirit to perceive 
articles of furniture, or other inanimate objects; indeed it does 
not need to, as it is seemingly able to pass through them, as 
has been noted. 

Still, it must be acknowledged that apparitions often do ap- 
pear to be conscious of material and inanimate things around 
them. As a rule, they do not pass through walls or doors; 
they stand on the floor or ground; they may make audible 
footsteps on it. And their actions, sometimes, are perceived, 
in the case of phantasms of the living, by the persons whom 



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236 RECENT RESULTS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH [Nov., 

they represent. In one case, for instance, a gentleman dreams 
of visiting the house where his fiancee lives. He follows her 
up the stairs, probably feeling the stairs under his feet (at any 
rate, it is not so uncommon in dreams to have such sensations) ; 
overtaking her, he puts his arms round her. At the same mo- 
ment, as stated independently by her, she was going up the 
stairs, hears his footsteps behind her, and then feels his arms 
round her. The hour when he woke from his dream, and when 
she heard and felt his presence, was carefully ascertained as be- 
ing the same. Still, the argument for the astral body is not so 
strong in this as it may at first appear. For telepathy will 
really suffice to explain it, to a great extent, at any rate. His 
mind, in the dream, is fixed on her, and he is, no doubt, fa- 
miliar with the house; her sensations are simply what he ex- 
pects her to have, and may telepathically transmit to her. Of 
course the question remains how he gets the impression that 
she is actually going up the stairs at that moment ; for it does 
not seem that she has any idea of transmitting that fact to him. 

Cases, however, sometimes occur in which telepathy, as we 
use the term, seems to play no part* 

The following is a remarkably good and well-attested case 
of this kind, there having been apparently no attempt to send 
a message or image, one way or the other. It was reported by 
an excellent authority. Dr. Elliott Coues, of Washington, D. C, 
in 1889. He says: 

The case is simply this : In Washington, D. C, January 

14, 1889, between 2 and 3 p. m., Mrs. C is going up the 

steps of her residence, No. 217 Delaware Avenue, carrying 
some papers. She stumbles, tails, is not hurt, picks herself 
up, and enters the house. 

At or about the same time — certainly within the hour, 
probably within 30 minutes, perhaps at the very moment — 

another lady, whom I will call Mrs. B , is sitting sewing 

in her room, about i| miles distant. The two ladies are 
friends, though not of very long standing. They had walked 

*It may be remarked, by the way. that the word " telepathy" does not etymologically 
convey the idea which it is used to express. The original term " thought-transference," is 
better. For " telepathy " ought to mean, by its Greek derivation, " perceiving at a distance," 
whereas it really means acting at a distance ; the acting of a spirit on another when the mate- 
rial bodies of the two, if they have them, are distant and without material means of communi- 
cation. Telepathy, in the sense of its Greek words, would cover clairvoyance, of course. 
What is wanted is a word signifying action rather than perception, at a distance. 



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1907.] Recent Results of psychical Research 237 

together the day before, but had not met this day. Mrs. 

B "sees " the little accident in every detail. The vision 

or image is minutely accurate (as it afterwards proves). 
Nevertheless, it is so wholly unexpected and unaccountable, 
that she doubts if it were not a passing figment of her imag- 
ination. But the mental impression is so strong that she 
keeps thinking It over, and sits down and writes a letter to 

Mrs. C , which I enclose. The letter is written, of course, 

without any communication whatever between the two ladies. 

Mrs. C receives it next morning, Tuesday the 15th. 

(The postmarks on the letter, shown to Dr. Coues, verify 

this.) I happened to call on Mrs. C that day, on another 

errand, when she hands me the letter and verifies it in every 
essential particular to me verbally, from her side of the case. 

Mrs. B describes in her letter the dress and hat worn 

by Mrs. C , the papers which she carried in her band, and 

Mrs. C 's fall on the front steps of her own house, the hat 

going in one direction, and the papers in another. 

In the questions asked of Mrs. C by Mr. Myers, he does 

not seem to have thought of inquiring whether at, or shortly 

after, the accident, she was thinking of Mrs. B , wondering 

what she would think of it, whether she would laugh at it, etc. 

It should be remarked, however, that Mrs. C had not come 

from Mrs. B 's, but from the Congressional Library, where 

she had been writing, and was not very likely to think of her 
friend at the moment of her fall, or to wish to communicate 
it to her shortly afterward, as it was not dangerous. Indeed 
it does not seem likely that she would have mentioned it to 
Mrs. B at all, had not the latter inquired about it. 

Telepathy, or the sending of thought messages, in this case 
and in others which might be adduced, does not seem a probable 
explanation of the phenomenon. That is to say, it does not 
seem likely that either of the parties acted telepathically on the 
other. 

But there is a possibility of a kind of telepathy, in all cases 
of seeming clairvoyance, which has not been much attended to 
by psychical investigators. And that is the telepathic action 
of a third party ^ aware of the occurrence, or of the objects or 
places, " clairvoyantly " seen. This kind of action is what spir- 
itism itself obviously suggests. 

There is a well-known, and we think well- attested case, in 



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238 RECENT Results of psychical Research [Nov., 

which the captain of a ship, going into his cabin, finds a man 
writing there, who is unknown to him, and unlike any one 
aboard. He goes away to make inquiries, and on returning 
finds the man gone, but a sheet of paper on the table, on which 
are the words: "Steer N. W." As it is not much out of his 
course, he thinks he will try and see if there is anything in the 
warning, and finds a burning ship, the crew of which he saves. 

Now if the captain had seen a vision of a burning ship to 
the N. W., beyond the range of ordinary vision, it would be 
taken as a case of clairvoyance on his part, or on the part of 
some one on the burning vessel, who clairvoyantly saw his own, 
and sent a message to him in the form of a " phantasm of the 
living." 

But evidently it is explicable by an angelic intervention ; and 
this is the view which would very probably occur to Catholics, 
or to any one believing that there are angels, and that they take 
an interest in our affairs, and may visibly appear to show that 
interest, and to instruct or help us. 

The same explanation may readily occur in other cases, in 
which human telepathy seems inapplicable. But it may be very 
well asked : " Why should angels concern themselves with things 

of no importance, such as the fall on the steps of Mrs. C 

in the case just described ? " 

It is probable that an answer to this question will readily 
occur to those who believe that there are evil angels, as well 
as good ones. And it seems, from what we read in the lives 
of the saints, that these evil spirits, beside their more important 
attempts against our welfare, do sometimes amuse themselves — 
so to speak — with very unimportant and trivial ones, like those 
narrated in the life of St. Anthony of the desert. And, indeed, 
in winning our confidence, and making us believe that we can, by 
certain practices, obtain information as to what is going on in 
the world, and more particularly as to future events, their time 
would not be wasted. If they can persuade us that we have 
occult powers, by which we can read closed books, understand 
languages which we have not studied, etc., and, more particu- 
larly, can foretell the future, it is a means of getting control 
of us which it is well worth while for them to make the most of. 

That they are able to give us accurate information as to 
the present and the past, if they choose, must be obvious to 
any one who believes in their existence at all. And if, by thus 



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1907.] Recent Results of Psychical Research 239 

winning our confidence, they can make us believe them when 
they give false information as to things not humanly ascertain- 
able, their object is still more fully accomplished than by simply 
getting more or less control over our actions and our time. 

They may even, to some extent, foretell the future better 
than we can, by greater sagacity, and more complete knowledge 
of the present circumstances on which the future largely depends. 
As for precise or definite foretelling of it, except in so far as it 
depends on natural laws, of course that belongs to God alone, 
or to those whom he may inspire for the purpose. PfemonitionSy 
therefore, whether clairvoyant or otherwise, cannot come under 
the head of law, and are not subjects of scientific research. 

It is equally plain that such warnings or encouragements as 
God may choose to give us cannot be obtained by any processes 
that we may adopt. Clairvoyants who pretend ability to tell 
the future, who are not saints, and give us no signs of a Divine 
commission, are either simply impostors, or must be referred to 
the diabolic order. Of course, serious endeavors to ascertain 
the future by their help is, therefore, strictly prohibited by the 
Scripture and by the Church. 

And it is also obvious that crystal -vision and the like per- 
formances, even when nothing but the present or past is sought 
for, are practices fraught with grave danger, so that no one can 
safely or lawfully indulge in them. The same, apparently, must 
be said of any kind of clairvoyance, in all cases where human 
telepathy, inter vivos, will not account for it. As for palmistry, 
astrology, and the like, they hardly deserve serious mention, at 
any rate in connection with our general subject, they being so 
evidently simply superstitions. 

There is, however, another practice which has considerable 
vogue lately, known as ** psychometry." This consists in send- 
ing to the '' psychometrist " articles belonging to the sender or 
sofhe friend (usually something which he or she has worn), that 
he may determine, or '' sense," as the slang is, something with 
regard to the character or future of the person owning them. 
The possibility may be conceded that some influence may pro- 
ceed from such things in some way indicating the owner's per- 
sonality or character; but that anything of the future can be 
indicated by them, except as a consequence of his or her pres- 
ent qualities, is evidently sheer nonsense. It may be imagined 
that the psychic influence proceeding from them in some " oc- 



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240 Recent Results of Psychical Research [Nov., 

cult" way enlightens the '' psychometrist/' and that the case 
is somewhat the same as that of cures or miracles of various 
kinds produced by relics of the saints. But all Catholics un- 
derstand that relics of the saints have no natural or intrinsic 
efficacy, and that the wonders worked by them are simply 
granted by Almighty God in an entirely supernatural way, to 
honor those who have been conspicuously and specially his 
servants and friends. 

Really, however, it seems pretty safe to say that the whole 
psychometry business is nonsense, from beginning to end. 

In the early days of the Society of Psychical Research, con- 
siderable attention was paid to the matter of the ** divining rod," 
by which hidden springs of water, veins of metal, etc., were 
supposed to be discoverable. It is hard to see what there is of 
a psychical character about this inquiry, unless that the psychi- 
cal qualities of the user of the rod could be supposed to com- 
bine with the physical qualities of the rod itself in some way. 
We hardly need say that no definite or certain results came 
from the investigation. 

Another matter, which has been more prominent lately, is 
that of "duplex or multiplex personality," so called. A good 
many instances are recorded in which, perhaps as a consequence 
of some physical lesion, perhaps without any, a person may lose 
memory of his or her previous condition and past experience, 
and become apparently a new person altogether, with, it may be, 
different characteristics, and having to acquire knowledge all or 
mostly over again. Then the previous condition may return ; 
in it memory is lost of the intermediate one ; and so the oscil- 
lation may go on, and even three or more such independent 
states be observed. 

This matter may be connected with hypnotism in some way. 
Some of the phenomena also suggest the possibility of diabolic 
possession. That several human souls can personally unite with 
the same body in turn is a hypothesis that no Catholic can 
safely entertain, any more than he could the successive union 
of the same soul with different bodies; the transmigration of 
souls, in other words. It is quite possible that, on account of 
the publicity given to this matter, some imposture may have en- 
tered into it, particularly in the more recent cases ; evidently it 
offers a field for acting or personation, which might be difficult 
to detect. In the genuine cases, granting their existence, it is 



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1907.] Recent Results of Psychical Research 241 

probable that further study of the brain may throw some light 
on the matter. 

We have endeavored, in these articles, to give a general and 
of course very imperfect view of the more prominent matters of 
modern psychical research. The literature of the subject is so 
immense, and growing so rapidly, that it is quite impossible 
to do any sort of justice to it within magazine limits. The few 
examples which we have given under some heads are, of course, 
simply paradigms of the classes to which they belong. Let no 
one imagine that they even stand out from the mass by any 
qualities which could not be found in many others. One might 
as well imagine that there were few very notable Greek or Latin 
verbs, because only a few are given as examples of each con- 
jugation in the grammar. Mr. Myers' great work, to which we 
have several times referred, published some four years ago, con- 
tains some 1,400 large pages; and the subject has grown im- 
mensely since that time. Periodicals devoted entirely to it are 
issued monthly. One of the most notable of these is The An- 
nals of Psychical Science^ established in 1905, and conducted by 
Dr. Dariex and Professor Charles Richet, with a committee con- 
sisting of Sir William Crookes, Professor Lombroso, and other 
well- known and eminent scientific men. It is proposed to 
establish an " International Club for Psychical Research," and 
1,000 Member-Founders are confidently and reasonably expected. 

The principal subject of the most modern investigation is in 
the matter of spiritism. The Annals^ just mentioned, is enti- 
tled: ''A Monthly Journal devoted to critical and experimental 
Research in the Phenomena of Spiritism." This matter has, we 
may say, a real religious interest to most of its investigators, 
who have lost the faith which frees us from any need to in- 
quire as to the serious problems of our future existence. 

The result; so far, of the investigations has been good, in 
convincing most of those who have taken part in it of the fact 
of future existence; and as they have been too busy in this 
work to determine from the communications much with regard 
to its character or varied conditions, the tendency has been 
perhaps as much toward true religion as away from it. Al- 
ready, indeed, we see indications of a recognition that the 
Catholic Church has been right in her teaching as to evil spir- 
its, among those who are not so much occupied in verifying the 
phenomena, but have taken them for granted. And there prob- 

VOL. LXXXVI. — 16 



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242 RECENT RESULTS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH [Nov., 

ably is not much danger o{ any one constructing a consistent 
system of doctrine as to our future life from the spiritist com- 
munications, even though still believing them to come from de- 
parted human souls; for they are so various and even contra- 
dictory in themselves, as we have seen, that to construct such 
a system out of them is practically impossible. 

The probability is that our experimenters will finally, and 
before so very long, discover what the Catholic Church has 
known all along, that the existence of spirit as distinct from 
matter is certain and unquestionable ; and furthermore, that 
psychical influence on our lives is continual, for good or for 
ill; and that what we have to do. if we wish to be secure, is 
not to sneer at the spirits, but, as St. John says, ''to try the 
spirits, if they be of God.'' We may be fairly sure of this, for 
no one can go very far in a bold and unrestricted experimental 
examination into these matters without having his fingers, at 
least, burnt; he will see, as many spiritists have already seen, 
that it is playing with fire; and to the investigators, as to those 
who have tried spiritism as a religion, the dangers to morality 
will become evident. And these investigators are men of high 
character, as little inclined to vice as fallen man, without spe- 
cial grace from God, is likely to be. When this result comes, 
they may perhaps find out that there is an institution on this 
earth, founded and enlightened by Almighty God himself, which 
has been acquainted from the beginning with this matter that 
they are investigating, and could have told them and warned 
them about it before they began. 

For us, there is one great fact which the recent results of 
psychical research will bring home more clearly, perhaps, than 
we have known it before. And that is, the fact, which we be- 
lieve all familiar with the subject recognize as thoroughly estab- 
lished, namely, that of telepathy; that is, of the possible di- 
rect communication of one spirit with another. As a matter of 
religion, of the grace and light given by God to us, of helps 
or hindrances to our salvation, coming from good or evil angels 
respectively, we have always known this ; but it can now hard- 
ly be denied that, outside of any question of hypnotism, a sim- 
ilar influence may be exerted on us, even by each other, and 
that harm, as well as good, may come from it. The mere fact 
that few of us appear to be subject to it in any marked degree 
should not make us doubt its actual occurrence in many cases 



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1907.] Recent Results of Psychical Research 243 

which have been examined, any more than the fact that one 
man cannot distinguish all the notes of a musical chord should 
make him doubt that others can do so, or that in any way 
their senses are sharper or more delicate than his own. 

The power of action of spirit on matter without the natural 
intervention or application of a bodily organism is another fact 
which stands out clearly as sufficiently ascertained. This is of 
use to us, in removing the difficulty which we may experience 
in believing in what are usually called miracles, but which do 
not require the suspension of any law of nature, but simply a 
spiritual action of this kind. 

And the subject, in general, and in all its parts, is well 
worth our being acquainted with, by means of the investiga- 
tions which are now being so extensively made. Particularly it 
is well for us to understand that the materialism, so rampant 
not long ago, is rapidly being abandoned by scientific men. 
But as to experimental investigation on our own account, as we 
have said, it is obviously a matter which should be conducted, 
if at all, with the greatest caution, and only in conformity with 
the prudent judgment of those who, as the best acquainted with 
the matter in its most important aspects, and as having a spe- 
cial commission and authority in all spiritual matters, are the 
proper judges of what is best in this one, so intimately con- 
cerning the welfare of our souls. In this matter, above all 
others, to be safe, we must have the sanction and approval of 
the Church of God. 

(the end.) 



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flew Books* 

Our national humorist has so fre- 
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. quently had recourse to irreverence 

towards religious subjects of all 
kinds for his artistic effects, that no person of any religious be- 
lief could consider him a suitable candidate for the office of pro- 
nouncing a verdict on any cult or creed, even though it be one 
so grotesque and extravagant as Christian Science. However, 
he has assumed the office ; let us see how he discharges it. Is 
this good-sized volume*— decorated with the picture of the au- 
thor in the white raiment about which the press has gabbled so 
nauseatingly often this summer — a protracted joke, or a serious 
criticism or history? A joke, we should answer, if the reply 
were to be made on finishing the introductory chapters, the hu- 
mor of which is in the author's most mechanical manner. 

But as Mr. Clemens warms to his subject, he develops a se- 
rious attack — in which his artillery of sarcasm and ridicule is 
continuously heard — upon Mrs. Kddy, her claims, her doctrines, 
and her methods. The devices for money-getting and money- 
keeping which the ** Mother" has woven into the structure of her 
religion are strongly scored, as well as her ingenious and mon- 
strous contrivances for retaining in her own hand absolute power 
over every branch of the organization, and every officer em- 
ployed in it. He contrasts at considerable length some au- 
thentic compositions of Mrs. Eddy with the book Science and 
Healthy for the' purpose of proving that the literary character of 
the former is so wretched that they prove Mrs. Eddy incapable 
of writing in the comparatively good style of the Scientist bi- 
ble. 

Dismissing as of little consequence the question of whether 
Mrs. Eddy stole or invented the Great Idea, he discusses, as 
of chief importance, this other one : " Was it she, and not an- 
other, that built a new Religion upon the Book and organized 
it?" This, undoubtedly, Mrs. Eddy achieved. How was she 
capable of it? — she, 

grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she 
sees — money, power, glory — ^vain, untruthful, jealous, des- 
potic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hyp- 

* Christian Science. With Notes Containing Corrections to Date. By Mark Twain. Il- 
lustrated. New York : Harper & Brothers. 



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1907.] New Books 245 

notists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of rea* 
soning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish. 

But, continues Mr. Clemens, this is not the portrait of Mrs. 
Eddy as her followers see her; and he proceeds to sketch the 
** Mother '' as she appears to the devoted disciple. Patient, 
gentle, noble- hearted, a messenger of God. 

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolution- 
ized their lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, 
and filled them and flooded them with gladness and peace ; 
a religion which has no hell ; a religion whose heaven is not 
put off to another time, with a break and a gulf between, but 
begins here and now, and melts into eternity as fancies of the 
waking day melt into sleep. 

We could hardly expect Mi. Clemens to draw attention to 
the contrasts between this view of life and that announced in 
the New Testament, though the oppositions are obvious. 

In his conclusion, Mr. Clemens incidentally makes some se 
vere strictures on the difference between the private and the 
public standards of conduct accepted by the American Chris 
tian which are the most timely in this book. 

This is an honest nation — in private life the American 
Christian is a straight and clean and honest man, and, in his 
private commerce can be trusted to stand faithfully by the 
principles of honor and honesty imposed on him by his reli- 
gion. But the moment he comes forward to exercise a public 
trust he can be confidently counted upon to betray that trust 
in nine cases out of ten, if** party loyalty" shall require it. 
If there are two tickets in the field in his city, one composed 
of honest men and the other of notorious blatherskites and 
criminals, he will not hesitate to lay his private Christian 
honor aside and vote tor the blatherskites, if his ** party hon- 
or " shall exact it. His Christianity is of no use to him and 
has no influence upon him when he is acting in a public ca- 
pacity. He has sound and sturdy private morals, but he has 
no public ones. 

Mr. Clemens proceeds to illustrate his general arraignment 
by a particular instance: 

In the last great municipal election in New York, almost a 
complete one-half of the votes, representing 3,500,000 Chris- 



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246 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

tians, were cast for a ticket that had hardly a man on it 
whose earned and proper place was outside of a jail. But 
that vote was present at Church next Sunday the same as 
ever and as unconscious of its perfidy as if nothing had hap- 
pened. 

Congress, Mr. Clemens goes on to say, is worse than the 
electorate. If Christian Science can succeed in establishing a 
Christian public standard, he wishes it success. This needed re- 
form will demand a stronger power than Christian Science. 

Within the limits of seventy > five very small pages,* Mr. Bur- 
rell has compressed a sketch of Mrs. Eddy's career, the origin of 
her teachings, and a criticism of the vagueness and inconsistencies 
existing in that doctrine. He notes, also, the adaptations intro- 
duced from time to time into Christian Science as the result of 
the many attacks made upon it. Mr. Burrell's little volume is 
not one -tenth of the size of that of Mark Twain on the same sub- 
ject, yet it embraces every element of value that is to be found 
in the larger work, and is just as effective an attack upon the 
religion of Mrs. Eddy. It enjoys, too, this advantage over Mark 
Twain's, that it is not open to the very reasonable objection 
urged by some defenders of Christian Science against the dean 
of American humorists, that ''not only Christian Science, but 
every other religious belief appeals to his sense of humor, and 
to his sense of humor only, and this gives rise to the question 
as to whether the comic point of view is a valuable or even a 
reliable point of view in the consideration of religious topics." 

This little volume f is published 
CHRISTIAN UNITY. anonymously, but we shall, per- 
haps, betray no confidence by men- 
tioning the fact that it is from the pen of Rev. Martin O'Don- 
oghue, a priest well known in the vicinity of the national Capi- 
tal, for bis eloquence in the pulpit and his zeal in the general 
ministry. We are happy to be able to say that this venture 
into apologetics is quite worthy of the reputation the author 
has achieved in other lines of apostolic labor. We hope, too, 
that, though the main purpose of this effort is to effect conver- 

• A New Appraisal of Christian Science. By Joseph Dunn Burrell. New York : Funk 
& Wagnalls. 

t The Gospel Plea for Christian Unity. Washington, D. C. : Gibson Brothers. 



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1907.] New Books 247 

sions of non-Catholics^ one of the by- products, so to say, may 
be to stimulate other zealous priests to a like endeavor. 

There are too few of such monographs on apologetic topics 
appearing in America, although there is probably no country 
where an up-to-date, readable substitute for the old-fashioned 
tract can do so much good work. 

There are a thousand topics available. Father O'Donoghue 
has chosen the task of demonstrating that the Gospels bear on 
their surface evident marks of a doctrine and a spirit that is 
solely Catholic. 

His method is rather novel. He selects a sentence or a 
passage, or even a chapter, from the New Testament, and then, 
by means ol a short, pithy, and oflen very lively commentary, 
indicates how closely the gospel teaching is maintained and il- 
lustrated in the Catholic life and the Catholic faith. Suffice it 
to say that such an objective, matter-of-fact method must ap- 
peal immediately to all bible-readers who are sincere enough to 
mark and compare the facts of Catholic life— especially devo- 
tional life — with the gospel records. Such readers cannot miss 
the main point of the author, namely, that the scriptures them- 
selves, taken verbatim, are the strongest possible plea for the 
unity of faith demanded by Christ and made possible by the 
Church alone. 

Of late years, since Newman's doc- 
HOLY ORDERS. trine of development, from being 

By Saltet. considered a dangerous novelty, has 

come to be looked upon and em- 
ployed as the most eflFective — indeed the only effective — prin- 
ciple for the defence of doctrinal continuity against the histor- 
ical critic, our poverty in theological literature of the positive 
kind has been severely felt. The need is so great that every 
writer attempting, in however modest a measure, to contribute 
towards supplying the want has evoked the gratitude of stu- 
dents, teachers, and scholars. Already many noteworthy con- 
tributions of a meritorious character have been made ; and they 
have met with so hearty a welcome that competent scholars 
are encouraged to devote talents and labor to the service of the 
Church and truth in this line. 

The publishing house of Lecoffre has projected a series of 
studies on the history of dogmas which was recently most au- 
spiciously inaugurated by Abb^ Riviere's fine volume on the 



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248 NEW Books [Nov., 

dogma of Redemption. Now comes a second study,* which is 
of a quality so high that it would be difficult to overpraise it. 
The authoritative doctrine concerning the sacrament of Holy 
Orders is at present, and for a long time past has been, pre- 
cisely fixed, and can be completely stated in a very small 
compass. But for a great period of the Church's history no 
such clear definition of the doctrine existed. And many his- 
torical facts, as well as many teachings, more or less authori- 
tative, are on record which could, with great difficulty, be recon- 
ciled with one another, or, in some cases, with the doctrine as 
finally formulated by the modern councils. To the intricacy of 
the question, and the consequent impossibility of obtaining a 
satisfactory understanding of it at one particular phase without 
entering upon a thorough investigation of the process of devel- 
opment exhibited from the beginning by the teaching concern- 
ing the repetition of Orders, we owe the present volume. 

In the course of a study on the reform of the eleventh 
century, the author informs us, be found himself face to face 
with the theological controversies which at that period so pro- 
foundly troubled the Church, concerning the transmission of the 
power of Orders. He found himself obliged to make a per- 
sonal study of the question. But this inquiry forced him to in- 
vestigate the chief events and controversies which marked the 
path of antecedent development — and thus what was intended 
to be an incidental chapter grew into an independent book. As 
we may expect from this history of its inception, this study is 
broad and comprehensive. Its starting point is the two diverse 
traditions of the ancient Church regarding the competence of 
schismatics and heretics to administer the sacrament of Baptism. 
The divergence between the practice of the African Church 
and that of Rome, the reordinations of the Novatians and Mono- 
physitesj the subsequent abandonment of reordination ; the de- 
velopment of the Roman theology by St. Augustine, with the 
difficulties involved in the treatment of the Arians, are thor- 
oughly discussed in these chapters forming the introductory 
part of the work. 

The author treats with considerable amplitude the many 
perplexing problems presented by history from the seventh to 
the eleventh century, especially the reiteration, by order of the 

♦ Let Reordinations, £tudf sur U Sacrament de tOrdre, Par I'AbW Louis Saltct. Paris : 
Libraire •Lecoflre. 



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1907.] New books 249 

Roman Council of 769, of the orders conferred by Pope Con* 
stantine; the annulment by Stephen VI. of the orders conferred 
by his predecessor, Pope Formosus, and the subsequent annul- 
ment of Stephen's act by his successors, Theodore II. and John 
IX., whose proceedings, in turn, received similar treatment at 
the hands of Sergius III. The author holds that the ordina- 
tions of Formosus were incontestably valid. The violent pro- 
ceedings of the Council of 769, as well as the subsequent action 
of John XII. in annulling the ordinations of Leo VIII., he 
treats as of little real interest to the student of theological de- 
velopment, since each case was " but one more act of violence 
in a period which abounds in others still greater." He does 
not evade the doctrinal difficulties created by the decisions de- 
livered regarding simoniacal ordinations during the eleventh cen- 
tury, and the still greater ones arising from the action of Ur- 
ban II., the subsequent influence of which he follows up in 
the teachings of the school of Bologna. The triumph of that 
school, by getting practical recognition from the Curia, its in 
fluence among the Parisian theologians, who attributed to the 
process of degradation the power of effacing completely from 
the soul of the priest the sacramental character; the final es- 
tablishment of the definitive doctrine by the Scholastics from 
the middle of the thirteenth century — these are the various 
phases through which, with a thorough grasp of history, critical 
acumen, lucid method, and in an admirably dispassionate, frank, 
sincere temper, Abb^ Saltet exposes this intricate and delicate 
subject, whose embarrassing difficulties have been so frequently 
ignored. The reordination of the past, he concludes, undoubt- 
edly supposed a notion of the power of orders which is not 
that of to-day. 

It is true that the doctrinal authority of Popes has several 
times been en cause in the course of these controversies. To 
what extent ? There will be no hesitation in saying that the 
decisions of the Popes on these questions have not been 
clothed with the character determined by the Council of the 
Vatican for definitions which implicate the sovereign author- 
ity of the Popes in doctrinal matters. In the history of reor- 
dinations the authority of the Popes is much less involved 
than it is in the doctrine regarding the relations of the two 
powers, in which, however, according to theologians, the in- 
fallible authority of the Popes is not at stake. 



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250 New Books [Nov., 

Among both the clergy and laity 
THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS, there is an increasing number of 
By Dupuis. spokesmen for the view that the 

dangers and remedies of the pres- 
ent crisis depend less on the adversaries of Catholicism than 
upon the clergy and the faithful themselves. This diagnosis of 
the case is certainly more hopeful than the contrary one which 
would ascribe all the present evils to the diabolical power and 
intelligence of an enemy too strong for the resources of the 
Church. The latest writer to direct attention to the internal 
sources of the present weakness is M. Dupuis, a professor in 
the School of Political Sciences.* 

It is a great mistake, he premises, to fancy that any elec- 
toral successes — even if such were possible — that would intro- 
duce more favorable legislation would remedy the present evils. 

Catholicism, for a long time past, is but the name of the 
religion of the majority of Frenchmen. That majority still 
passes through the Church at the opening and at the close of 
life, but between these two extremities of existence it has, we 
must admit, very little concern about religion. Believers in 
a vague fashion, the French are, with regard to the Church, 
distrustful above all things. This distrust wears two aspects, 
an old one and a new. 

The old one, M. Dupuis proceeds to show, is of no recent 
origin, a fear that the clergy are always hankering for a share 
of power in temporal and political affairs. 

This suspicion, no longer reasonable, is strong enough to 
strengthen and recruit anti-clericalism. But the new form which 
the Frenchman's distrust of the Church takes is directed against 
the essence of Catholicism itself. 

The French people every day hear the flatterers to whom 
they have given their confidence repeat that Catholicism is 
condemned by science, that it cannot resist the scrutiny of 
free thought ; that its hold on souls depends on a system of 
intellectual compression and deliberate ignorance, cunningly 
fostered by the clergy. On the other hand, the people hear 
timid Catholics insisting to excess on the perils which menace 

*£a Crise Religieuse et L' Action IntellectuelU des Caikoliques, Par Charles Dupuis. 
Paris : Bloud et Cie. 



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1907.] New Books 251 

faith, on the dangers which the study of suspected or hostile 
sciences presents, on the advantages and security of the faith 
of the illiterate laborer. The people compare the two atti- 
tudes; between those who affirm boldly the rashest errors, 
but proclaim that they do not fear examination, and those 
who, sure of the truth, dread for it the weakness of the hu- 
man mind to such an extent as to appear in dread of reason 
itself, the people incline more and more to follow the former ; 
they distrust more and more a doctrine which seems to doubt 
its own strength. 

This excessive timidity has, M. Dupuis argues, contributed 
signally to alienate the people from Catholicism. He then pro- 
ceeds to show that, through faulty methods of exposition and 
teaching, the French people are ignorant of the true significance 
of much of the Church's doctrine. In a masterly analysis he 
sets forth the causes which, since the period of the Reforma- 
tion, have led to a poor and inadequate method of preaching 
and teaching, and to the predominance of a merely defensive 
policy instead of one of apostolic aggressive vigor by the Church 
in France. One of these causes, on which M. Dupuis writes 
very forcibly, has been the inveterate disposition of the clergy 
to rely on the secular power; and a kindred tendency in the 
Catholic body in general to forget that the ''Kingdom of God 
is not of this world." Again, be declares, the education given 
in the seminaries has not produced priests fit to cope with the 
dif&culties of the day. The clergy has lost its intellectual pre- 
eminence. 

To an audacious and inquiring age truth cannot be preached 
in the same way as to an age filled with the fear oi God and 
respect for authority. Yet the seminaries have been much 
less pre-occupied to equip apostles than to preserve timid souls 
from temptations of mind and heart. To ward off the peril o^ 
false, or merely bold, doctrines, teaching has shut itself up 
in the philosophy of the Middle Ages and Bossuet, has thun- 
dered against forgotten or abandoned errors, but has ignored 
systems in vogue, and scarcely mentioned contemporary errors. 

Owing to these causes, France has slipped away from the 
control of the Church. The sources of the evil indicate the na- 
ture of the remedies to be applied — the development of the 



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252 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

spiritual aims of the Church ; definitive abandonment of any 
pretentions to dictate in secular affairs; a more modem course 
of seminary teaching; a more faithful preaching of the truths 
and spirit of the gospel; more active sympathy with the peo- 
ple, in contradistinction to the higher classes. On this latter 
point M. Dupuis quotes liberally from an eloquent pamphlet is- 
sued by the Bishop of Chalons, Mgr. Latty, who, after express- 
ing the view that the principal cause of the decadence of Ca- 
tholicism in France is to be sought, 'Mess in the enterprise of 
its enemies than in the insufficient adaptation of the clergy to 
their role," exhorts the Church in France to take the side of 
the people, and to be with the people in whatever struggles 
they find themselves involved. The rupture of the Concordat 
may prove to have been a providential blessing for the Church 
in France. 

Rarely has a spiritual biography 
MARGARET B0UR6E0YS. been written in such a lively, fas- 
cinating manner as this history of 
the noble woman who founded the Canadian order of Notre 
Dame.* In 1653 Margaret Bourgeoys, then a young woman 
who had vainly sought admission to the Carmelite order in 
France, joined the band of adventurers, colonists, and apostles 
who sailed for Canada on the Saint Nicholas, under the com- 
mand of the chivalrous and saintly De Maisonneuve, founder 
and first governor of Montreal. The history of Margaret's long 
life is closely interwoven with the early history of the city in 
which she labored, and where the seeds which she sowed in 
tears and trials still bear such abundant fruit. The narrative 
is as full of adventure and of the spirit of the gentlemen and 
gentlewomen of France who laid the foundations of Canada, as 
is one of Mary Catherine Crowley's novels ; while the spiritual 
side of the story is told with eloquent simplicity. The sanctity 
of Margaret Bourgeoys' life has already won for her the title 
of Venerable from Leo XIII. ; and '^ it is the cherished hope of 
Mother Bourgeoys' daughters and clients, as of all Canadians 
and Catholics, that his successor will soon exalt our heroine's 
life, name, and mission, by granting her the crowning honors 
of beatification and canonization." The order founded by Mother 

♦ Tkt Life and Tinus of Margaret Bourgeoys ( The Venerable). By Margaret Mary Drum- 
mond. Boston : The Angel Guardian Press. 



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1907.] NEW BOOKS 253 

Bourgeoys has its Constitutions approved by the Holy See. It 
has 127 houses scattered over twenty- one dioceses, 1,400 re- 
ligious, and 32,000 pupils. Yet, as her biographer relates in 
detail, when she first proposed to establish an order of unclois- 
tered sisters the conservatives of the day denounced and opposed 
her as a dangerous innovator. 

Mr. Sladen's new volume on Si- 
SICILY. cily • is a unique form of guide- 

By Sladen. book, practical and complete in its 

instructions, and filled with a spir- 
it of fervent admiration for the romantic and beautiful places 
of which it speaks. The style is swinging and attractive, rich 
in allusions, and profitable to read. So intimate and so thor- 
ough is Mr. Sladen's familiarity with his subject, and so care- 
ful his explanations, that the reader will not easily discover any 
shortcomings in the book. Nine chapters, of a general character, 
deal with climate, customs, types, and the like, and introduce us 
to a series of twenty-four sections on '' Things Sicilian.'' Each 
of these sections resembles a brief encyclopaedia, giving in 
paragraphs, alphabetically arranged, short accounts of what is 
most important for the studious traveler to know concerning 
the history, topography, and institutions of the various parts of 
Sicily. Generously illustrated and attentive to practical details, 
the volume fulfils a very useful purpose and will help both to 
draw visitors to a land that deserves to be better known, and 
to ease their way during their travels. 

This book f presents a number of 
THE PSYCHIC RIDDLE. facts or alleged facts— many of 
By Funk. them taken from works that have 

been already published — belonging 
to spiritistic phenomena. Anybody familiar with the volumes 
of Myers, or even with the little book of Lapponi, will find 
that Dr. Funk has paid little attention to systematic arrange- 
ment of his data and analysis of the various factors of the prob- 
lem with which he deals. He begs that it be understood he 

*" Sicily: Tkt New Wintir Resort, An Encyclopaedia of Sicily, By Douglas Sladen. 
New York : E. P. Dutton & Co. 

t The Psychic Riddle. By I. K. Funk, D.D. New York : Funk & Wagnalls. 



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254 N^W BOOKS [Nov., 

is not himself a spiritualist in the usually accepted sense of the 
word. For, though he holds that extra- mundane intelligences 
can, and do, communicate with the living through the medium 
of the senses, nevertheless he considers that there is no proof 
that these intelligences can and do identify themselves as beings 
who once lived in the flesh. Dr. Funk's object is ''to make 
somewhat more easy for trained scientists the way to help ef- 
fectively the psychic research societies in efforts to solve the psy- 
chic problem." The trained scientist often draws help from un- 
likely quarters, and, perhaps, if Crookes or Lodge, or any other 
of their scientific brethren, should take up Dr. Funk's book, they 
may derive some inspiration from it. We fear, however, that 
it is much more likely to be read by another class, in whom it 
will stir up a dangerous curiosity, that will seek to satisfy it- 
self by dabbling in spiritism that cannot but prove pernicious. 
It may be true, though there is a ring of exaggeration about 
Gladstone's statement, that " the work of the Society for Psy- 
chical Research is the most important work that is being done 
in the world to-day — by far the most important." But, what- 
ever may be the value of that work, it is certainly of a char- 
acter to demand on the part of those who undertake it trained 
powers of observation, sobriety of judgment, and a mental poise 
that will protect them from rushing at conclusions that might 
have the most lamentable influence on their moral and religious 
life. 

The precise reason for this new 
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA, life of St. Catherine • is not plain. 

The book is handsome in binding 
and press- work, and the numerous excellent illustrations are 
full of interest. Miss Roberts seems to have read carefully, and 
she reports accurately enough, the chief events connected with 
the subject. But her pages present no evidence of her right to 
undertake the serious task in question ; rather they give us reason 
to think that neither the faculty of clearly and logically pre- 
senting facts, nor the power of sympathetically appreciating 
Catherine Benincasa, has been granted to the saint's latest biog- 
rapher. 

• St. Catherine of Siena and Her Times, By the author of Mademoiselle Mori. New 
York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 



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1907.] New Books 255 

In this manual* of about two hun- 
THE CHURCH IN ENGLISH dred and eighty pages, the au- 
HISTORY. thor gives an attractive sketch of 

By Stone. ^he outlines of English ecclesi- 

astical history, adapted for pupils 
in higher schools and colleges. The arrangement is clear, and 
the course and correlation of events, causes, and consequences 
set forth with as much detail and philosophic analysis as the 
grade of students for whom it is intended, can be expected to 
master. The author states facts in a fairly objective way, and, 
while evincing the staunchest loyalty to the Church, does not 
descend to needlessly blackening the character of her opponents, 
nor to the tricks of the special pleader. In our day, when 
Catholics of any education are sure, some time or another, to 
meet with the non- Catholic view of historical facts, where the 
perspective is often very different from our own, the important 
point is that the teacher and the text- book should teach the 
pupil the facts, just as they are. Otherwise he may one day 
find that he has been deceived in some things ; and thencefor- 
ward he will cease to trust the guides of his youth. Very 
rightly this manual insists on the evidences that establish the 
subordination of the English Church to the Holy See up till 
the Reformation; and the substitution, in the Tudor settlement, 
of the Royal Supremacy for that of the Pope. The pupil who 
will have mastered, as he can easily do, the contents of this 
comparatively small text- book will have a very respectable 
knowledge of the ecclesiastical history of England down to the 
time of James I. The subsequent period, and especially the 
last century, is rather too briefly disposed of. And, perhaps, 
the author has somewhat deviated from her general standard of 
sincerity when she leaves the. impression that James II. was an 
advocate of the principle of religious liberty. 

One of the first companions of 

GOLDEN SAYINGS OF St. Francis, Brother Giles, achieved 

BROTHER GILES. during his life the reputation of 

possessing a singular power of ex- 
pressing the truths of the spiritual life and the wisdom of the 
saints with vivacity, terseness, and the distinctive Franciscan 

* The Church in English History, A Manual for Catholic Schools. By J. M. Stone. St. 
Louis: B. Herder. 



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256 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

character. His golden sayings were compiled soon after his 
death by the disciples who had committed them to writing 
after they had heard them fall from his own lips ; and have 
come down, more or less adulterated, to the present day. Four 
collections of the Dicta exhibit many variations. Father Pas- 
chal has taken for translation* the Dicta B. ^gidii; and adds 
an appendix giving other sayings from compilations more or 
less corrupted. Apologizing for the meagreness of the bio- 
graphical sketch of Brother Giles which he draws. Father Pas- 
chal, after noting the paucity of reliable information existing 
concerning the subject, writes: 

The purely historical features of a saint's life, everything 
in fact which illustrated only the human side — features 
which we have come to regard as almost essential to a com- 
plete grasp of the subject — such things were of little or no in- 
terest to the thirteenth century hagiographer. Moreover, the 
medieval legends of the saints were mostly, as their names 
imply, intended for reading in the refectory. Hence their 
comparative disregard of all save what actually tends to 
edify. Remembering this — and how much depends on the 
point of view — we must not look for a methodical account of 
the actions of Blessed Giles in the Leonine life as it has come 
down to us. 

This life by Brother Leo, treated critically, is the basis of 
Father Paschal's sketch. Here, and in the editing and trans- 
lating of the Sayings, Father Paschal displays the erudition and 
the grasp of historical method which have won him a place in 
the front rank of the large band of scholars who to day have 
devoted themselves to the study of " Franciscana." 

The exposition and defense of 

PHILOSOPHERS OF THE Catholic ethics and theology in 

SMOKING-ROOM. some lighter literary form, rather 

By Aveling. t\i?^Ti in the systematic lecture or 

treatise, is too seldom attempted. 

Hence the present effort of Dr. Aveling f deserves, apart from 

• The Golden Sayings of the Blessed Brother Giles of Assisi, Newly translated and edited, 
together with a Sketch by his Life, by the Rev. Father Paschal Robinson, of the Order 
of Friars Minor. Philadelphia, Pa. : The Dolphin Press. 

t The Philosophers 0/ the Smoking -Room. Conversations on Matters of Moment. By 
Francis Aveling, D.D. St. Louis: B. Herder. 



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1907.] NEW BOOKS 257 

its intrinsic value^ warm commendation. A party of passengers 
on a steamer from Liverpool to Montreal, consisting of an artist, 
somewhat poetical and dreamy, with his heart in the right place, 
a doctor of a sceptical and materialistic turn of mind, a genial 
Protestant clergyman, and a secular priest, who unites a good 
grip of philosophy and theology to a sound store of common 
sense, tact, and good nature, drift into friendly discussion in 
the smoking-room on such topics as suicide, God, drunkenness, 
free-will, myths, spiritualism, etc. 

The priest, with occasional assistance from the parson when 
the debate is confined to philosophical or common religious 
grounds, champions the orthodox views, in opposition to the 
doctor, who is occasionally assisted by the artist's wife. A good 
deal of solid philosophy and theology is conveyed in popular 
form and in colloquial language. A listener well up in Spencer, 
Hartmann, and the other gospels of positivism in all its forms, 
would be likely to protest that the priest wins his triumphs too 
cheaply over his somewhat superficial opponents, and would 
probably push him much harder, while some colleagues of the 
worthy parson would accuse him of having allowed his sympathy 
with a brother fisherman to have dulled his polemical wits. 
But it would have been a violation of all the probabilities, and 
entirely incompatible with the simpler aim of Dr. Aveling, to 
have treated us to the spectacle of an exhaustive dialectical duel 
on any of the burning questions of religious thought in the 
smoking-room of a transatlantic steamer. Conveyed in this 
lighter vein Catholic doctrine may obtain a hearing in quarters 
where it would knock in vain were it arrayed in its characteris- 
tic garb. 

A number of priests and two or 
A MIRROR OF SHALOTT. three laymen meet on several oc- 
By Benson. casions to " swap stories " of their 

respective personal experiences in 
the realm of the preternatural* Presentiments, ghostly appari- 
tions, visions, and uncanny manifestations of various kinds are 
related with all the indications that the writer asks us to be- 
lieve that they are records of real experiences. In some of them 
the Mass and the sacraments are introduced. If true, they are 
wonderful. If mere exercises of the imagination, it is surpris- 

♦ A Afirror ofShaloU, By Rev. Robert Hugh Benson. Nci» York : Benziger Brothers. 
VOL. LXXXVI. — 17 



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258 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

ing that Father Benson should have employed the most sacred 
rites of religion as part of his machinery. 

Probably the aim of the composition has been to convey the 
impression that there is a good deal of truth in the accounts of 
spiritistic and diabolic manifestations which are engrossing at- 
tention just at present. If this be the case, it would seem that 
Father Benson would have done better to state clearly whether 
he set forth these stories as genuine histories, whatever they 
might be worth, of real persons, or as mere fiction. And if 
they are but fiction, why should they be given to the public 
under the prestige of his name ? 



The author of The Formation of 
LIFE OF ALLIES. Christendom has found in his daugh- 

ter a graceful, sympathetic, and 
competent biographer.* The earlier years of Allies' life are re- 
lated with a good deal of detail. The story of his conversion, 
with its intellectual struggle, is passed over more rapidly — a 
mark of judgment in the biographer, since Allies himself has 
given us an ample account of the journey of his mind from 
Canterbury to Rome in A Life's Decision. The long years of 
his life after his conversion, in privacy and in the comparative 
obscurity of the secretaryship to the Catholic Poor School Com- 
mittee, afford little matter of interest except to personal friends 
of the family. Some letters of Newman to Allies, conveying 
criticisms and suggestions regarding The Formation of Christen- 
dom^ are interesting reading. So, also, is some correspondence 
that passed between Allies and Aubrey de Vere, his life- long 
friend. 

A significant revelation of Allies' inner thoughts is his com- 
plaint that when he came into the Church he could find no 
official occupation for the employment of his talents, and was 
condemned to a life of obscurity. But this fact he turned to 
good account for himself, by making it a stepping-stone to the 
high level of spirituality which he attained. And he found 
profitable vent for his literary ambition and activity by becom- 
ing, with his pen, the ardent defender of the Holy See, with 
the happiest results for many Anglicans, who were led to the 
truth by his writings. The composition of The Formation of 

* ThowMs William Allies, By Mary Allies. New York : Benziger Brothers. 

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1907.] New Books 259 

Christendom was the work of his life. In his diary he writes, 
on March 8, 1890: 

This is a great anniversary to me. On March 10, i860, I 
wrote to my wife from the Minerva at Rome : ** I have accom- 
plished the main object of my journey, having had an audi- 
ence of the Pope on Thursday. He recalled my visit to Gae- 
ta, and asked me whether I had been at Rome since. I told 
him I had not been able. ' But you have been well employed 
at home ; you have defended St. Peter, so I must give you 
St. Peter '; upon which he gave me an intaglio of St. Peter in 
red cornelian. Thirty years have now elapsed since that day, 
and the work for which I asked the blessing of Pius IX. has 
occupied me ever since. It has set before me a definite task 
to which I have devoted every thought — I might say almost 
every hour. It has reached fifty-four chapters, and I hope, 
in a short time, to complete it as far as the crowning of Char- 
lemagne, seven volumes. Without this task I should cer- 
tainly have expired from ennui, at the loss of my ergon in life, 
and the feeling that I was cast out of the sea of heresy as a 
piece of seaweed on the coast of the Church, whom no one 
cared for or valued. And it remains to me- as the sole person- 
al raison d^Hre, I mean that, after the work of saving my 
soul, it is my work in life to defend the See of Peter, and with- 
out this I should be utterly discouraged and purposeless as to 
my external task." 

The last volume of his work was written between 1892 and 
1895. The author died in 1903, at the ripe age of ninety. 
His biographer has given the world a full and definite picture 
of a noble man whose work will live long after him. 

The purpose of this book* is to 
HA6I0GSAPHT. show the application of the ordi- 

nary rules and methods of histori- 
cal criticism to our hagiographical literature in order to winnow 
some of the chaff from the good wheat — to separate, and to in- 
dicate by copious examples, the necessity that exists for sepa- 
rating, from the authentic lives and other records of the saints, 
a vast mass of spurious stories, baseless legends, and pious in- 

* The Ligindi of the Saints. An Introduction to Hagiography. From the French of P^re 
H. Delehaye, S.J., BoUandist Translated by Mrs. V. M. Crawford. New York: Long^ 
mans, Green & Co. 



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26o New Books [Nov.. 

ventions, that, in the course of ages, have obtained currency, 
only to depreciate the value of the genuine histories which we 
possess. Needless to say, Father Delehaye's labors, far from 
meeting, at first, with universal approbation, were received with 
a good deal of suspicion and not a little indignation. His char- 
acter of Jesuit was not quite equal to placing his orthodoxy be- 
yond suspicion ; nor did the title of Bollandist protect his qual- 
ifications as a scholar from assault. In the Introduction to this 
volume, a part of which first appeared in the form of articles 
in the Revue des Questions Historiques^ he mentions, in a gener- 
al manner, the drift of the criticisms by which he was some- 
what bitterly assailed by highly religious- minded people. These 
persons, he observes, considered his conclusions to have been 
inspired by '^ the revolutionary spirit that has penetrated into 
the Church " ; and to be " highly derogatory to the honor of 
the Christian faith." Father Delehaye, expressing his actual ex- 
perience in hypothetical form, says: 

If you suggest that the biographer of a saint has been un- 
equal to his task, or that he has not professed to write as a 
historian, you are accused of attacking the saint himself, 
who, it appears, is too powerful to allow himself to be com- 
promised by an indiscreet panegyrist. If, again, you venture 
to express doubt concerning certain miraculous incidents re- 
peated by the author on insuflScient evidence, although well 
calculated to enhance the glory of the saint, you are at once 
suspected of lack of faith. You are told you are introducing 
the spirit of rationalism into history, as though in questions 
of fact it were not above all things necessary to weigh the 
evidence. 

Time, however, has brought around a juster appreciation of 
P^re Delehaye's work. Reflection has taught his opponents that 
an endeavor to detect and eliminate counterfeit money from the 
genuine cannot fairly be held up to reprobation as an attack 
upon the national credit. 

To give assistance in detecting materials of inferior work- 
manship is not to deny the excellence of what remains, and it 
is to the ultimate advantage of the harvest to point out the 
tares that have sometimes become mingled with the wheat to 
a most disconcerting extent. 



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1907.] New Books 261 

The entire volume is not consecrated to the purgation of 
hagiology. A good third of it is devoted to combating, with 
the arms of critical scholarship, the misrepresentations of ra- 
tionalistic writers in the historical field and in the comparative 
study of religions, who pretend that Catholicism has incorpor- 
ated in its ritual and practice a considerable quantity of pagan 
observances and beliefs. Certain resemblances and coincidences 
exist which have been so misinterpreted as to give plausibility 
to this theory. Father Delehaye sets the facts in the proper 
light. With the editors of the Westminster Library, to which 
series the present translation belongs, we may say that Father 
Delehaye's work will prove of great service to "those who, 
whether as a matter of duty or of devotion, are accustomed to 
recite the Divine Of&ce with its historical lessons; to those 
again who, as the Church's local representatives, are often asked 
to explain difficulties regarding the cultus of the saints; to all, 
in fine, who take an interest in the discussions upon pagan sur- 
vivals provoked by so many of our modern folk-lorists." His- 
torical students will find the work to be a fine example of 
sound, conservative, scientific method. 

The professor of Liturgy in Over- 
LITURGY, brook Seminary has made the 

American clergy his debtor by pub- 
lishing two manuals of liturgical practice,* for which — to use a 
sadly abused phrase which, however, is strictly applicable in 
the present instance — there has long been a grievous want. 
Every instruction necessary for the various rites of consecration 
and blessings incidental to the parochial service is, of course, 
contained in the Ritual and Pontifical ; and copious volumes of 
text and commentary exist in abundance. But when a priest 
is to discharge, or assist, in some unusual liturgical benediction 
or consecration, he is often perplexed by the complication of 
directions, explanations, references to other parts of the book, 
that are to be found in the official texts, as well as in the 
works of commentary and explanation. How many a priest, 
who during the course of some episcopal ceremony, such as 

* CoHsecranda. Rites and Ceremonies observed at the Consecration of Churches, Altars, 
Altar-Stones. Chalices, and Patens. Benedianda, Rites and Ceremonies to be observed in 
some of the Principal Functions of the Roman Pontifical and the Roman Ritual. By Rev. 
A. J. Schulte, Professor of Liturgy at Overbrook Seminary. New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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262 New Books [Nov., 

the consecration of a church, on finding himself put out by 
some abbreviated reference, or by his failure to find with suffi- 
cient alacrity the place to which he is referred, has said : ** Why 
doesn't some person publish a good, large-sized book, in which 
everything that belongs to this function, and others of the same 
kind, would be found in its own place, with the Latin prayers 
in conspicuous type, and the instructions, clear and full, in their 
proper place in English ? " 

These two volumes are just the thing to make the priest's 
way, through all the functions in which he is ordinarily called 
upon to take part, very plain sailing. Clear and detailed in- 
structions on each function are given in an introductory sec- 
tion; the articles required and their proper disposition speci- 
fied. The prayers, psalms, antiphons, etc., are printed in con- 
spicuous, heavy type; signs of the cross and other ceremonies 
are marked clearly in their proper places; even the verbal va- 
riations required, such as the plural for singular forms of words, 
are given, so that no distraction of effort to recall one's Latin 
grammar is imposed on the reader. The first volume contains 
the following subjects: Consecration of a Church; Consecration 
of an Altar; Consecration of an Altar- Stone, the Sepulchre 
of which is beneath the Table; Consecration of a Chalice and 
Paten. The other volume: Laying of the Corner- Stone of a 
Church; Laying of the Corner-Stone of any Other Building 
than a Church; Blessing and Reconciliation of a Cemetery; 
Blessing of Bells, of a Church, a School- House, Crosses, Images; 
The Episcopal Visitation of a Parish ; The Administration of 
Confirmation. Even that function of growing frequency and 
importance — the investiture of Domestic Prelates and Protono- 
taries Apostolic — is not forgotten. 

Not alone the wants of the clergy in active ministry have 
been met by Father Schulte. He has provided for the semina- 
rian a work which will be a good text-book in those semina- 
ries where the course of Liturgy is short, and one which will 
prove a useful guidebook to the great standard authors when 
the length of the course permits a study of them. 

We are pleased to note the appearance of new editions of 
some books of various characters, but all distinctively Catholic, 
and of merit enough to make this evidence of their popularity a 
cause of satisfaction to the friends of Catholic literature. Among 



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1907.] New books 263 

them are : Treacy*s Conquests of our Holy Faith • and Tributes 
of Protestant Writers ;\ M. F. Egan's The Life Around Us;X 
R. O'Brien's Ailey Moore ;% and McKernan's Forty -Five Ser- 
mens. || 

A volume on North America^ by Father De Vincentiis — a 
risumi of information of all kinds concerning the United States 
— is intended for the use of Italians anxious to become familiar 
with the country of their adoption, and for the enlightenment of 
those living at home in Italy, who are interested in the land where 
so many of their friends and fellow-countrymen dwell. The au- 
thor writes about climate, geography, history, industries, national 
customs, religious systems, laws, and in fact pretty much every- 
thing that could be included in a book of general description. 
His style is interesting, the information he conveys fairly ac- 
curate, and, for the purpose in view, the book is useful. It 
will hardly serve to replace a careful study of statistics, but, on 
the other hand, it will convey as much information as persons 
with a superficial interest in the topics it discusses ordinarily 
care to have. The enthusiasm of the writer for America and 
Americans is written large on every page, and the fervor of his 
Catholicism is certainly beyond question. 

• Conquests of our Holy Faith. By James J. Trcacy. 3d Edition. New York : Fr. Pnstet 
a Co. 

t Ttibutes of Protestant Writers to the Truth and Beauty of Catholicity, By James J. 
Treacy. 4th Edition. New York : Fr. Pustet & Co. 

\ The Life Around Us, A Collection of Stories by Maurice F. Egan. 5th Edition. New 
York: Fr. Pustet & Co. 

$ Ailey Moore: A Taleofthe Times, By Richard B. O'Brien. 4th Edition. New York : 
Fr. Pustet & Co. 

II Forty-Five Sermons Written to meet the Objections of the Day, By Rev. J. McKeman. 
New York: Fr. Pustet & Co. 

^V America del Nord. Per Reverendo Prof. Gideone de Vincentiis. Napoli: Luigi 
Pierro. 



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foreign perioMcals* 

The Tablet (7 Sept ) : la an exposition of the changes in the 
Catholic Marriage Law, which, according to the Pope's 
recent Decree, will go into effect after next Easter, it is 
pointed out, that the Church will condemn, as null and 
void, marriages between Catholics, performed either in a 
Protestant church or in a registry office. The absolute 
requirements, therefore, for the validity of a marriage, 
will be the presence of a duly qualified priest and two 
witnesses ; except : (a) In case of danger of death, for 
the relief of conscience and the legitimation of offspring, 
when any priest may assist validly; and (b) When the 
contracting parties have, during the space of a whole 
month, been unable to secure the presence of a properly 
qualified priest or the Ordinary of the place, • . . the 
marriage is valid if the parties express their consent in 

the presence of two witnesses. ^The German Emperor, 

in a remarkable address at Manster, exhorts his people 
to return to Christian ideals as a sure basis for healthy 

national life. Mr. John Redmond claims, for the Irish 

party, credit for the defeat of the obnoxious McKenna 
Education Bill. 

(14 Sept.): The address of the Archbishop of Westmin- 
ster, at the Catholic Congress at Preston, on the English 
School crisis, was a strong and vigorous one. He con- 
demned the plan of having the various creeds explained 
and taught in rotation, and insisted that the only possible 
way out of the difficulty was to have the children grouped 
according to their beliefs. Catholics, he said, cannot ac- 
cept the municipal religion, for the sufficient reason that 
it is not Catholic, His Grace branded the suggestion as 
an attempt to bring back the old penal code and to enact 
new disabilities for those who are faithful to Catholicism : 
** Weaken the power of religion and you relax the bonds 
which knit a civilized people together. Destroy and up- 
root religion and you will have to encounter the wildest 

forces of human passion." A Catholic Women's League 

has been formed in London, with Father Bernard Vaughan, 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 265 

S.J., as its spiritual director. It numbers among its mem- 
bers, the Dowager Marchioness of Bute, the Countess of 
Denbigh, and many other ladies of distinction. 
(21 Sept.): The Eucharistic Congress has closed its fruit- 
ful labors at Metz, and will meet next year in the capi- 
tal of the British Empire. The Sovereign Pontiff's 

Encyclical, addressed to the Catholic world, shows how 
deeply and earnestly the Holy Father has entered into the 
questions treated in its pages, and which are condemned 
under the name, '* Modernism " : The mutilation of Chris- 
tianity by the separation of an historical from a religious 
Christ; the reversal of the Incarnation by the denial of 
the ingerence of the Divine in the domain of fact; the 
banning of the intellect in its highest function, the ap- 
prehension of the Divine truth, and the degradation of all 
religion and faith to the region of mere sentiment; the 
deposition of religious authority from the Apostolic throne 
to a president's chair in a republic of consciences; the 
superannuation of the Bible and all exterior revelation 
in favor of the inner revelation of individual or colltc- 
tive religious experience; the reduction of all Christian 
doctrines to mere changeable counters and symbols pecu- 
liar to the period in which we live ; these are in the 
main the group of pernicious errors labelled as ** Modern- 
ism," which has been declared by the Soverign Pontiff to 
be "the meeting ground of heretics." 
The Crucible (Sept.) : The Editor announces the opening of 
the "Information Bureau" which the Catholic Women's 
League has established to provide opportunity of useful- 
ness and of gaining experience for those who have not 
yet " found an outlet for their energies." The general 
aim of the League is to unite Catholic women in a bond 
of common fellowship for the promotion of religious, in- 
tellectual, and social work. Dr. Eleanor S. Warner, 

largely through whose efforts permission has been granted 
by the Roman Curia for the establishment of Catholic 
women's colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, draws atten- 
tion to the good results which the higher education of 
women is effecting. Society is receivirg the benefit of 
superior work in many departments of life. From the 



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266 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

standpoint of the individual, the advantage is incalcula- 
ble. '' Many a woman who would formerly have been 
condemned to an existence of aimless inanity or worse, 
a prey to morbid fancies, a burden to herself and her 
surroundings, is now able to find an outlet for her en- 
ergies, and to lead a healthy life full of joy to herself 

and usefulness to others." Miss Petre, discussing the 

question of control over the voluntary worker, insists 
that he is bound to recognize a sense of responsibility 
and should identify himself thoroughly with the work. 
Lily H. Montagu contributes some very valuable sug- 
gestions for the education of the working girl. 

International Journal of Ethics (Oct.) : Walter L. Sheldon finds 
the classification of duties and virtues in many of the 
modern treatises on ethics unsatisfactory. The separa- 
tion of ethics from ethical teaching, from which tradi- 
tionally it is not distinguished, and the invention of a 
terminology scientifically accurate, are being realized all 

too slowly in this department of philosophy. David 

J. Brewer, though he defends the integrity of the legal 
fraternity, appeals to it for a higher standard of profes- 
sional ethics. He wishes that every lawyer had the cour- 
age to say to his client: ''It may be legal, but it is dis- 
honest and I will have nothing to do with it." Of 

democracy, Professor Warner Fite, of Indiana Univer- 
sity, says that it is partly a fact and partly an unreal- 
ized ideal. If we are to work for the ideal, we must rid 
ourselves of the delusion that democracy is a state of 
primitive nature, to be found at its best among "plain 
men," or that the safeguard of democracy lies in that 
impatience of constituted order which marks the ''free- 
born American." The democratic ideal is that of a so- 
ciety of perfectly intelligent and cultivated men. It is, 
in a word, the ideal of a society of gentlemen. 

The Irish Monthly (Sept.) : " Hester's History," a serial by 
Lady Gilbert (Rosa Mulholland), begins in this number. 

A sketch of Louise Gimet, or " Captain Pegerre," as 

she was called, is startling. One of the worst of the 
communists of 1871, leader of a band of soldiers, a free- 
mason, and the murderer of thirteen priests, she ends 



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1907.] Foreign periodicals 267 

her life as a penitent, with the Sisters of St. Joseph. 

Katharine Tynan Hinkson illustrates the charms of foot* 
ball by a pretty short story. 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Sept.): Rev. R. FuIIerton con- 
cerns himself with the Ghost Theory, as seen in its de- 
velopment. After examining the cults of various savage 
tribes, he comes to the conclusion that degeneration, and 
not progressive evolution, has produced the religious con* 

ditions existing among these peoples. '' Glimpses of 

Penal Times/' an article, drawn from the original legal 
documents, by Very Rev. Reginald Walsh, O.P., is an 
account of the persecution of certain bishops and priests. 

Le Correspondant (25 Aug.) : '' Letters to an Exile " are con- 
cluded. Apropos of the Maritime Exposition at Bor- 
deaux, P. Carmena d'Almeida contributes a review of the 
accomplishments of steam navigation during the past cen- 
tury. The military mutineers of the Revolution, Oscar 

Harvard maintains, were the dregs of the population of 
Paris. Recruited from the lowest strata of society, they 
were subjected to the severest military discipline, a sys- 
tem inflexible, and providing the most drastic punishments 
for minor offences. Moreover, we are told the of&cers 
were incapable. All these reasons, combined with the fact 
that the opinions of Rousseau were dominant at the time, 
explain the insubordination of the French army in the 

early days of the Revolution. M. de Villelume recently 

made a trip into the heart of Africa. He writes an ac- 
count of it and particularly of the people of Zand^, whom 
he visited. The inhabitants of that country have little 

religion. Dr. Charpentier, Director of the Laboratory 

of the Pasteur Institute, states that a remedy for snake 
bite has been found at last. He advises immediate cau- 
terizing and the placing of a tight bandage between the 
wound and the trunk. Profuse sweating must be induced 
in the patient. In the wound must be injected ten cen- 
timeters of an an ti- venomous serum obtained from the 
blood of an inoculated horse. 
(10 Sept.): General Lambert contributes some memories 

of the war of 1870. In the first of a series of articles 

on the Edict of Nantes, Philip R^gnier treats the ques- 



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268 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

tion from the Catholic standpoint^ by showing that all the 
persecuting was not done by the Catholics, and that the 
Edict did not guarantee liberty of conscience to the Prot- 
estants of France. E. Martin Saint-Leon treats of the 

Trust questions in America. He is impartial and adduces 
all the arguments that he can muster for the existence 
of the trust, and does not neglect those of its opponents. 
The case of the Northern Securities, that of Standard 
Oil, of the Beef Trust are cited. President Roosevelt is 
highly eulogized. A Christian artist, Jean Bethune, re- 
ceives a lengthy notice at the hands of M. de Grandmai- 
son. The history of his life manifests the ideal of a great 
artist and of a good man. He was one of those few per- 
sons who has made a school and who has had his ideas 
perpetuated in a body of disciples. His masterpiece is 
the Benedictine Abbey at Maredsous, in the diocese of 
Namur, which he finished in the austere style of the 
fourteenth century. 

Etudes (20 Sept.) : M. Le Monnier contributes an article on the 
stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi, defending their miracu- 
lous character. After giving a good deal of testimony to 
the fact of the stigmata, which he says is not generally 
denied, he takes up the various explanations of this fact, 
offered by M. Alfred Maury and M. G. Dumas among 
others. He denies the theory of M. Maury that the 
stigmata could have been produced by the power of 
imagination, and M. Dumas' theory that the phenomena 

was the result of hypnotic suggestion. M. Mallebrancq 

begins a paper dealing with the alleged crisis in Catholi- 
cism. He outlines the conclusions of science and the de- 
mands of faith in the fields of history and Scripture; 
and continues with a keen analysis of the attitude of 
modern philosophy toward dogma. He dwells tspecially 
upon the dangers of exaggeration and lack of balance to 
Catholic scholars who assume this attitude. The ar- 
ticle on Madagascar is continued. 

Annales de Philosophie Chritienne (Sept.) : M. Laberthonniere 
gives forty pages to the first installment of a discussion 
of the meanings and relations of the terms ''Dogma" 
and '• Theology." Thus the discussion started by M. Le 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 269 

Roy in La Quinzaine (16 April, 1905), after engaging 
scores of the most prominent theologians in Europe, pro- 
fessional and amateur, cleric and lay, of the old school 
and the new, has finally become the occasion of what will 
unquestionably be a comprehensive and luminous disser- 
tation from the pen of the editor of the Annales. With 
three such masters as Le Roy, Lebreton, and Laberthon- 
ni^re engaged in the conflict pro and contra, we will 
probably see the most famous theological controversy of 
the times — and the times are critical. Indeed, any one 
who desires to be informed on the exact meaning, ten- 
dency, and possible outcome of the new theology among 
Catholics, must follow these articles. The present article 
is largely introductory, giving the state of the case, and 
a long detailed expose of the stand taken by M. Le Roy, 
which has been stated more than once in this depart- 
ment. M. Laberthonni^re promises to come to his critique 
proper in the next number, and to show that M. Le Roy, 
in his attempt to do away with the reproach of '' Heteron- 
omy," which he says modern philosophers level at reli- 
gion, is unsuccessful, and that instead of escaping difficul- 
ties, has only fallen more deeply into them, for the reason 
that he seeks to dodge rather than overcome them. 
La Dimocratie Chtitienne (8 Sept.): In an account of the ses- 
sion of the '' Social Week of France,'' held at Amiens 
early in August, a summary is given of the different 
lectures delivered there. The assembly's aim is to better 
the condition of the laboring population. The papers 
were on such topics as " Christian Principles in Social 
Economy"; "The Social Action of the Church"; '*The 
Christian Notion of Property"; etc. The principle un- 
derlying the relation of the Church to the civil authority, 
the contract of the wage- earner, and other subjects con- 
cerning the relations of labor and capital, were also dis- 
cussed. Following are a few of the ideals of the " Soc- 
ial Week" selected from a number formulated by M. 
Thellier. '* We are formed only to act." " We will speak 
the truth to the people." "We will not be flatterers^ 
either of the poor or of the rich." " Our voice will be that 
of justice, which no envy, .no consideration of persons, 



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270 Foreign Periodicals [Nov., 

troubles." M. Raoul Perret contributes a discussion of 

the '' Legal Reform of the Marriage Laws/' 

Revue Pratique d^ Apologitique. (i Sept.): J. Guibert enters in- 
to a discussion of the relation between religious belief 
and natural science. The conclusion arrived at is that 
the two are not in conflict, but can be intimately and 

profitably united. In a recent number of the Revue 

a^Histoire et Litterature Religieuses, William Herzog main- 
tained that the idea of the virginal conception of Christ 
was a product of Hellenism. P. Camuset, after a short 
risumi of this article, refutes it with proof of the Jewish 

origin of that doctrine. E. Terrasse finds many reasons 

for complaint against those who call themselves ''free- 
thinkers.'' L.-Cl. Pillion, in this and the following 

number criticizes unfavorably two recent German ro- 
mances, Frohe Botsckaft eines Armen Sunders and Hil" 
ligenlei. Both deal with the life of Christ in the modem 
rationalistic fashion and have received a warm reception 
in Germany. 

(15 Sept.): Many conjectures have been made on the 
real part played by Hugues G^raud, Bishop of Cahors, 
in the death of Pope John XXII. G. Mollat decides, 
after careful study, that the bishop was legally and justly 
condemned, though the process leading to his condem- 
nation was rather severe. H. LesStre contributes a 

sketch on the history of the Judges of Israel. 

La Civilth Cattolica (7 Sept.): The first article, dealing with the 
recent scandals in Italy, in which religious were accused 
of grave immoralities, shows that the true authors of the 
scandal were the freemasons, anti-clericals, and radicals, 
aided by the anti- Catholic press in its circulation of re- 
volting, but utterly false, stories about religious. In 

an article on Spencer's theory of ethical evolution, the 
writer demonstrates the immutability of the Natural Law, 
and indicates the worthlessness of the arguments advanced 
by Spencer and his followers for a utilitarian code of 

ethics. "Studies in the New Testament," is the title 

of an article which summarizes the latest views oi scholars 
on New Testament questions. 

Rassegna Nazionale (i Sept.): Contains an interesting sketch, 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 271 

by G. Gallo, of Josephine Butler and her famous work 
in behalf of social purity.— E. Vercesi, a friend of the 
lamented Abb^ Gustave Morel, writes sympathetically of 
this remarkable representative of the younger French 
clergy, so distinguished for learning, zeal, and breadth 

of view. G. Volpi tells of the difficulties encountered 

by the Association for the Assistance of Catholic Italian 
Foreign Missionaries, and of the co-operation with the 
Society on the part of Mgr. Scalabrini and Mgr. Bono- 

melli. Introducing an article on *' The Holy House of 

Loreto,'' written by Dr. Carlo Nembrini Gonzaga (against 
the authenticity of the translation), the editor explains 
his refusal to publish a recent article (in favor of the 
legend) on the ground that it contained nothing new and 
was of the abusive tone adopted by other defenders of 
the same thesis, who forgot the proverb that nothing 
can guarantee a lie, neither extent of space, nor length 
of time, nor patronage of persons, nor privilege of place. 
The editor mentions the forthcoming publication of a 
work upon the Mentality of the Defenders of Legends. 

R. Mazzei speaks of the harm done to the law- and- 

order party by the voters who abandon the promoters 
of right and decency for fear of being called clerical; 
and again by the voters who wish to support the gov- 
ernment at all costs. 
Stimmen aus Maria^Laach (Sept.): The new Syllabus, Lamen- 
tabili Sane, is treated at length in this number. The 
writer, Fr. Bessmer, shows that there was an imperative 
need of the action taken by the Holy Father. He also 
calls attention to the character of some of the errors 
condemned, their origin, and the extent to which they 

have been disseminated. Fr. Cathrein continues his 

discussion of the relation that exists between pedagogy 
and religion. The conclusion to which he comes is that 
** moral training without religion, and indeed without the 
Catholic religion, is for us Catholics impossible and even 
inconceivable. Religion is the foundation on which moral 
training must rest. It is further an essential part, an in- 
dispensable means of moral education. What root^ earth, 
air, and light are to the tree, that religion is to moral 
training." 



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272 FOREIGN Periodicals [Nov., 

Razon y Fe (Sept.) : In the open'mg article, L. Murillo asserts 
that the recent Syllabus was both opportune and neces- 
sary. Opportune, because it provides the faithful with a 
sure means of deciding as to the orthodoxy of the vari- 
ous books, pamphlets, and periodicals that discuss our 
present-day religious problems; necessary, because the 
world was beginning to think that the Vatican sympa- 
thized with and encouraged the " reform movement," and 
also because the innovators had formed the '' insolent " 
project of fitting their theories into the scheme of Catho- 
lic theology, a work for which they sought to pave the 
way by endeavoring to limit the activity and authority 

of the Index. Narciso Noguer gives a clear, concise 

statement of what various Swiss Catholic organizations 
aim to do for the working people of that country and of 
the methods they employ. He praises highly the ability 
and zeal of Fathers Jung, Scheiwiller, and Schmidt, lead- 
ers in these good works, and urges the Spanish clergy to 
undertake similar labors to save the workingmen of Spain 

from the pitfalls of socialism What foreign students, 

principally German, have done in the field of ancient 
Spanish ecclesiastical literature is the subject of an ad- 
miring and grateful article by Zacarias Garcia.— Enrique 
Portillo continues his critical studies of Spanish Church 
history during the first half of the eighteenth century.— 
Ignacio Casanovas gives a descriptive analysis of the fifth 
international Art Exposition held in Barcelona. Some 
nine hundred painters and sculptors, representing Spain, 
France, Italy, Germany, England, Belgium, Holland, Port- 
ugal, and Japan, have sent about two thousand different 
exhibits as proofs of their skill and genius. Some of 
these, the writer asserts, are artistically and morally bad. 

Other articles deal with the nature of sensation; the 

twenty- eighth and twenty- ninth chapters of St. Teresa's 
Way of Perfection ; the region and people of Libanus. 

Espana y America (15 Sept.): Taking it as undeniable that the 
present age does not impart to Church architects the in- 
spiration necessary for the creation of new styles, and 
that a servile imitation of the past is out of the ques- 
tion, M. Cil asks what one of the old styles furnishes the 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 273 

best basic ideas for our new ecclesiastical edifices. He 
sums up and endeavors to refute the arguments profifered 
by those who favor the Byzantine model. Their reasons 
briefly are: The Byzantine is the first fruit of Christian 
inspiration ; the Gothic style has been adopted by the 
Protestant churches; the Byzantine is the cheaper; and 
is likewise the more enduring. The third of these rea- 
sons is the only one in which the author sees any strength. 
Anacleto Orejon continues his study of Modern Bib- 
lical Criticism, pointing out serious defects in the ration- 
alistic literary critics; namely, that their reasonings are 
shaped, consciously or unconsciously matters not, by their 
preconceived notion that the Jewish and Christian are 
not revealed religions; that their concept of these reli- 
gions is built out of their own imaginings and that they 
attach an undue importance to internal criteria while they 
unduly depreciate the worth of external testimony. Yet, 
despite all their faults, they have been of some service to 
Catholics, for they have forced Catholic scholars to study 
the Bible more thoroughly and to examine traditional 

opinions more carefully and severely. Father Juven- 

cio Hospital gives an historical review of Buddhism in 
China. 



VOL. LXXXVI —18 

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(Tutrent lEvents. 



The chief pre- occupation of the 
France. French government has, of course, 

been the question of Morocco. A 
few years ago everything seemed to have been prepared for the 
peaceful penetration of that Empire, which had long been re- 
duced to anarchy by autocratic rule. This project, however, 
was thwarted by the interposition of the German Emperor, who 
seems to look upon it as part of his mission to act as the pro- 
tector of every despot. Morocco, in consequence, has been fall- 
ing into a state of ever greater and greater disorder. 

In its northeastern districts there has been for some years a 
chronic pretender, who is not strong enough to secure the 
throne, and is too strong to be decisively defeated by the Sul- 
tan. Then Raisuli, who a few months ago was reported to have 
been defeated, has emerged from his enforced seclusion, has cap- 
tured one of the chief advisers of the Sultan, an Englishman, 
or rather a Scotchman, Kaid Sir Harry Maclean, whom he still 
holds in captivity, and is supported by no one knows how many 
tribes. As a condition of submission Raisuli demands that he 
should be appointed governor of an extensive territory, and pass 
again from the occupation of robbing his felluw countrymen as 
a bandit to the legalized plundering of them, which is normally 
exercised by their governors. 

In the south of Morocco Mulai Hafid, the elder brother of 
the Sultan Abdul Aziz, being grieved at the sight of such wide- 
spread anarchy, and feeling that he was the man to set things 
right, has caused himself to be proclaimed Sultan, has deposed 
his incapable brother, and has received the adhesion of a large 
number of the semi* independent tribes into which the popula- 
tion of Morocco is divided. Whether the two brothers will 
come to blows remains to be seen. 

To add to the distraction which exists, a very learned and 
holy man, with great influence among the Moors, named Ma el 
Ainin, animated with hatred for all Europeans, and anxious to 
defend the purity of the faith, has been preaching a holy war 
throughout all the country, from Cape Juby to Rabat. The 
Moorish love of their faith includes also a hatred for science. 



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1907.] Current Events 275 

especially when it takes the form of wireless telegraphy. It was 
the attempt to install this system at Marakesh which was the 
immediate cause of the murder of Dr. Mauchamp last March, a 
murder which led to the occupation by the French of Ujda, an 
occupation which still continues. The bombardment and subse- 
quent occupation of Casablanca on the western coast of Moroc- 
co was due to a massacre of Europeans, chiefly Frenchmen, who 
were at work in making modern improvements to the harbor. 
This massacre took place on the 30th of July, and ever since 
the French government has been puzzled how to act. For be- 
hind the Moors are the Germans, and if French action goes be- 
yond a certain line, and it is not easy to discover where that 
line is drawn, grave danger would arise of at least a diplomatic 
conflict with Germany. The Act of Algeciras imposed upon 
France and Spain the duty of training police for the sea- port 
towns and of providing the officers of this force. Very little 
had, however, been done to carry out this commission when the 
massacre took place ; but to France and Spain it naturally fell 
to act in this emergency. Both powers sent ships and men, 
and both have taken part in the fighting and in the occupation 
of the town. The part taken by Spain, however, seems to have 
been somewhat reluctant and ineffectual, and this possibly in- 
dicates a difference between the two governments. 

The massacre which took place at Casablanca gave reason 
to apprehend that similar events might happen at the other sea- 
ports in which Europeans were living. To guard against this, 
France proposed to the powers that these ports should be po- 
liced by a force composed of Frenchmen and Spaniards. The 
Algeciras Act authorized a police force, but this force was to 
be composed of Moors with French and Spanish officers. The 
proposal consequently went further than the Act. The German 
re*ply to the French proposal, while not offering any direct op- 
position to it, was so qualified in its approval and so carefully 
called attention to the fact that it went further than the Act, 
that it seems that the French government is reluctant to carry 
it out. Indeed it is asserted that urgent need no longer ex- 
ists, all apprehension of further massacres having been removed. 

It will be seen how great are the difficulties in which France 
is involved. If she leaves Morocco to its fate, her possessions, 
which border upon it, may rise in revolt; if, on the other 
hand, she takes decisive action and penetrates, as she is tempted 



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276 Current Events [Nov., 

to do, into the interior, she may become involved in a war, not 
merely in Morocco, but with her neighbor across the Rhine. 

In internal matters the anti- Militarist movement and the 
question of the abolition of capital punishment have excited 
the greatest interest. No one denies that some of the soldiers 
have adopted the teachings of M. Herv^ and M. Jaur^s, men 
who condemn war in every case except that of an unprovoked 
invasion. Those who take optimistic views say that it will re- 
quire at least six months to remedy the evils produced by the 
anti-Militarist propaganda in the army ; they claim, too, that 
should a national emergency really arise there would be no dan- 
ger of these unpatriotic theories being put into practice. The 
character of this anti- Militarism was clearly shown by M. Jaur^s 
in a speech which he made recently at a large Socialist meet- 
ing. After declaring that it was the duty of governments to 
maintain peace between nations, and in case of the failure of 
their own efforts then to appeal to arbitration, he went on to 
say : " If you will not do so, appeal, that is, to arbitration, you 
are a government of scoundrels, a government of bandits, a 
government of assassins, and it is the right and duty of the 
proletariat to rise against you and to keep and to use against 
you the rifles which you place in their hands. It will be no 
longer necessary to inquire which government is the aggressor. 
It will be the government which refuses arbitration. In such 
cases we shall use our rifles, not to cross the frontier, but by 
a revolution to upset the criminal government." 

The leader of the anti-Militarists, M. Herv^, was not to be 
outdone by M. Jaur^s. He declared both the French govern- 
ment and the German government to be thieves and equally 
ignoble thieves. "Are you going to offer," he asked the meet- 
ing which he was addressing, " to Prussian bullets the only 
thing which you possess— namely, your skins?" "As for us," 
he continued, "we detest all mother countries. We will not 
give an inch of our skin for our own ; and if we have to risk 
our lives, it must be for something worth while, and that is to 
make a revolution." 

It is often advantageous to have a clear statement of prin- 
ciples and their consequences; and these statements of M. 
Jaur^s and M. Herv^ have opened the eyes of many even of 
their fellow- Socialists, and have brought upon them almost uni- 
versal condemnation. It cannot but be, however, a matter for 



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1907.] Current Events 277 

anxiety when a prominent man, so eloquent, cultivated, and in^^ 
fluential as M. Jaures, can be found to use language of such a 
character, nor would he use it had he no backing. Politicians 
nowadays are not teachers, prophets, or even leaders, but hunt- 
ers after a following which makes or unmakes them. It must 
have been in the hope of securing such a following that M. 
Jaures spoke. 

The secularization of education in France has not yet brought 
about the millenium. In several of the cities so great is the 
amount of crime that there is said to be a reign of terror. In 
Paris hardly a day passes without a contingent of murders or 
oi murderous assaults. In Marseilles certain quarters are un- 
der the rule of bands of young men called Apaches. These 
ruffians commit not only highway robbery, but shoot or stab 
their victims, attacking them in gangs. The low price for 
which revolvers can be bought and the liberty to carry these 
weapons are causes which have led to this increase of crimes. 
A still greater cause, however, is found in the practical aboli- 
tion fof many years past of capital punishment. This is the 
legal penalty, but it is so rarely carried out, owing to the 
President's exercise of the prerogative of commutation into 
transportation, that hardened criminals look forward with con- 
fidence to a life which is somewhat easier than that to which 
honest people are accustomed. 

A horrible case, which has recently taken place, of the out- 
rage and murder of a little girl by a brute named Soleilland 
has excited public opinion on the question. This rascal is said 
to have expressed satisfaction at his prospects in the future. 
He would be reprieved, he felt sure, and in a few years he 
would be able to put by money and to secure a comfortable home 
in New Caledonia. The President, M. Falli^res was appealed 
to from all parts of France, and by all kinds of people, not to 
commute the sentence in this case. To these appeals he turned 
a deaf ear. The result has been that he has lost a good deal 
of his popularity, and troops have had to be called out to main- 
tain order. The question too has been raised, whether he has 
not gone beyond the powers given him by the Constitution. 
Capita] punishment is the law of the land, and while to the 
President power to reprieve or commute is given, this power is 
to be exercised only in special cases and tor good reasons, and 
not to be used practically to repeal the law. This is left for 



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378 Current Events [Nov., 

the Parliament, and habitual exercise is an infringement of its 
rights. There is, in fact, a bill before the Chamber abolishing 
altogether the death penalty. What effect upon its passing the 
recent increase of crime and the Soleilland agitation may have 
remains to be seen. Whatever the prospects of the proposal 
may be, a movement in favor of depriving the President of his 
prerogative has begun. It is declared to be a relic of monar- 
chical institutions. Voices too are heard in favor of lynching 
the fiends who are guilty of outrages on children. 



Germany has recently been the 
Germany. scene of two Socialist Congresses. 

The former, held at Stuttgart in 
Wurtemberg, was international in character, the latter, held at 
Essen in the Ruhr district, was confined to the Social Demo- 
crats of the Empire. Both Congresses met under the shadow 
of the great disaster — the defeat at the last elections. But it 
is worth pointing out that the defeat was not so great as it 
seemed. Many seats were lost, indeed, but a quarter of a 
million votes were gained ; so that when an attempt is made to 
form an idea of German political and social thought, the opinions 
of 3,250,000 Social Democratic voters must not be left out of 
account. Especially must this be borne in mind in estimating 
the probability of Germany's going to war. For this must be 
said in favor of the Socialists, that they are opposed to mili- 
tarism and jingoism. But the German Socialists are not anti- 
Militarist in the same way as MM. Jaur^s and Herv^. Both 
these gentlemen were at the International Congress, and when 
M. Herv^ introduced a resolution declaring that soldiers should 
desert and even revolt in case of war, Herr Bebel vehemently 
opposed the motion. A resolution, however, was passed in 
favor of the abolition of all standing armies, while allowing the 
arming of the entire male population for national self-defence. 
By the same resolution all Socialists are called upon to vote 
against war-budgets in favor of treaties of arbitration ; to rise 
and demonstrate when the slightest danger of war occurs. The 
Socialist Bureau is to keep watch the world over, so that the 
Socialists may become the greatest and the most effective peace 
party. 

While the International Congress at Stuttgart was the more 



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1907.] Current Events 279 

imposing of the two, there having been present 886 delegates 
representing 18 nationalities, the Congress of the Social Demo- 
crats held at Essen deserves attention, though confined to the 
German nationality. Although the Social Democrats are a 
minority, yet that minority is so large that it cannot be with- 
out influence upon national questions. The chastisement which 
they received at the recent elections made them less exuberant 
than at previous Congresses. Personal questions fell into the 
background and the necessity for harmonious action was recog- 
nized. More confidence was placed in their leaders, and every 
effort made to meet what all acknowledged to be a difficult 
situation, inasmuch as to all appearances they would have to 
rely on their own strength alone, every other party being against 
them. But notwithstanding every obstacle and all opposition 
the future, it was declared, belonged to the Social Democracy. 
The proceedings resulted in the reorganization of the party 
with a view to more efficient action. 

The Pan- Germans have also been holding a Congress, but 
its proceedings do not seem to have attracted as much atten- 
tion as usual, because, perhaps, its aims are so well known. 
Resolutions were passed, of course, for the strengthening and 
increasing of the navy. How great this increase has already 
been may be judged from the fact that the numerical strength 
of its personnel has doubled in ten years. While in 1897 it 
mustered only 23,403, this year it numbers 46,951, and next 
year will exceed 50,000; nor is it apprehended that the gov- 
ernment will have any difficulty in carrying its looked-for pro- 
posals for a further increase. 

Two remarkable speeches nave been recently made by the 
Kaiser. The first was an appeal for unity addressed to the 
German Empire. With reference to social questions he de- 
clared his adherence to the manifesto on social policy issued 
by the Emperor William I. in 1881. He desired the assistance 
in realizing this programme both of Catholics and of Protestants, 
and declared religion to be the only means by which a union 
of all classes can be effected. To illustrate and enforce this 
necessity the Emperor proceeded as follows : " During the 
course of my long reign, I have had to do with a great many 
people, and I have had to endure a great deal from them. 
Unwittingly, and often, alas ! wittingly they have caused me 
bitter pain. And when in moments like these my anger threat- 



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28o Current Events [Nov., 

ened to overcome me^ and thoughts of retaliation came into 
my mind, I have asked myself by what means anger might best 
be mitigated and forbearance be strengthened. The only remedy 
I could find was to say to myself: 'They are all human like 
yourself; and, although they cause you pain, they have within 
them a soul which comes from the bright realms above, whither 
all of us want some day to return; and through this soul of 
theirs, they have a part of their Creator with them.' Those 
who think like that will always be able to judge leniently of 
their fellow- men. If this thought could find a place in the 
hearts of the German people in judging their fellows, the first 
condition of complete unity would have been achieved. But 
this unity can only be attained in the central person of our 
Redeemer, in the Man who called us brothers, who lived as 
an example for all of us, and who was the most personal of 
personalities. Even now he still goes up and down among the 
nations and makes his presence felt in the hearts of all of us. 
Our nation must look to him and be united, and must build 
firmly upon his words. He himself has said : ' Heaven and 
earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' If 
it does this it will succeed. • . . Then the German nation 
will become the block of granite upon which the Lord our God 
can build up and complete his work of civilizing the world. 
Then, too, will be fulfilled the words of the poet who said: 
' The German spirit will one day prove the world's salvation.' " 
We make no apology for this somewhat long quotation, for 
it is very seldom that a King and Emperor, at a public ban- 
quet, has made a speech in which so much of the workings of 
his mind has been revealed. The need of the appeal to unity 
is not denied, for toleration is not a characteristic of the Ger- 
man people as a whole; in few countries are there so many 
differences. "Be united, be true, and be German"; this is the 
watchword to which the Emperor has frequently appealed. Al- 
though all the other nations may not share in his belief, the 
Emperor holds firmly that Germany has a divine mission. The 
disintegrating effects of Protestantism are made evident by the 
remark of one of the papers that national unity cannot be 
built up on a religious basis, since religious beliefs are purely 
a matter for the individual. A deep spiritual revolution must 
take place before the unity of spirit which the Emperor desires 
can be produced. 



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1 907. ] Current E vents 2 8 1 

The second speech of the Emperor was made at Memel on 
the occasion of the memorial emblematic of the gradual rise of 
Prussia after the defeats of the year 1807^ which has just been 
inaugurated in that town. This speech is in the same vein, 
perhaps it is even more like a sermon than the former. All 
the progress that has been made is ascribed to Divine Providence. 
To-day, as in the past, close touch must be kept to the old 
fountains. The first duty is to raise the eyes to heaven, in 
the consciousness that all success and all prosperity are wrought 
by dispensation from on high. Every man should go about 
his work as beseems an honest Christian and German. 

By the death of the Grand Duke of Baden the Empire has 
lost one of its founders. He was one of the first to express the 
aspirations for unity of the German people, to recognize the 
destiny of Prussia and loyally to support her King, braving un- 
popularity at home, and wisely moderating extreme counsels. 
A higher distinction perhaps was his refusal of an extension of 
territory and of the dignity of kingship. 

By the death of the Hottentot chief, Morenga, who fell in a 
conflict with British police in Cape Colony, the last serious 
obstacle to the pacification of German Southwest Africa has 
been removed. As this result is due to the police of the Cape, 
an English colony, the prospects of the detente which is de- 
veloping ought to be rendered brighter. The German papers 
are lavish in the compliments which they pay to the officers 
and soldiers who took part in the action. 



The seemingly interminable nego- 
AuBtrla-Hungary. tiations between the Austrian and 

the Hungarian ministers, for the 
conclusion of an economic convention which were resumed a 
few months ago, appeared at length to be reaching a settlement. 
All of a sudden, however, disagreements arose; Austrian de- 
mands could not be made acceptable to the Hungarians, nor 
the Hungarian to the Austrians. The Conference broke up. 
There are rumors, however, that one more attempt is to be 
made to solve the difficulties. There seems to be a greater 
hatred one for another between Austrians and Hungarians than 
exists anywhere else. 



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282 Current Events [Nov., 

In Russia the elections for the dele- 
Russia, gates who are to choose the mem- 

bers of the third Duma have been 
taking place. The greatest apathy, however, prevails; only a 
very small percentage of the very limited number to whom a 
vote is accorded having taken the trouble to go to the polls. 
The reason for this apathy is not far to seek. Any Duma in 
the hands of an autocrat is seen to be little better than a sham. 
It seems likely that the fate of Russia will have to be decided 
by the two extremists, the absolutists on the one hand and the 
revolutionists on the other. Which of the two is worse it 
is hard to say. With the assassinations and outrages of the 
revolutionists we are only too familiar; the following Renter 
telegram gives an account of absolutist methods: ''Eight per- 
sons were executed this morning at Lodz, without trial, for be- 
ing implicated in the murder of M. Silberstein. The new gover* 
nor is empowered to use all means in order to put a stop to 
outrages by the workmen. Every third man of the eight hun- 
dred workmen arrested will be exiled for not preventing the 
murder." The prospect is not encouraging. At present the 
Tsar is not safe even when at sea; his yacht has been wrecked 
in an inexplicable manner. The plot, however, which served as 
an excuse for the dissolution of the second Duma seems more 
or less of an invention. 

The Convention made between Great Britain and Russia has 
been ratified by the two Powers, and forms by far the most 
important event of the month. The long-standing rivalry, 
amounting almost to chronic hostility, which has existed be- 
comes a thing of the past. A settlement is made of all the 
various questions affecting the interests of the two States in Per- 
sia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. As to Persia, while its integrity 
is guaranteed by both powers, three zones are marked out for 
commercial purposes : in the northern zone Russia is to be left 
free to act in support of business interests, the southern zone is 
in like manner left to Great Britain, while in the zone between 
there is to be mutual toleration. This seems to involve an aban- 
donment by Russia of her movement in quest of a port on the 
Persia Gulf, and also the projected railway skirting Afghanistan. 
As to Afghanistan, Great Britain declares that she has no in- 
tention of changing the political position, her influence will be 
exerted in a peaceful sense, no encouragement will be given to 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



1907.] Current Events 283 

Afghanistan to attack Russia, nor will Great Britain annex any 
part of the country or intervene in its internal afifairs. On her 
part, Russia recognizes that Afghanistan is outside her sphere of 
influence, and agrees to act in all political relations through the 
intermediary of the British government. As to Tibet, the suze- 
rain rights of China over it are recognized, and through the 
Chinese government alone will Great Britain and Russia treat 
with Tibet ; the integrity of the country is to be maintained, 
and neither Great Britain nor Russia ate to send representatives 
to Lhasa. No railway, road, telegraph, or mining rights are to 
be sought or obtained by either party. All that Great Britain 
secures is a recognition of her special interest in seeing that 
the present rigime and external relations of Tibet are maintained 
and that there may be, according to the Convention of Septem- 
ber 7, 1904, direct relations between British commercial agents 
and the Tibetan authorities. Each state seems to have secured 
sufficient advantages for itself to render the agreement stable. 
No one can say that, with reference to Tibet, Great Britain has 
shown herself exacting. 

A dictatorship was declared in 
Portugal. Portugal a few months ago, and 

yet the Constitution has not been 
abrogated. . For, strange to say, the Constitution itself contem- 
plates and makes provision for its own temporary abrogation. 
It seems that in Portugal, owing to the long-continued reign of 
absolutism, the character of the people has become so deter- 
iorated that all the political parties are expected to become 
equally corrupt, and as a matter of fact do so. This has be- 
come a recognized process. A dictatorship is, therefore, pro- 
vided for, when the state of things becomes absolutely intoler- 
able, if a fairly honest man can be found to be dictator. 

Two or three instances have already occurred. When re- 
forms have been made and hopes can be entertained oi an im- 
provement, the Parliament is again summoned, the dictator re- 
signs and the normal state is restored. The present dictator- 
ship is but a repetition of the old procedure. Parliamentary 
government became impossible, the Chamber was dissolved with 
no indication when it is to be summoned to meet, reforms are 
being made. When complete a new Parliament will be called. 



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THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 



AT Cliff Haven in August the meeting of reading circles was called to or- 
der by the Rev. John T. Driscoll. He spoke on the value of such or- 
ganizationsj and showed how the reading circle was a part of the great in- 
tellectual movement of the day, and was a sort of university extension. He 
said there were many opportunities to form circles, where study, discussion, 
and lectures enable the members to broaden their minds. New thoughts, 
new ideas, and the offsetting of wrong ideas would result. The great Cath- 
olic revival, the revising of encyclopaedias, and university extension work, 
show Catholic life in all its phases, and generate a moral atmosphere in the 
community, besides communicating thought to others. 

Reports were presented from the D'Youville Circle, of Ottawa, and the 
Fenelon Reading Circle, of Brooklyn. Sister M. Camper gave the report 
of the D'Youville (Grey Nuns) Circle. Miss Rosemary Rogers, president of 
the Fenelon Reading Circle, of Brooklyn, reported for her Circle for the 
year 1906-7. 

Miss M. Marlow reported for the John Boyle O'Reilly Circle^ of Boston. 
An excellent outline of topics for the yeai 1905-6 came from the St, Monica 
Reading Circle, of Cleveland. 

Mrs. P. J. Toomey, of St. Louis, spoke for the Queen's Daughters of St. 
Louis, an organization of women whose work has merited the approbation of 
the hierarchy. 

Hon. J. C. Monaghan spoke of work that could be done by urging the 
publication of translations in English of works by foreign authors, represent- 
ing the best Catholic thought. 

The reading circle for the working people was discussed by Miss M. £. 
Early, of Brooklyn. She recommended the organizing of classes for young 
children from twelve years up. 

Rev. Father Reilly, of Bayonne, spoke in favor of forming reading cir- 
cles. Much success depends on the tact of the leaders. There must be har- 
mony of work. Individuality of expression will come if discussion follows. 

Miss Elizabeth L. Rogers proposed a plan of unification of various cir- 
cles. By interchanging ideas they would be held together by a common 
bond of interest. The printing of reports and papers of individual members 
would show the progress in different places. Sister Camper said the unifica- 
tion should be as slight as possible, so as not to interfere with the plans of 
circles engaged in post graduate studies. 

The scope of the Columbian Reading Union was explained by the Rev. 
Thomas McMillan, C.S.P. Reports from reading circles are always wel- 
comed for publication, chiefly to show the progress of the movement and to 
encourage beginners. Some very successful organizations never write or 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



1907.] The Columbian Reading Union 285 

print a report of their programmes ; others seem to be restrained by a fear of 
vain glory, especially the circles under the guidance of religious directors. 
They should remember the admonition of Scripture, not to keep their light 
hidden under a bushel. Whatever tends to glorify the work of the Church in 
the world, and promote self- improvement, ought to be made known to the 
brethren of the household of the true faith. 



Publicity for good works of all kinds is in accord with the following ad- 
vice from the Rev. Morgan M. Sheedy : 

The Catholic Church trains her young people in a way to secure good 
morals, good citizenship, a respect for property rights and the rights of 
others. She has a firm faith in God, in Christ, in the Bible, and a firm ac- 
ceptance of the religion of the Savior, without which civilization must event- 
ually disappear. 

Outside of the Church religion is fast drifting into infidelity ; the Bible 
is regarded as mere literature ; disbelief spreads apace. So we see there are 
splendid opportunities opening to the Church in this land. The field is in- 
viting for a display of her best energies. 

While doubt, infidelity, and materialism are making great inroads among 
other religious bodies, the Catholic Church alone is able to resist the attacks 
of these enemies of religion. And this is due not only to the truth and logic 
of her system, but to the care and sacrifices she makes in the Christian train- 
ing of her children. 

From that training must spring the highest type of American citizen- 
ship. The three essential elements, religion, morality, and intelligence, the 
pillars of human happiness and the firmest props of the duties of men and 
citizens, are embodied in the education of our Catholic youth. Hence with 
us it is an accepted maxim : The better the Catholic, the better the citizen. 
They who aspire to be fellow-citizens of the saints and of the household of 
God must be loyal and law-abiding members of society. Religion regulates 
the relations of class to class, gives to morals a sound basis, to legislation 
efficacy, to administration honesty. The Church is concerned with the wel- 
fare of men in all the complex relations of life; she is deeply interested in 
almost every movement that tends to uplift humanity. Her history is the 
history of modem civilization. She is not content to trust to the leavening 
influence which her teaching indirectly exercises on society in virtue of its 
power to transform the life of the individual, but she is ever ready to support 
practical measures for the moral and social betterment of the community. 

Every movement, therefore, for good citizenship, for honest and efficient 
administration in city, state, and nation has her support and blessing. Her 
beneficent influence makes itself felt throughout the entire sphere of human 
life and conduct. She would hallow all the relations of men with the princi- 
ples of the Sermon on the Mount, and bring to bear upon society the vivify- 
ing energy of Catholic truth. The supreme interest with which the Catholic 
regards all the great movements of the day is made manifest in the teaching 
and policy of the iate Pope Leo XIII. 



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286 Books Received [Nov., 

The Catholic citizen, therefore, who understands the aims and spirit of 
the Church must be in active sympathy with every movement for the public 
good. And the more he is imbued with the spirit of religion the more he 
conforms in his daily conduct to its teachings, all the more deeply will he be 
interested in what makes for civic righteousness ; or, in other words, the bet- 
ter the Catholic, the better the citizen. 

Now, I know of no period in our history when the influence of the better 
Catholic was more needed than to-day. We need him in politics, in busi- 
ness, in social life, in public administration. We need him to stay the tide 
of political corruption, which for the moment obscures the great democratic 
experiment. Ex-President Cleveland, in a recent address, reviewed our many 
moral defects as a people and earnestly appealed for a revival of the virtues 
of good citizenship. President Roosevelt is a strenuous lay preacher of the 
civic virtues. There is no form of government so much as a republic that 
demands wisdom and virtue in the people. Universal suffrage requires the 
individual voter to be not only a good citizen at the ballot-box, but a good 
citizen all the year round. He must by precept and example spread abroad 
and actively support, at all times, the principles of civic virtue and honest 
government. Catholic citizens everywhere should be pre-eminent in this 
work. Thus can we hope to allay the fears of those who find many discour- 
aging symptoms in the body politic. M. C. M. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

Longmans, Green & Co., New York : 

Praj^maium ; A New Nam* for Some Old Wa^s of Thinkiti^, Popular Lectures on Phi- 
losophy. By William James. 8vo. Pp. xiu.-309. Price, cloth, $1.75 net The Story 
of Ancient Irish CiviliMtum, By P. W. Joyce. LL.D., M.R.I.A. Small Svo. Pp. 
viii.-i7S. 1'^^ Legends of the Saints, An Introduction to Hagiography. From the 
French of P6re Delehaye, S.J. Translated by Mrs. V. M. Crawford. Price $i.ao. A 
History of Commerce, By Clive Day, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Economic History 
in Yale University. Price $2. Through Scylla and Chary bdis; or, the Old Theology and 
the New, By George Tyrrell. Price $1.50. 

Benziger Brothers, New York: 

Tin Lectures on the Martyrs. By Paul Allard. Authorized Translation by Luigi Cappa- 
delta. Price $2. Sursum Corda, Letters of the Countess de Saint-Martial (in Religion 
Sister Blanche), Sister of Charity of St. Vincent of Paul, together with a Brief Bio- 
graphical Memoir by her brother, Baron Leopold de Fesche. Price $2. Madame 
Louise of France. By Leon de la Brifere. Authorized Translation by Meta and Mary 
Brown. Price $2. Contemplative Prayer, Ven. Fr, Baker* s Teaching Thereon : Jrom 
'* Sancta Sophia.*' Price $1.50. Short Meditations for Every Day in the Year, From 
the Italian. Translated by Dom Edward Luck, O.S.B., Bishop of Auckland, Price 
$1.60. A Tuscan Penitent, The Life and Legend of St, Margaret of Cortona, By Fr. 



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1907.] Books Received. 287 

Cuthbert, of the Order of St. Francis, Capuchin. Price $1.35. History of the Books of 
the New Testament. By E. Jacquier. Translated from the French by Rev. J. Duggan. 
Vol.1. Preliminary Questions : St. Paul and His Epistles. Price $2. Honor Without 
Renown. By Mrs. Innes- Browne. A New Edition. Price $1.25. Thoughts and Fan- 
cies. By F. C. Kolbe, D.D. Price 75 cents. The Blind Sisters of St. Paul. By 
Maurice de la Suzeranne. Translation by L. M. Leggett. Price $2. The Finding of 
the Cross, By Louis de Combes. Translation by Luigi Cappadelta. Price $2. 
Thomas William Allies. By Mary T. Allies. J»rice $1 25 net. Friday Fare. Over 
one himdred receipts for days of abstinence or fasting. By Mrs. Charles Marshall, 
M.C.A. Price 35 cents. Madame Rose Lummis. By Delia Gleeson. Price 
$1.25 net. Ritual in Catholic Worship. Sermons Preached in Westminster Cathedral 
during the Lent of 1904. Bv Very Rev. F. Proctor. Price 50 cents net. The Life of the 
Blessed Julie Billiatt, Foundress of the Institute of Notre Dame (of Namur), By a mem- 
ber of the same society. Boulogne-sur-Mer, St. Patrick's Native Town. By Rev. Wil- 
iam, Canon Fleming. Price 45 cents. Ireland and St. Patrick, By William Bullen 
Morris. Fourth Edition. Price 60 cents. Selected Poetry of Father Faber. By Rev. 
John Fitipatrick, O.M.I. Price 90 cents. Good-Night Stories Told to Very Little Ones. 
By Mother M. Salome. St. Mary's Convent, Cambridge. Price 75 cents. Melor of 
the Silver Hand; and Other Stories of the Bright A^es. By Rev. David Bearne, S.J. 
Price 85 cents. The Rhymed Life of St. Patrick. By Katharine Tynan. Pictured by 
Lindsay Symin^on. Harmony Flats: The Gifts of a Tenement House Fairy, By C. S. 
Whitmore. Price 85 cents. A Mirror of Shalott : Being a Collection of Tales 7 old at an 
Unprofessional Symposium. By Rev. R. H. Benson, M A. Practical Sermons for all the 
Sundays and Holydays of the Year, By Rev. John Perry. 2 Vols. Synopsis Theologia 
Moralis et Pastoralis. Ad mentem S. Thomae et S. Alphonsi. Hodiernis Moribus Ac- 
comadata. Tom. L — Theologia Moralis Fundamentalis. Tom. IL — De Virtute Justiiia 
etde yariis Statuum Odligationthes. Tom. IH. De Sacramentis in Genere et in Specie 
(Nova Editio). Auctore Ad. Tanquerey. 

Charles Sckibner's Sons, New York : 

The Vtrgin Birth of Christ, Being Lectures Delivered under the Auspices of the Bible 
Teachers' Training School. New York, 1907. By James Orr, M.A., D.D, Pp. xiv.- 
30Z. Price $1.50 net. 

D. Appleton & Co., New York: 

The Tents of Wickedness By Miriam Coles Harris. Pp. 474. Price $1.50. 

Thomas Y. Crowbll & Co., New York : 

Famous Painters of America, By J. Walker McSpadden. Illustrated. Pp. Z.-362. Price 
$2.50 net. 

Christian Press Association, New York : 

A Colonel from Wyoming, By John Alexander Hugh Cameron. Pp. 364. 

B. W. HuEBSCH, New York: 

Religion and Historic Faiths, By Otto Pfleiderer, D.D. Translated from the German by 
Daniel A. Huebsch, Ph.D. 

Teachers College, Columbia University, New York : 

Administration and Educational Work of American Juvenile Reform Schools. By David 
S. Snedden, Ph.D. Pp. 906. 

FoRDAM University Press, New York: 

Makers of Modern Medicine. By James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.. LL.D. Pp. 36a. Price 
$2 net. Postage 15 cents extra. 

Catholic Summer-School Press, New York: 

The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, By James J.Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D. Pp. 
450. Price $2 50 net. Postage 20 cents extra. 

J. B. Lyon Company, Albany, N. Y. : 

Life Sketches of Father Walworth, With Notes and Letters by EUen H. Walworth. Pp. 
370. Price $1.50. 

B. Herder, St. Louis, Mo.: 

Sermons to the Novices Regular, By Thomas k Kempis. Translation by Dom Vincent 
Scully. C.R.L. Price $135. The Protestant Reformation. How It was Brought About 
in Various Lands. By Rev. Charles Coppens, S.J. Price, paper, 15 cents ; cloth, 40 
cents. Handbook of Ceremonies for Priests and Seminarians. By John Baptist Muller, 
S.J. Translated from the (merman by Andrew P. Gauss. S.J. Price $1. Arabella, 
By Anna r. Sadlier. Price 80 cents. Stories of the Great Feasts of Our Lord. Taken 
from the Gospel Narrative and Tradition. By Rev. James Butler. The Love of Books, 



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288 BOOKS RECEIVED [Nov., 1907.J 

Being the " Philobiblion " of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham. With a Foreword 
by George Ambrose Burton, Bishop of Clifton. Price 60 cents. The Church in English 
History. A Manual for Catholic Schools. Being an Outline from the Introduction of 
Christianity to Catholic Emancipation in 1829. By J. M. Stone. Price $1. Tht Phi- 
losophers of the Smokin^Room, Conversations on Some Matten of Moment. By Fran- 
cis Aveling, D.D. Price $1. Westminster Series: Theories of the Transmigration of 
Souls. By Rev. J. Gibbons. Ph.D. Mysticism. By Rev. R. H. Benson, M.A. The 
Catholic Sunday-School. Some Suggestions on its Aim and Management. By Rev. 
Bernard Feeney. Price $1. Cousin Wilhelmina. By Anna T. Sadlier. Price $z. 

Page A. Cochran, Essex Junction, Vt. : 

A Friendly ChtU and Plain Talh About Mind Reading, Paper. Pp. 92. Price 50 cents. 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston : 

Camping and Tramping wiih Roosevelt, By John Burroughs. With Illustrations. Pp. 
xiv.-iio. Price $1 net. 

Oliver Ditson Company, Boston : 

Sunday-School Hymn Booh, Compiled b^ Sisters of Notre Dame. (With Accompani- 
ments.) Pp. 183. Price 75 cents prepaid. 

Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. : 

Twenty-First Annual Report of the Commission of Labor, igob, Strihes and Lockouts, 
Pp. 979. 

Catholic Standard and Times Publishing Company. Philadelphia: 

Latin Pronounced for Catholic Choirs / or, the Latin of High Mass, Vespers, and Hymns 
Arranged Phonetically. By Rev. Edward J. Murphy. 

St. Paul's Catholic Historical Society. St. Paul, Minn. : 

Acta et Dicta. A Collection of Historical Data regarding the Origin and Growth of the 
Catholic Church in the Northwest. Pp. 159. Price 75 cents per copy. 

The Arthur H. Clark Company, Cleveland, Ohio : 

Dr, John Mc Long hlin— the Father of Oregon. By Frederick V. Holman. With Portraits. 
Pp. 300. Price $2.50 net. 

H. M. Gill & Son, Dublin, Ireland : 

The Crucifix, The Most Wonderful Book in the World. By Rev. William McLoughlin, 
Mount Melleray Abbey. 

The " Irish Messenger " Office, Dublin, Ireland: 

Daily Mass; or, the Mystic Treasures of the Holy Sacrifice, By Rev. J. McDonnell, S.J 
Pp. ii.-32. Paper. Price one penny. 

MM. Gabriel Beauchesnb Et Cie. Paris : 

Pourguoi I'on doit itre Chritien f Par M. Lepin. Paper. Pp. 6x. 



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Eclipse Brand in full half-pint, pint, 
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showing absolute purity, published in 
Callanan's Magazine. 

L. J. Callanan's Eclipse Brand of 
Ceylon tea eclipses all other Ceylon 
teas offered in packages in this mar- 
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There is no better tea sold in this 
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Give Your Friend 
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We mention here only two of many that w^ can recommend, 
t{ interested send for our Catalogue. 
G>od books make good gifts — give some. 



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Saint Benczet and kis Biographer 

Amoul the XtagliBbman 

Thomas William Allies 

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Lisheen ; or, The Test of the Spirits 

Life Sketches of the Late Father Walworth 

In Miss Felicia's Garden 

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CATHOLIC WORLD. 

Vol. LXXXVI. DECEMBER, 1907, No. 513. 

SAINT BENEZET AND HIS BIOGRAPHER. 

A SIDE-LIGHT UPON THE ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH TO 

SCIENCE. 

BY HERBERT THURSTON, SJ. 

AM not quite sure whether it is St. B^n^zet or 
his modern biographer that I am the more anx- 
ious to write about. St. B^n^zet is a delightfully 
interesting person, but he is also rather mythical. 
The biographer is real enough, but his life was 
not externally eventful, and one of the most remarkable things 
about him was his devotion to St. B^n^zet. Perhaps under the 
circumstances it will be wisest to try to say a few words about 
both of them. The engineer of the twelfth century and the 
engineer of the nineteenth, will each help to throw the person- 
ality of the other into higher relief. 

Let me begin by confessing, to my shame, that a few months 
ago I was unacquainted with the very name of either of these 
two heroes of science. It was a mere chance which led me to 
stumble across the track of St. B^n^zet, and in the e£fort to 
learn something more about this quaint, mediaeval figure I came 
to make acquaintance with the elaborate ^tude which M. de 
Saint* Venant, Membre de Tlnstitut, has consecrated to th^ 
memory of his patron.* 

As the book is, unfortunately, but only too evidently, a 
posthumous work, it is prefaced by some little account of its 
author. There among the tributes paid by men of science to 

*5/. Bimitet, Patron da InghiUun. Par M. A. B. de Saint- Venant, Membre de I'lnsti 
tut, etc.. Bourges. 1889. 

Copjrrigfat. Z907. TBB MiSSlONAKT SOCIBTT OF ST. PAUL TBB APOSTLB 

IN THB State or New Yokk. 

VOL. LXXXVI. — 19 

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290 Saint Benezet and his Biographer LDec, 

an eminent confrire^ I observed, with a start of surprise, the 
name of Karl Pearson. 

Now, although Professor Karl Pearson, LL.D. and F.R.S., 
may not be so well known to readers in the United States as 
he is in England, it is hardly likely that in any English-speak- 
ing country the much-discussed author of The Ethic of Free-- 
Thought can fail to be identified with the cause of the most 
out-spoken agnosticism. As the friend of W. Kingdon Cli£ford, 
and the editor of his remains, he has the reputation of having 
inherited not a little of the aggressive spirit of his brother 
scientist Even though the lapse of years has toned down some 
of his earlier fierceness, we hardly expect to find such a writer 
even temporarily upon the side of the creeds.* 

However, it was no other than Karl Pearson, then Professor 
of Mathematics and Mechanics in University College, London, 
who in the scientific journal Nature (February 4, 1886) began 
his generous tribute to the late M. Barre de Saint- Venant in 
the following terms: 

'' We have now to consider the earlier work of the greatest 
of living elasticians." Within a fortnight after these words 
were sent to the press, on January 6, M. de Saint- Venant 
died at Venddme. The news of his death will have caused 
a deep feeling of regret among English mathematicians and 
physicists, to whom his researches are so well known that 
they have attained in their own field a classical value. We 
purpose in this notice to give some brief account of this 
foremost representative of latter-day French mathematical 
physicists. 

Saint- Venant stood out for the younger mathematicians of 
the English school as the link between the past and the pres- 
ent. Intimately related to the great period of French mathe- 
matical physics he had continued to produce down to our own 
day, and we felt him to be as real a personality as Helmholtz 
or Thomson. . . • He took up elasticity where Poisson 
left it, a mathematical theory, he leaves it one of the most 
powerful branches of mathematics applied to physics and 
practical engineering ; not a small amount of this transforma- 

* For example, in the last chapter of his Etkic of Fret- Thought, Professor Pearson, as the 
representative of all that is enlightened and emancipated, says : '* You of the past valued 
Christianity — ^aye, and we value free-thought ; you of the past valued faith — aye, and we value 
knowledge ; you have sought wealth eagerly — we value more the duty and right to labour ; 
you talked of the sanctity of marriage— we find therein love sold in the market and we strive 
for a remedy in the freedom of sex." — Ethic of Free-Thought, Second Edition. 190Z. P. 430. 



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1907.] Saint Benezet and his Biographer 291 

tion is due directly to his researches or indirectly to his in- 
flnence. 

Turning to the personal character of the man, we find in 
him the essential characteristics of the scholar and the stu- 
dent, the truest modesty, the complete absence of self, the 
single-minded devotion to his study. Saint- Venant, whose 
researches on elasticity undoubtedly far surpass those of 
Navier and Clebsch, is yet content to appear as their Editor. 
But what an editing it is. The original text is hidden and 
disappears, almost as completely as Peter the Lombard's Sen- 
ienHa in a mediaeval commentary — nay, he even praises 
Clebsch for inventing a term in 1862, which he himself had 
had first proposed in the privately distributed lithographed 
sheets of 1837. Ever ready with advice and assistance, per- 
fectly free from jealousy. Saint- Venant was a typical scholar. 

After speaking of M. de Saint- Venant's extraordinary good- 
ness in helping others, and illustrating it by his generosity in 
revising the proof-sheets of a work which Professor Pearson 
himself was then passing through the press, the latter continues : 

On January 3 we sent him the remaining proofs ; a week 
afterwards we had to mourn the loss of one whose personal 
kindness had served to intensify the respect raised by his 
transcendent mathematical ability. 

If we examine the leading characteristics of Saint- Venant's 
scientific work, we find them marked by an essentially prac- 
tical character, we find subtlety of analysis combined always 
with practical physical conceptions. The problems he at- 
tacks are those which are physically possible, or of which the 
solution is an immediate practical need. He smiles good- 
naturedly over Lame's attempts to solve the terrible problem 
of an elastic solid in the form of a right-six-face, whose sur- 
face is subjected to any system of load. The solution would 
be a triumph of analysis, but its physical and practical value 
would, in all probability, be nil. He chooses instead a real 
beam, and he obtains a solution which, if it be but approxi- 
mate, is at least an approximation to reality, and will serve 
all practical purposes. Saint- Venant never troubled himself 
with impossible distributions of load over impossible surfaces, 
but took the problems of mechanics as they occurred practi* 
cally, and solved them for practical purposes. This tendency 
on his part was no doubt greatly due to his training as an en- 
gineer. He was IngSnieur-en-chef du Fonts et Chaussies ; he 
had been Professeur de Ginie rural h rinstitut Agronomique ; 



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292 Saint Benezet and his Biographer [Dec, 

he had built lock-gates and improved the gutters of Paris ; 
he was an authority on agricultural drainage, and had in- 
vestigated the best form of the ploughshare ; he designed a 
bridge for the Creuse, and planned a method, afterwards 
adopted, for drying up the vast marshes of the Sologne. Yet 
with all this he was a great master of analysis, and knew how 
to make his analysis fruitful in practice.* 

The rest of this eloquent tribute is too technical to tempt 
me to copy it further, and indeed the only point which greatly 
concerns us here has already been fully illustrated. Whether 
Professor Pearson knew anything of M. de Saint- Venant's reli- 
gious convictions does not appear, but it is at any rate obvi- 
ous that, though the French scientist venerated from the depth 
of his soul those '' superstitions " of Catholic belief and prac- 
tice which Mr. Pearson has in some sense spent his life in com- 
bating, they had not in the latter's judgment interfered either 
with the supreme value of his services to science or with that 
modesty and kindliness of disposition which is ability's noblest 
adornment. In any case M. de Saint- Venant throughout an 
exceptionally long life had always been a true Christian, croyant 
et pratiquant. It was this splendid mathematical genius who 
had spent much time during his last years over an attempt to 
vindicate the legends of an obscure mediaeval saint, whom he 
ardently invoked as the patron of his profession. Whether he 
was entirely successful in this proposed rehabilitation does not 
very much concern us. The work afterwards published was 
avowedly very far from complete, and no part of it had re- 
ceived the author's final revision. That it should have been 
printed as it stood did more credit, perhaps, to the filial piety, 
than to the critical sense, of the writer's children. 

But the interesting fact is that such a man should have been 
eager to devote his time and his abilities to such a cause. For 
it was no mere antiquarian interest which led him to give many 
precious hours and to spend a not inconsiderable sum of money 
in the preparation of this work. The whole undertaking had a 
definite and practical end in view. With a touching confidence 
in the deeper religious instincts of his countrymen, he dreamed 
of seeing St. B^n^zet formally recognized by the whole fratern- 
ity of engineers and mathematicians as the great patron of their 
craft, and of gathering them together for Mass and for Com- 

* Natun, February 4, 1886. Pp. 3x9-390. 



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1907.] Saint Benezet and his Biographer 293 

munion on some annual holiday near the time of his feast. It 
was Easter Monday which he proposed for the purpose, and 
though he was not blind to the diiEcuIties which surrounded 
him as he wrote, in 1880, his sanguine temperament looked for- 
ward to happier days, when the Christian faith of the French 
people should once more assert itself.* Strong in his reliance 
upon his beloved St. B^n^zet, he allowed no discouragement to 
daunt him. 

What is in any case certain, is that those of us who wish to 
invoke St. 66n6zet will never be disappointed in the trust we 
place in him. He is the most tender of comrades and the 
least formidable of leaders. His look, as we may well imag- 
ine it for ourselves, has no trace of severity, and a tone of 
gentle familiarity will assuredly ,not displease him. By his 
intercession we shall obtain from God at the right moment 
more things and better things than we have ever dared to 
ask. He wishes for nothing so much as that we, by our own 
act, should give him the right to concern himself about us, 
about our families, about our undertakings, to the progress 
of which he certainly is not indifferent. Our profession, 
which, by God's Providence, was also his, is not only a glori- 
ous profession, but it is something consecrated and holy. It 
is a work of active charity, embracing travellers and traders 
and missionaries of every kind ; but more than that, benefit- 
ing even the sedentary portion of the population, for lack of 
proper communication breeds famine, and the dearth or ex- 
cess of water bring in their train loss of life, devastation, and 
impoverishment. 

The fact was, as this and many another passage show, that 
M. de Saint- Venant had completely saturated his mind with 
the gracious conception of the mediaeval bridge- building confra- 
ternities of which St. B^n^zet was, in legend if not in fact, the 
originator. To construct a bridge was deemed, and rightly 
deemed in that age of perilous journeys and inadequate com- 
munications, a meritorious work of philanthropy. It was as 
great a charity as the founding of a hospital, the building of a 
light-house, or the creating of a life-boat station would be 

* Ce serait, toutefois une trop naive illusion que de regarder le temps d'aujourd'hui en 
France (1880) comme ^tant bien favorable au r^tablissement de cette Chr^tienne coutume. 
Nous ^rivons evidemment pour un avenir que nous serions heureux de pouvoir relier au pass^ 
par une tradition qui risquait de se perdre. Mais regarder cet avenir comme tout k fait loin- 
tain, serait une erreurplu^ grande." A. B. de Saint- Venant, St, BhUzet^ Patrondes In^inieun, 
Bourges, 1889. P. 47. 



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294 Saint Benezet and his Biographer [Dec, 

with us. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there sprang 
into existence a crowd of religious brotherhoods following a 
definite rule of life, blessed by the Church and wearing a dis- 
tinctive habit — although it is probably a mistake to regard them 
strictly as religious orders — whose main work was to construct 
bridges and to collect alms for their building and repair. Upon 
almost every important bridge a little chapel was erected, and 
there, as he passed dryshod and secure, the traveler might offer 
his thanks to God in gratitude for the boon which had saved 
him from peril to life and limb. Here, also, he was invited 
under the protection of the Church to deposit an alms, if he 
were so disposed, to aid in defraying the expenses of mainte- 
nance. Now it was St. B^n^zet, as we have said, who, rightly 
or wrongly, was credited with having instituted this good work 
and with having been the first founder of the bridge- building 
brotherhoods. 

That such a person existed, and that he took the leading 
part in erecting a wonderful bridge over the Rhone at Avignon 
towards the end of the twelfth century, cannot be rationally 
doubted.* That he performed wonders of healing, and that he 
was venerated by his contemporaries as a saints is also attested 
upon early and reliable evidence. But with regard to the pic- 
turesque details with which the story of the saint was invested 
not very long after his death, it would be necessary to give a 
much more hesitating reply. M. de Saint- Venant seems to have 
been prepared to accept all, but it is no disparagement to his 
great scientific gifts to say that certain palaeographical and his- 
torical diiEculties would probably have weighed less with him 
than they would with one who had been trained in the £cole 
des Chartes rather than in the £cole Polytechnique. 

But it will at least be interesting to give the legend of St. 
B^n^zet as it is preserved to us in the one fundamental docu- 
ment which is maiAly in dispute. From whatever point of view 
we regard it, the evidence is respectable and in many another 
historical inquiry it might be held sufficient to bring conviction. 
This is the account of St. B^n^zet (the name is only a Proven- 
pal variant of the Latin Benedict) which appears in a thirteenth 
century document, a single sheet of parchment preserved in the 
municipal archives of Avignon: 

^ A great part of this bridge is still standing, though several arches were carried away by 
a flood in the seventeenth century. The Rhone at this point is wide and very rapid. 



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1907.] Saint benezet and his Biographer 295 

In the year of grace 11 77 the lad B£n£zet (Benedictus) be- 
gan the bridge, as is declared in what is written hereafter. 

Upon the day on which the sun was eclipsed a certain lad, 
B6n6zet by name, was tending his mother's flocks in the pas- 
tures. To whom Jesus openly said three times: ''B6n6zet, 
my son, hear the voice of Jesus Christ." 

'' Who art thou, Lord, that speakest to me? I hear thy 
voice, but I cannot see thee." 

"Listen then, B6a£zet, and be not frightened. I am Jesus 
Christ, who by my only word created heaven and earth and 
all things that are in them." 

** Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? " 

''I want thee to leave thy mother's flocks which thou art 
pasturing, because thou art to build a bridge for me over the 
river Rhone." 

'' Lord, I know nothing ot the Rhone, and I dare not leave 
my mother's flocks." 

'* Did I not tell thee to believe ? Come boldly; for I will 
help thee to keep thy flocks, and I will give a comrade to 
take thee to the Rhone." 

'' Lord, I have nothing but three farthings (obolosj, and how 
am I to build a bridge over the Rhone ? " 

'' All will be well, do as I shall show thee." 

B6n6zet therefore went. He was obedient to the voice of 
Jesus Christ which he heard, though he saw no one. And 
there met him an angel in the guise of a pilgrim, carrying a 
scrip and a staff, who thus addressed him : '' You may come 
safely with me and I will take thee to the place in which 
Jesus Christ will build the bridge and I will show thee what 
to do." 

Soon they are at the river's bank. But B6n6zet, seeing the 
vastness of the river and struck with fear, declared that he 
could in no wise build a bridge there. To whom the angel 
spake : '' Pear not, lor the Holy Ghost is within thee. See 
the boat which will take thee across. Go, then, to the city of 
Avignon and show thyself to the bishop and his people." 
And this said, the angel vanished. 

Then went the boy B6n6zet to the boat and he besought the 
boatman that, for the love of God and the Blessed Mary, he 
would take him across to the city, because he had a great 
matter to talk over. 

To whom answered the boatman, who was a Jew : " If thou 
wouldst cross over thou must give me three shillings, as all 
the others do." Again B6n6zet besought him, for the love of 



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296 Saint Benezet and his Biographer [Dec, 

God and the Blessed Mary, that he would ferry him over. 
To whom the Jew said : ** Talk not to me of thy Mary, for 
she has no power in heaven or on earth. I prefer my shill- 
ings to the love of thy Mary, for there are Marys in plenty." 

Then B^n^zet hearing, gave him the three farthings which 
he had. And the Jew seeing that he could extort nothing 
more, took them and ferried him over. 

But B6n6zet, entering the city of Avignon, found the bish- 
op preaching to his people. And to them all the youth said 
in a loud voice : " Hear and understand me, for Jesus Christ 
has sent me to you for this purpose that I may build a bridge 
over the Rhone." And the bishop, hearing the voice and 
seeing whom it came from, had him carried in jest to the mayor 
of the town, that he might flay him alive and cut off his 
hands and his feet, because this mayor was a monster of cru- 
elty.* 

But B6n^zet coming to the mayor bespoke him softly, say- 
ing : ** My Lord Jesus Christ sent me to this city to build a 
bridge over the Rhone." To whom the mayor replied: 
'' Dost thou, a miserable little being and destitute, say thou 
canst build a bridge where neither God, nor Peter, nor Paul, 
nor even Charles, nor any one else, could build it, and no 
wonder ? Still, since I know that a bridge is built of stones 
and mortar, I will give thee one stone that I have in my pal- 
ace, and ii thou canst lift it and carry it away, I will believe 
that thou art to build the bridge." 

B6n6zet, trusting in the l/ord, returned to the bishop to tell 
him how it was to be. To whom said the bishop : '' Let us 
go, then, and see the marvels thou speakest of." 

So the bishop went and the people along with him, and 
B^n^zet took up his stone, which thirty men could not have 
stirred, carrying it as easily as if it had been a pebble, and he 
set it down in the spot where the bridge was to have its pier. 
Then the beholders marvelled, saying that God is mighty and 
wonderful in His works. And then the mayor, before every 
one else, called St. B6n^zet and he offered him three hundred 
livres, kissing his hands and his feet, and he gathered in five 
thousand livres upon the spot. 

The manuscript which preserves this legend is admitted by 
all to belong at latest to the closing years of the thirteenth 
century. It is, therefore, little more than a hundred years la- 

* The meaning presumably is that the bishop told B^n^zet, to frighten him, that he was 
sending him to be flayed alive, and that the mayor would show him no pity. 



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I907.J Saint Benezet and his Biographer 297 

ter than the time at which the saint began his work of bridge- 
building. M. de Saint- Venant contends for an earlier date, and 
believes that it preserves with substantial accuracy the leading 
facts in the story of St. B^n^zet. In this view the critics do 
not concur. It is, they contend, a mere legend and very large- 
ly a work of the imagination, thrown into this form to be used 
for reading in the church of Avignon in the office upon the 
festival of the saint. In proof of its inaccuracy, they appeal 
for example to its opening statement that St. B^n^zet came to 
Avignon on the day when an eclipse of the sun took place in 

1177. Now there was not, and could not be, any eclipse of 
the sun in 11 77, but there was a very famous total eclipse 
which took place in the south of France on September 13, 

1 1 78, of which numerous independent chroniclers have left us 
the record. Obviously the author of the legend had this in 
mind, and has mistaken the year. For this and other reasons 
the critics are probably right in inferring that the legend can- 
not be trusted. But, after all, the precise amount of historical 
foundation which lies at the back of this picturesque story does 
not much concern us here. We may be content with the cer- 
tainty that there was such a person as St. B^n^zet and that he 
assuredly built the bridge over the Rhone at Avignon. For 
that we have contemporary evidence in the chronicle of Rob- 
ert of Auxerre, which is quite trustworthy and was compiled 
before 12 12. He agrees with the legend in assigning the be- 
ginning of the bridge at Avignon to the year 11 77. 

1 177. — In this year a youth named B^n^zet (Benedictus) 
came to the city, saying that he had been sent by the I^ord to 
construct a bridge over the Rhone. His proposal was re- 
ceived with ridicule, since he had no money tor the work, 
and because the size and depth oi the river, which is great 
and broad at this point, excluded all hope of bringing it to 
completion. Nevertheless he persisted in urging it upon the 
people (insHHt pradicando)^ and not long afterwards the citi- 
zens, divinely moved to the task, vied with each other in set- 
ting hand to the work, though it was beyond all calculation 
difficult and Incredibly costly. And to complete it this young 
man of exceeding holy life, journeying through many prov- 
inces, collected funds from the alms of the faithful. And 
they report, moreover, that his mission was confirmed by 
miracles. 



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298 Saint Benezet and his Biographer [Dec, 

Later on in the same chronicle we also find the following 
brief notice : 

1 184. — In this same year B^n^zet, the builder of the bridge 
at Avignon, a youth of exceeding holy life, died and was 
buried upon that wonderful bridge, which was then in great 
part completed, this being about seven years from the time 
when its foundations were laid. 

These are facts which there need be no hesitation in accept- 
ing as authentic, for casual allusions in charters and municipal 
records lend them further indirect support Moreover, it is not 
disputed that the body of St. B^n^zet was buried in the bridge 
chapel, and was found on occasion of a restoration of the 
bridge, undertaken in 1670, almost without signs of corruption, 
though it had not been embalmed or the viscera removed.* 
The body was subsequently exposed for the public veneration 
of the people of Avignon. The coverings in which it was 
wrapped were free from decay, especially those portions which 
were in contact with the flesh. The body was lifted out of its 
stone receptacle by the shoulders and feet, as if it had been 
that of a man recently dead, and it diffused a sweet perfume. 
It is sad to relate that at the time of the French Revolution 
these remains, which were then enshrined in the chapel of the 
Celestines at Avignon, were desecrated. None the less the 
head and other portions of the relics were eventually recovered, 
and they are still preserved with due honor in one of the 
Avignon churches. 

But perhaps the most interesting of all the records which 
remain to justify the cultus of St. B^n^zet is an appendix which 
is to be read upon the same sheet of parchment which preserves 
the Latin legend. This consists of certain depositions of wit- 
nesses, apparently drawn up in the course of some episcopal 
inquiry held at Avignon about the year 1230 in view of the 
saint's beatification. 

There seems no reasonable ground for doubting the authen* 
ticity of these testimonies, for instead of bearing out the more 
startling features of the legend to which they have been ap- 
pended, they tend rather to throw suspicion upon it, while, on 
the other hand, they are substantially in accord with the as- 

* The official account of the finding of the body, written by D. R. de Cambis, and first pub- 
ished in 1670, is printed by M. de Saint- Venant in his St. Biniu%t, Patron des InghtUmrs. P. 135. 



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1907.] Saint Benezet and his Biographer 299 

certained facts which are known to us from other sources. It 
may be interesting to translate one or two of these testimonies 
as specimens of the rest. They were presumably depositions 
made by witnesses, then at an advanced age, who had known 
St. B^n^zet in their youth. The record begins thus: 

In the name of Christ. Here begin the notarial acts of St. 
B6n6zet. These are the witnesses who have seen him. 

(i) In the first place William Chautart, being sworn, de- 
posed that he had seen the Blessed B^n^zet, and he saw the 
bridge being built by the power oi God and the Blessed 
B^n^zet. And he saw the foundation-stone laid and the Bish- 
op of Avignon was present and he said his service there. 
And the bridge was built in less than eleven years from that 
time. Also the said William Chautart saw that the Blessed 
B6n6zet restored their sight to many persons, and their hear- 
ing and the power of walking and their health, laying a cross 
upon them and saying to each : '' May thy faith make thee 
whole." And he used to kiss them. And before his death 
they left their crutches in the church and went away, walking 
erect. And all these things he had seen also. Also he saw 
Blessed B^n^zet say to the workmen when they had no 
stones: **Go and dig there and you will find them.*' And 
by the power of God they found them as he said. And he 
saw Blessed B^n^zet both alive and dead. And there was a 
yearly feast held in his honor, like our I^ady of Pew, and 
great was the renown of his virtues. 

(2) I^ikewise Bertrand Pelat saw a woman who was blind 
and Blessed B6n6zet restored her sight upon the bridge. And 
when she wanted to leave the bridge she lost her sight and it 
happened to her often, and so she worked upon the bridge for 
a year and more. Afterwards joyously, and in the possession 
of her sight, she went away. Also he saw a man and he held 
in his hand a sickle (serra), with which he was reaping on the 
feast of St. Peter, and it befell that he could not let go of the 
sickle nor of the sheaf oi com, and he came to the tomb of 
Blessed B6n^zet to get himself free, and he was set free ; and 
he left the sickle and the com there upon the tomb. Also as 
he had heard it said that Blessed B^n6zet was in Burgundy 
in a certain church at night praying to God, and the evil one 
cast a great stone at him thinking to kill the Blessed B6n^zet ; 
but the stone did not touch him, but fell upon his clothes. 
Then the devil being angry, because he had not done what 
he hoped, came to the bridge by night and wrecked one of 



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300 Saint Benezet and his Biographer [Dec, 

the piers of the bridge. And the witness aforesaid saw this 
quite clearly in the morning. Blessed B^n^zet, though absent 
in Burgundy, knew what had happened and said to his com- 
panions: ** I/et us return, for the evil one has wrecked the 
pier.'* And this happened by the power of God and it all 
occurred in one night. Moreover, as regards the sick and 
the blind and the cripples and the deaf, he heard and saw 
the same as William Chautart. 

(3) R. Martin says like Bertrand Pelat. 

(4) Hugh Troncha saw him too, and said like R. Martin. 

(5) Also I^autaud saw Blessed B^n^zet going through the 
town and saying : '' God will build a bridge over the Rhone.*' 
And the people laughed at him and accounted him crazy. 
Nevertheless the knights, both in St. Peter's square and many 
others, listened to him and said to one another : '* He seems 
to be a good man ; let us go with him.'* And they went round 
the town with him begging for alms, and they collected as 
much as seventy livres of gold with which Blessed B^n^zet 
bought stones. As for the sick and the others (he testifies) 
like R. Martin. 

Other witnesses deposed to having seen as many as three 
donkey loads of crutches hanging over his tomb. The bishop 
wished to bury him in one of the churches of the town, but 
the Blessed Benezet had chosen his own burying place upon 
the third pier of the bridge, and his remains were duly honored 
there. Altogether the depositions of fifteen witnesses are sum- 
marized in the document. All these had known B^n^zet in life 
and were able to testify to the miracles wrought both before and 
after his death. 

Such was the story of the holy youth whom M. de Saint- 
Venant honored with a life- long devotion, and whose history 
aroused in him the same intense interest which he bestowed 
upon the most absorbing problems of mathematical science. 
Let it not for a moment be supposed that it was only after a 
godless youth that this distinguished professor, as sometimes 
happens, tried to expiate past excesses by an exaggerated piety. 
No; we learn on the best authority, that the dawn and the 
mid-day of his life corresponded in all respects to its close. 

One would have been glad to know more of the religious 
side of such a character, but M. de Saint- Venant was far too 
modest a Christian to wish to parade his deeper feelings for 
public edification. We must be content with a few striking 



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1 907. J Saint Benezet and his Biographer 301 

traits preserved to us in a brief memoir published shortly after 
his death by a strictly scientific periodical^ the Annates des Pants 
et Chaussies. 

Every day of his life M. de Saint- Venant rose at five o'clock, 
and from that hour until six or seven in the evening, except 
for a very hurried dSjeuner, his work claimed him entirely,* It 
was only in the evening that he was able to join his family. 
Then the scientist became the man of the world, a charming 
talker, witty, affable, considerate, a man who had seen and 
observed much, with abundant matter for conversation on 
every possible subject, but at the same time a man who gladly 
listened to others and took an interest in all that was said to 
him. 

The author of the brief memoir, from which I borrow these 
facts« adds that M. de Saint- Venant was a fervent Catholic, 
whose death was as peaceful and edifying as his life had been 
full of hard work. His Christian faith had never been clouded 
by a doubt. Impervious himself to those temptations to de- 
spondency from which the most successful are often not exempt, 
he had preserved even to an extreme old age all the buoyancy 
of character, together with that freshness of mind and intellec- 
tual honesty which led him habitually straight to the root of 
things. The writer ends his memoir with these words: 

We have tried to give an idea of the scientific student, to 
show how this man of faith trusted in the power of reason, 
and to indicate the boldness and originality of thought he 
brought to the investigation of the difficult problems which 
were the occupation ot his life. But only his pupils and his 
friends will know, without ever feeling able to express, the 
wealth ot affection with which his heart was stored, or how 
wonderful he was in his delicate consideration for others and 
in that rare form of generosity which neither counts nor 
knows the cost of a sacrifice. 

In the funeral oration, which was spoken over his remains 
by a fellow-member of the Institute on January 9, 1886, the 
orator said: 

His end was the worthy crown of such a life. He closed 
his eyes after having blessed his children and his grand- 

* Had the vaiter of this notice been addressing a Catholic public, he would no doubt have 
said : " His work and his devotions." For we know aliundi that M. de Saint-Venant heard 
Mass daily. 



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302 Saint Benezet and his Biographer [Dec 

children gathered round his bed-side — his two sons, both of 
whom he had seen honourably wounded upon the battle-field 
of Loigny, in 1870, when defending their native land against 
the foreign invader, his bereaved daughters, the worthy imi- 
tators of the wife whom he had lost but a short time before, 
daughters who, by their self-sacrifice and by their intelligent 
management of his household affairs, had enabled him to give 
himself to his scientific work without interruption. In that 
last hour he had the happiness of knowing that his children 
remained faithful to the principles of religion and honour 
which had been the guiding influences of his own life and 
which he had sedulously instilled into them from their earliest 
years. 

His death was as edifying and as calm as his life had been 
holy and innocent. It was his happiness to sleep the last 
sleep while his soul was still radiant with that hope of im- 
mortality which doubt had never clouded, and without which 
our existence here below would be no more than a bitter irony 
and a cruel disappointment. 

When we look round upon the attitude of the present govern- 
ment of France towards practical Catholicism, and when we re- 
call those incessantly repeated denunciations of religion as the 
implacable foe of science which we hear on all sides, it is well 
to remind ourselves sometimes of the example of such a man 
as M. de Saint- Venant, and to recall the estimate of his scientific 
standing which comes to us upon testimony so unexceptionable 
as that of Professor Karl Pearson. The following are the con- 
cluding words of the article in Nature from which I quoted large- 
ly at the beginning of this article: 

Perhaps the controversy about constants is not quite so 
obviously settled as some English physicists seem to think. 
But, however the future may regard it, history will record 
that on January 6 of this year (1886) died one of the greatest 
mathematical physicists, and undoubtedly the greatest elastic- 
ian that Europe has seen since the age of Poisson and Cauchy, 

That M. de Saint- Venant did not occupy a great space in 
the public eye, like his friend M. Pasteur, for example, only 
renders this impartial expert testimony the more valuable and 
the more welcome. 



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ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN. 

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY • 
BY FRANCIS AVELING, D.D. 

Chapter VII. 

fND so, Araoul" — it was Sir Guy speaking — "we 
can do nothing here to-day. Pigot says that he 




can arrange nothing without his Lord's assent. 
He dare not have the chapel set in order. He 
dare not fix the hour for the Masses. We had 
best go back again to Woodleigh and wait until Sir Sigar is in 
a better mind." 

" Indeed, Sir Guy/* put in the seneschal, the third of the 
group standing beneath the Norman archway that, flanked by 
its two round towers, gave entrance to the castle. " Indeed, it 
is best. Sir Sigar is quiet now; but I will not be answerable 
if he is disturbed again to-day. I think — I fear sometimes — 
that my poor Lord will lose his reason altogether, so frequent 
have these mad paroxysms become of late. No, no, Sir Guy ; 
best return to Woodleigh and come again to-morrow or the 
next day, when he will be calm." 

"But the maid," put in Arnoul. "Remember, Pigot, what 
I told you. She must be guarded from every chance of harm. 
Can't you persuade the Abbess to have her for a time ? Can't 
you make her go? Some pretext — it would not be difficult to 
find one." 

" It would be a wise plan," said Sir Guy, advising in his 
turn, " to send her away to her aunt. Yes, Pigot ; Arnoul is 
right. Think of an excuse." 

" No, no, no " ; answered the seneschal. " Leave it alone I 
It is best left alone. She would never be persuaded to leave. 
And Sir Sigar — I fear for Sir Sigar if she went. It shall not 
happen again. Sir Guy. I assure you. Master Arnoul, it shall 
not happen again. I shall be always within call — " 

"As you were to-day," commented Arnoul drily. 

• Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society'of St. 
Paul the Apostle in the State of New York. 



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304 Arnoul the Englishman [Dec, 

'^ Nay, but I shall be ready. It shall not occur again. And 
the Lady Sibilla will not go. I tell you she would not go. 
There is no use thinking of it — none! Leave it alone I She 
will come to no harm." 

As he spoke, Sibilla herself came towards them. Her eyes 
were red with weeping, the perfect oval of her face all sad and 
mournful. But she bore herself stately, like a queen, as she 
crossed the paved courtyard. She came straight up to Arnoul, 
and, the long lashes sweeping her downcast eyes, her rose-red 
lips quivering with emotion, addressed him. 

'^Sir," she said, plucking at one long sleeve with nervous 
fingers, '^ believe me, I am not ungrateful. To-day you shielded 
me from danger. Perhaps — perhaps you saved my life." 

Her voice trembled and the tears welled again as she re- 
membered how and why. 

'^ But, I pray you, think not hardly of my father. You have 
not seen him. It was some fearful demon that possessed him 
that you saw, and not — not my father. He is so kind and good, 
so loving and so tender. They say that he is hard and cruel. 
He may be hard at times; but he is not cruel. Believe me 
that he is not — he never means to be cruel. I am sure he is 
not. Poor father," she went on tenderly, " my poor father ! " 
And her bosom rose and fell with sobs, so that she could not 
speak. 

Arnoul longed to console her, but the words stuck in his 
throat. Sir Guy, with, for him, unusual tactfulness, saw their 
embarrassment, and drew the seneschal aside. Then, looking up 
again at him, she smiled through her tears. 

''But I am very grateful," she said again. 

'' It was nothing," replied Arnoul, finding his tongue at last. 
'' Nothing at all. I did but what any one would have done 
with an angry man." 

*'Yet Pigot did not do it," she retorted, "nor Henry, nor 
great strong Gilbert, neither. None of them moved but you. 
It was so noble and so brave." 

" Nay, Lady I it was nothing," insisted the lad, blushing red 
beneath the fire of her eyes. "And Sir Sigar was but angry. 
Doubtless he meant nothing by his threats." 

She flashed a grateful look upon him for his mercy. Her 
father was so dear to her — her lovei her pride in him, so great 
and faithful. 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 305 

" He would have turned it to a jest," the boy went on ; 
^'and you the first to laugh with him on it afterwards." 

^'Indeed you are near the mark/' the maid replied quickly, 
glad of the chance to shield her father. " I have but now been 
with him. And, oh I he is so sorry that he gave way to his 
evil temper. Something had crossed him ere he set out this 
morning; and all was wrong where'er he went to-day. He 
did not mean it. Oh I believe me ; it was not meant I And 
now he grieves and sorrows so. He kissed me thrice before I 
came hither; and knowing what I was to do he let me come. 
He almost wept as he asked me my forgiveness. Poor father I " 
sighed the maid, ^'an evil spirit comes over him at times and 
seems to drive his reason from its seat." 

" But, maiden, are you safe here alone — ? " 

That was wrong. He set the wrong chords quivering in her 
heart. 

'' Safe ? " she repeated, her eyes flashing lightnings. '^ Am I 
safe ? Where could I be safer than in my own home and with 
my father to protect me ? Safe ? Why do you look at me like 
that?" 

And Arnoul hastened to explain, plunging still deeper in 
the slough of mistaken kindness. ^' I meant," he stammered, 
'' what if Sir Sigar were to break out again ? What if the mad- 
ness of this day came upon him when none was near to succor 
or to bring you help ? " 

"My father will not give way to his rage again. Never 
will he lose control of his passions as he did to-day." She 
raised her little head proudly as she answered for herself and 
for her father. 

Arnoul saw his mistake and corrected it, though not with- 
out misgivings. And the girl, blinded by her great love, be- 
came gracious again. She took a tiny ornament, a little chis- 
eled golden casket, from the chain about her throat and gave 
it to him. '' It was," she explained, '' a reliquary and contained 
a precious fragment of the true cross upon which the Lord 
Christ hung." She begged him to accept it as a token of her 
memory of his bravery, her recognition, her gratitude. And 
then they spoke of Paris — she had learnt from her women, who 
knew all the comings and goings of the countryside, that he 
was going from Devon to the famous schools. She knew that 
he was poor; and yet the delicate sense of her pride forbade 

VOL. LXXXYL— 30 



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3o6 Arnoul the Englishman [Dec, 

her offering, even in her father's name, the assistance that 
would have been so easy. 

Instead she gave the reliquary, and bade him call upon Sir 
Sigar Vipont whenever he was in trouble or had need. They 
continued long, speaking of his plans: he shaking off his shy- 
ness, and telling of all his youthful hopes with animation and 
no lack of words; she encouraging him and spurring him on 
by her gentle approval. They looked into each other's eyes, 
these two, in the innocence and freshness of their youth, stand- 
ing at the gate of the great world, where their paths diverged. 

He told her of Guy's great hopes for him, the means dis- 
cussed, the ends proposed — of the knights templars, the law, 
the ecclesiastical state. Only here her eyes opened wide, when 
he spoke of prelacies and prebends. Surely her knight of the 
morning was not going to be a priest like Sir Guy and wear a 
shabby black cassock I And she bade him think of doughty 
deeds and noble fame ; her pouting lips, her sparkling eyes, be- 
traying the halo of romance with which she already clothed him. 

And he, too, felt the spell of her eyes and the witchery of 
her presence; so that he reddened and grew white by turns, 
and spoke like some great, awkward boy, and not like a man 
of seventeen full years, ready to gird on his sword and go forth 
to the conquest of knowledge and the world. 

And then she took a riband and tied it in a loop and hung 
the reliquary upon it and set it round his neck, and spoke once 
more of her father and his great repentance for his evil mood. 
And he kissed the relic reverently, as a good Christian should, 
and hid it away in his breast. He spoke kindly of Sir Sigar, 
too, and with fresh excuses for his rage. 

And thus they spoke, looking all the while into each other's 
eyes, fresh and innocent and young, until Sir Guy and the senes- 
chal, impatient, drew within earshot again. 

On the way back to Woodleigh, Arnoul was more silent than 
was usual, more reserved. His brother pressed him with ques- 
tions as to what the Lady Sibilla had been saying to him ; and 
he answered, truthfully enough, that she had thanked him and 
spoken of her father — excusing, explaining, exonerating, in her 
great love for him. But he said nothing of the gift of the relic 
nor of himself nor of the maid. Only he felt the little golden 
box lying warm upon his bosom and his heart beat with strange 
and new emotions. 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 307 

Thus it was that Arnoul was brought up and loved by monks; 
and loved and taught his woodcraft and his simple knowledge 
of the world by cotters and boatmen. Thus he was destined for 
the great schools of Paris by his kinsman. Abbot Benet, that 
be might reap the fruits of knowledge and grow a learned and 
a holy man ; by Sir Guy, his brother, that he should stretch 
forth his hand and pluck the richest prize that either Church 
or world might place within his reach. Thus simple Budd and 
honest Roger, ay I and Isobel, too, strove their best to keep 
him in their own land of Devon ; and thus, a second time, the 
grim sisters had spun and twisted the strands of Sir Sigar's 
life and his together. And thus, amid all this play and cross- 
play of motives and influences, a grateful maiden's glance had 
found a way to reach his heart, a maiden's gift lay hidden in 
his breast. 

Of course the lad did not reason with himself, nor try to 
separate the various influences that came into his life. He cer- 
tainly could not have said what effect the Cistercian alumnate had 
had upon his character, nor how far it was afterwards modified 
by his free, unfettered after-life at Buckfast. And Guy's dreams 
of great careers that lay before him, he would not have been 
able to tell how they had affected him — those golden dreams of 
Sir Guy, the poor priest of Woodleigh. But all had brought 
their something to him — Guy's dreams no less than Abbot 
Benet's advice; the maudlin sorrow of drunken Roger, as well 
as the jovial jesting of the Bishop. Now in Sibilla Vipont a new 
factor entered. All were dumbly striving within him towards 
some expression— 'what it would be the future alone could show 
— there they all were. But he did not separate or analyze, for 
the very good reason that he never thought of himself at all 
or of his consciousness ; and for the better reason still, that he 
could not have done so had he tried. 

He was here, at any rate, like any other human boy of 
seventeen, or like any man of seventy, for the matter of that. 

Motives and influences come and go, and shift and patch, 
and build and pull down again, until the strong one comes, on 
which we act and sometimes frame our life. Afterwards we can 
point to the strongest motive and say that was our reason for 
doing as we did. Sometimes, we can trace it back through a 
growing maze of other motives — all the dancing motes that 
gyre and twist about in what we call our consciousness. But 



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3o8 ARNOUL the englishman [Dec, 

it always escapes us somewhere in the maze, for there are our- 
selves as well as motives to reckon with; and when we find 
that the weakest had become the strongest, and the strongest 
sunk back into nothingness, then we realize that we, too, have 
some hand in making motives what they really are — that it is 
not always the circumstance that forms the man. 

If Arnoul could have thought it out, and reasoned and 
analyzed himself as though he were some third person ; if he 
could have done what nobody can do — looked upon himself, his 
scrutiny uninfluenced by the actual play of living, pulsing feel- 
ings within him — he would doubtless have come to some such 
conclusion as this; but he did not reason or analyze or think 
at all. 

He trudged on with his brother, along the winding path 
that led towards the priest's home at Woodleigh. And the 
fresh country air, coming up from the western sea, filled his 
lungs and made him glad to be alive. For healthy boys of 
seventeen are not given to being introspective. They are still 
human animals under the thin veneer of whatever civilization 
they happen to belong to ; and they give as little real thought 
to the future as they worry about the present. 

The two brothers walked on in silence under the arching 
branches of the trees that lined their path. Arnoul struck with 
a hazel switch plucked from the hedge at the heads of the 
primroses — happy and buoyant. He was thinking of the maiden 
and of the golden reliquary that hung about his neck; though, 
had he been asked, he would probably have answered that his 
thoughts were of his impending voyage to Paris — and this, no 
doubt, with truth, for the two were by this time inextricably 
tangled up in his mind. 

Sir Guy, his cassock swishing against his legs, strode on, 
imaging fresh projects, new and higher aims for his brother's 
welfare. They loved each other, these two, so strangely dis- 
similar in every point. The priest, poor as he was, had no 
personal motive in wishing his only brother to make his way 
in the world. His horizon was bounded by the limits of his 
parish of Woodleigh, and though he sometimes sighed as he 
saw others fall into the richer livings that lay lord or bishop 
or chapter had in their bestowal, his sighs were not prompted 
by desires of advancement so much as because his own cure 
was so difficult and so meagre. He desired little, if anything, 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 309 

for himseifi but for his brother — that was not at all the same 
thing. Arnoul must not grind and pinch and eke out the 
means as he always had to do. He, at least, must look upon 
life with other eyes. There was no reason why his path should 
not be a rose-girt one; and as far, at any rate, as Sir Guy's 
advice and interest could help him to it, it should be both 
rose-girt and golden. 

When he broke the silence, it was to speak of men who 
had already carved out positions for themselves in the Church 
and of those who were on the highroad to preferment and 
dignities. And though then, as now, birth and wealth had 
their part to play in the getting of honors and sinecures and 
high positions, neither poverty nor lack of gentle blood was an 
absolute obstacle to them. It was a subtle and a ready way of 
inflaming the lad's mind with desire for wealth and place and 
power. He was poor, truly; but Sir Guy would never allow 
him to forget that the best blood of Devon ran in his veins. 

And so he spoke of those who had forced their way up- 
wards by sheer strength and doggedness of character. There 
was Lodoswell, the chancellor, and Ermeston, the keeper of the 
seal, who ruled good, weak Bishop Blondy with a rod of iron. 
These men had come to the fore, and had carved out their for- 
tunes well. Yet neither Lodoswell nor Ermeston were to be 
compared to Arnoul de Valletort. And then there was Brones- 
comb too, Walter Bronescomb, who, as a matter of fact, after- 
wards did become Bishop of Exeter. He was a coming man. 
And his parentage was poor enough, certainly, and mean. He 
had nothing to help him forward but his own abilities and his 
dogged purpose to get on; and already he had worked him- 
self out of the rank and file, and forced himself up to honors 
and position. 

The boy took it all in. He was listening attentively enough 
and making his own comments upon the names as they came 
up. For all its silence, there was little that was not known of 
ecclesiastical doings at the Abbey. And Arnoul probably knew 
quite as much as Guy himself of all the personages and their 
histories, as they were repeated to him. 

Poor Guy, the boy wondered, why did he himself not try to 
get on, if he thought so much of success ? Still, he certainly 
would do his best. He would forge ahead, too, once he found 
himself in Paris. He had no misgivings that he would fail in 



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3IO ARNOUL the englishman [Dec, 

anything. On the contrary, he was quite certain that, whatever 
he did, he would succeed in it. It was not conceit or self- 
sufficiency, but the mere expansion of his nature, the surging of 
a hope that had never known any real disappointment, the fresh- 
ness and vigor of his buoyant youth that made him so confident. 
So they walked on under the curving boughs towards Wood- 
leigh : Sir Guy ever dreaming, planning, scheming, speaking ot 
Lodoswell and Bronescomb ; Arnoul still listening and com- 
menting, smiting off with his stick the heads of the yellow prim- 
roses at the roadside, his hand resting on the golden relic case 
that was hidden in his breast. 



Chapter VIII. 

A league below Woodleigh the river Avon broadens out 
into one of those many tidal indentations that so fret and fray 
the whole southern coast of Devon. Nowhere in its short course 
from Avon Head in the lower moorland, where it rises between 
Fox Tor and Holne Ridge, down to within a mile or so from 
the coast, does it exceed the proportions of a small stream. 

South of Peter's Cross, it is true, where for a space it tinkles 
merrily along beside the Abbot's Way, three little streamlets 
join to meet it, and it does its best to rise and swell itself up 
to a dignity that affluent waters ought to lend a river. But it 
is a little stream still, even when it has boasted of three tribu- 
taries; and it remains a little stream for all the creeks and 
brooks and rivulets it manages to entice into its bosom as it 
flows along to the sea. 

It cannot boast, like Tamar, of its length or importance; 
though it fusses and fidgets in its bed as though it were a very 
important river indeed. It has not an embouchure like stately 
Dart; nor evqn like tiny Yealm, with its scarce three leagues 
of happy life behind it, to justify the bursting pride with which 
it meets the ocean. But it has what none of its rivals all the 
way from Plymouth Sound to Exe have got. It has an island. 

A tiny island, it is true, standing off a bare quarter of a 
mile from the mainland, in proud and solitary isolation. The 
tides swirl round it as they come in, pushing the moor- drained 
stream back upon itself up at the head of the estuary ; and they 
swirl round it as they draw back again, freeing the sullen, pent- 



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1907.] Arnoul the Englishman 311 

up water of the stream. Twice a day they come and go, some- 
times sleek and smiling, lapping on the shore as though caress* 
ing it, sometimes rushing and ravening, the curling waves, like 
great, hungry monsters, tearing at the red cliffs all along the 
coast. 

But the tiny island is long used to the ocean and its moods. 
It basks in the hot sun, with the wavelets singing it to sleep, 
and it feels the salt scuds and stinging whips of driving spray 
indifferently. When the leaden sky bends down over the churn- 
ing waters and the dull ocean lifts up its arms towards the 
leaden sky, and all the world is wrapped in storm-light, it lies 
quite still, though the trailing storm swathes it in mists and 
the waves leap at it like dogs unleashed. And when the storm 
has passed and the sun shines out again, then it lies glistening 
and gleaming, smiling ever because it gives the fussy little river 
so unique a title to distinction. 

Arnoul stepped into the boat that had carried him from the 
mainland, and took his seat at the stern. Roger gave the craft 
a shove, sending it gliding out from the shore upon the calm 
water, and threw his legs over the bow. Neither spoke much 
for a while. It was the last week of the lad's sojourn at Wood- 
leigh, and his approaching departure had been the principal 
theme of discussion all the day. For honest Roger had not 
seen over-much of him during his short stay. He had had his 
daily toil to attend to ; and when he found himself at Sir Guy's 
lodging on an off-day or of an evening, he had generally dis- 
covered that Arnoul was not there or was busy with the priest. 
So he had been obliged to fall back upon old Isobel, in the 
kitchen, and talk of a subject that was most congenial to them 
both and uppermost in both their minds. 

There was a long outstanding jealousy between the fisher- 
man and the old housekeeper over Arnoul ; but like many jeal- 
ous persons, and all spiteful ones, they had no small mutual con- 
solation in discussing the object of their affections; and Roger, 
be it added, generally found some of the cider from Sir Guy's 
limited cellar making its way down his thirsty throat. Were it 
not for this wrangling over the lad, they were the best of friends, 
and the poor priest often wondered where the fine fish came 
from for which he was never called upon to pay. 

And why had Arnoul been so much away from Woodleigh 
during his short visit to his brother ? There were many reasons. 



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312 Arnoul the Englishman [Dec., 

First, there were the Masses at Moreleigh. He had accompanied 
Sir Guy, not once or twice, but many times, to the chapel that 
lay within the demesne of the Viponts. Nor had he been at 
all loath to go. And the reading of the Mass and the break- 
fast that followed — for how could Sir Guy get back to Wood- 
leigh on an empty stomach? — took up a great deal of the 
morning. And Guy would dawdle so on the road back; he 
always had so many things to say, and so much advice to give, 
and he spun out such long stories about all the worthies as ex- 
amples for him to follow. 

Then there was Totnes — and, as every one knows, to go to 
Totnes and talk with the armorer at the bridge and try the 
arms that the Abbot has selected, cannot be undertaken with 
less than a whole day to do it in. 

And last, there was Buckfast. True, Arnoul was staying at 
Woodleigh with his brother, but as he was to meet the Lord 
Abbot at Exeter and set out from there, the only chance of 
saying good-bye to all his friends lay in his taking two days to 
make a last pilgrimage to our Lady of Buckfast. And the two 
days had lengthened into three — there were so many farewells to 
make. And — ^and altogether poor Roger had been rather over- 
looked. So he promised him a whole day for himself, a lazy 
day of fishing and doing nothing at Avon Mouth. 

And the day had come and was already nearly gone; and 
there they were going back to the mainland from the little island 
that lends the high distinction of its presence to fidgety, fussy, 
fuming little Avon, as it flows down from the lower moorland 
to meet the sea. 

Arnoul first broke the silence. He was looking sideways, 
away from the land, into the broad red furrow that the setting 
sun was beginning to plough across the water to the westward ; 
and his bronzed face caught something of its fiery glow. 

^^ Roger," he began slowly, as if choosing his words, "do 
you know aught of Sigar Vipont ? " 

The man eyed him curiously, wondering what brought Sir 
Sigar to his mind. 

'* Aye, that I do " ; he answered in a tone that bespoke little 
token of reverence towards the knight of Moreleigh. **I know 
that he is the worst tempered man in Devon ; and I know it to 
my cost. So do you, lad. I mind me when you came back, a 
little lad, crying because that same Sir Sigar clouted you. 



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I907-] Arnoul the englishman 313 

Years agone, that is ; and you no higher than so." He made a 
sign with his hand above the bottom of the boat in illustration. 

"I mind it well, you and your dog; and did I not, 'tis 
Isobel would not let me forget it. But what of him, lad ? 
Why do you speak of him ? " 

'^ Oh ! nothing, Roger. Only I have been seeing him of 
late when Guy has been going to the castle. And — and/' he 
ended weakly, ^' I think he is very evil humored." 

'* And what has that to do with you ? " questioned the man. 
"All the countryside knows that. 'Tis nothing new for Sir Sigar 
to show his temper. But," he added with suspicion, ''has he 
been venting his wrath on you ? " 

" No, no "; replied Arnoul quickly. " Not that, Roger. He 
has been thoughtful and gracious to both Guy and me of late. 
Only, when I first saw him — Guy and I had gone over to the 
castle about the Masses, you know — he was in such a rage. 
And with his daughter, too. I wondered if he were really mad. 
Is he really mad, Roger?" 

" Mad ! " echoed the man. " Yes ; mad as you are, or I, or 
my Lord the Abbot up at Buckfast. He is mad when he chooses 
to be mad, or when he lets himself get out of hand with his 
anger. I am drunk when I choose — God assoil me ! — and when, 
perchance, too many inns stand gaping alongside a dusty road. 
And as I am drunken by choice, or by occasion, so is Vipont 
mad. But what ails you, to harp so on Vipont and his bad 
temper ? " 

'' I was thinking of the maid, his daughter," replied Arnoul 
softly, turning his face still further towards the blood red track 
across the water. Perhaps it was the light that crimsoned on 
his face and brow. 

"So!" thought Roger to himself. "So!" But he said 
aloud : " And what of her ? " 

"She is very beauteous," the boy answered, his eyes fixed 
upon the sun- stained water. 

"So !" commented the fisherman mentally. And then: "Yes, 
lad; she is a fair maid and a wealthy. All Moreleigh is hers 
when Sir Sigar dies." 

The lad sighed and Roger promptly, and perhaps purposely, 
changed the conversation. " But why talk of Vipont or of 
maids on this last day with poor Roger at Avon Mouth ? You 
will be going in a day or so where neither Vipont nor his maid 



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314 Arnoul the Englishman [Dec., 

will trouble you. And when you return, you will be too great 
a man to worry about either — God wot ! a bishop at the least — 
and so full of learning that there will be no understanding you/' 

Arnoul smiled. He was not sure that Guy had suggested a 
mitre as his goal; but Roger evidently flew at higher game 
than the poor priest. 

So he began to jest and chaff with the man, and told his 
plans and hopes over again as the boat moved slowly through 
the oily water, and at last grated on the shingle of the main- 
land. They dragged the light craft up beyond reach of tides 
or storms, near to the little hut where Roger's nets hung out 
drying. And Arnoul gave the fisherman a hand in taking them 
down and storing them away inside the cabin. 

Roger announced his intention of accompanying the lad to 
Woodleigh and making an evening of it. So they went off to- 
gether through the gathering twilight. 

Arrived at the village, Arnoul found Sir Guy waiting im- 
patiently for his return. He was walking to and fro before the 
house, hands clasped behind back, head bent in thought; and 
he nodded every now and then to impress on his memory some 
point of which he had thought for his brother's edification. 

The priest had heard from Buckfast that the Abbot was to 
ride to Exeter on the morrow and that Arnoul was to be there 
to meet him and his train at sundown, or else before sext at 
the Priory of Torre, where Father Abbot was to lie that night 

There was much to be done, many things to be spoken of, 
befoie the morning. This sudden move of the Abbot's had 
shortened Arnoul's time by two or three days at least. And 
so Roger was sent once more to get what comfort he could at 
the hands of Isobel; while the two brothers talked again far 
into the night. 

The morn broke glorious, spears of gold and red hurled by 
the glowing east against the mantling sky. Arnoul was up and 
seeing to his horse with the first herald of the coming day. 
All his scanty baggage was prepared, the animal standing ready 
bridled and saddled, when Sir Guy rubbed the sleep out of his 
eyes and came out, clad in rusty black, into the sunlight. Iso- 
bel was already in the kitchen, bustling about with a great 
clatter of pots and pans, keeping the tears away by her great 
preparations for the parting breakfast and making up little pack- 
ages of food to be stuffed, at the last moment, into saddle bag 



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1907.] Arnoul the englishman 315 

and bundle. Before long Roger, who had found some lodging 
for the night — the lee side of a hedge, most like — came up, 
rough and shaggy in the bright morning light; and old Isobel 
stepped to the door to see the preparations for departure. 
There was little speech, except for Sir Guy's perpetual injunc* 
tions and advices, running on like a long litany. 

At last all was ready — the breakfast eaten, Arnoul seated 
on his beast, and the last packet stowed away. Sir Guy had 
given the lad more than half the money he had in the house 
at the time; and Roger, not to be outdone by Isobel, had 
pressed upon him, out of his small stock of belongings, a token 
that he thought the boy would value. What is more, he slipped 
at the same time a silver coin into his hand. ''Twill serve to 
buy you wine upon the road,'' he whispered. But Arnoul was 
loath to take it from him; and it was only when he saw how 
sorely the honest fellow bore his refusal that he dropped it into 
the pouch at his side. And Roger, who with all his roughness 
was as delicate as he, laughed and wagged his head as he heard 
his coin chink against the others in the wallet. 

'' When you come back with crosier and mitre, I will exact 
an usury like any Jew," he chuckled. 

And — "Crosier or no crosier, you shall have it" — the boy 
smiled back at his humble friend. 

They walked by his side to the end of the village. People 
came to their doors as they passed and wished the lad a fare- 
well and a God-speed. The village dogs barked about the horse's 
legs, and the children ran and toddled beside the priest One 
little urchin caught his gown in grimy hands, as if it were poor 
Sir Guy who was faring forth from Woodleigh to seek his fortune. 

And so the little procession went on, priest and dogs, Iso- 
bel and Roger, and Arnoul sitting on his horse, and children 
straggling and trailing out in the rear, until they came to the 
last house that marked the end of the hamlet. 

There they said good-bye — the boy dismounting and kneel- 
ing for his brother's blesssing. And he rode away from the vil- 
lage, looking back over his shoulder at the little group stand- 
ing together in the golden morning, until a bend in the road 
hid them from his sight. He rode away, as he had walked out 
from the alumnate, under the great gateway of St. Mary's, with 
a sadness at his heart struggling with an inexpressible and ex- 
panding joy. 



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3i6 Arnoul the Englishman [Dec, 

The promise of the morning did not hold. As he rode, the 
weather changed. Thick clouds banked themselves up behind 
him and stole across the blue sk}% floating out white and fleecy 
at firsti like islands of snow in a topaz sea ; and then gather- 
ing and massing and folding themselves one above the other^ 
so it seemedi in sullen, cheerless tones of gray. Here and there 
the sun struck feebly through the jagged rents in the lower 
cloud pally the light struggling towards the earth in long, fan- 
shaped rays that filtered through the murky air. The ragged 
edges of the rifts were of a weak, sickly yellow, merging into 
a faint green where the sky was bared. The trees on either 
hand and the sloping hills stood out strangely, vividly green in 
the yellow glare that suffused the atmosphere. He urged his 
horse onward, fearful of the storm breaking before he should 
make shelter; and found himself in Totnes as the first drops 
began to fall. There he waited, sitting in the armorer's by the 
bridge, and wondering whether he should meet Abbot Benet, as 
had been arranged, at Torre. 

The storm was short, and spent itself almost before it had 
begun ; so he thanked the armorer, and rode on over the bridge 
and up the long hill on the other side. The grasses and the 
leaves sparkled fresh and green with the rain as he jogged along 
over the rolling hills that lie between the ancient town nestling 
in its emerald solitude and the Premonstratensian house of 
Torre. He came within sight of the sea more than once, and 
passed groups of peasants now and then, a pair of begging 
friars in their sad-colored habits, and once a gaily dressed com- 
pany of knights and squires making their way, with laughter 
and jest, towards the castle of the Pomeroys. At length he 
drew within sight of his destination, and putting spurs to his 
horse, rode up into the courtyard of the monastery. 

There he found all bustle and animation. The Abbot's 
train was already making ready to start. The mules were 
standing ready saddled — six of them in all — as well as several 
of the little, shaggy moor ponies. For the Lord Abbot was 
going abroad accompanied not only by his adviser, but by three 
of the brethren who were to finish their studies in Paris. The 
Premonstratensian Prior, their host, was to ride with them as 
far as the episcopal city. The ponies were for the lay servants. 
Arnoul was too excited to take much note of what was going 
on ; but his ride had made him thirsty. So he sought out the 



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1907.] ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 317 

cellarer first of all ; and then made his way to the Abbot, who 
was standing, ready to mount, beside the black robed Prior. 

** 'Prs^Yf Father, a blessing ! '' he said, habituated to the 
monastic usage, and he made his reverence. '^ Here I am at 
last; though methought it would be at Exeter I should find 
you." 

The Abbot and the Prior both welcomed him heartily. ** You 
have ridden far,'' said the former, looking at the lad's horse. 
** Shall we change your beast here, or can it take you on to 
Exeter, think you ? " 

*' I have not ridden five leagues and I rested at the bridge," 
answered the boy. *^ Besides from here to Exeter is but an- 
other five leagues and something over, and we shall but walk 
the whole way." 

He smiled as his glance fell on the fat mule, soberly ca* 
prisoned for the monk, for he knew how fast that excellent 
animal was likely to go. 

^' So be it then," said Abbot Benet, climbing into his saddle, 
and tucking his scapular and the skirts of his habit out of the 
way of his legs. "We are ready. Mount!" 

The monks and the Prior got clumsily astride their mules. 
The men mounted upon their ponies — Amoul vaulting lightly 
upon his — and the whole party filed out of the gate on their 
way to Exeter — and Paris. 

(to be continued.) 



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THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES. 

BY WILFRID WILBERFORCE. 

1HE biographer who undertakes to write the life of 
his father must expect to be confronted with 
difficulties even greater than those which are in 
any case inseparable from his art. The very na- 
ture of his work makes him critical, while his 
habitual attitude of reverence renders criticism tarn cari capitis 
intolerable to him. If he notes defects in the character of his 
subject, he is accused of the sin of Ham; if he passes them 
over, he is blind. His praises are carelessly attributed to filial 
partiality — admirable no doubt, but without weight where others 
are concerned. On the other hand, his blame is taken as repre- 
senting a mere tithe of what is deserved, while its utterance 
brings odium on himself. 

In some respects, no doubt, a man has more favorable op- 
portunities of becoming a successful Boswell to his father than 
has any one else; but it may be taken as a general rule that 
it will be better for him if his Johnson be some one else's fa- 
ther, not his own. There are, of course, exceptions to this 
rule — the most conspicuous being the Life of William George 
Ward^ by his son. It would be difficult to point to a single 
page in those two volumes in which the critical faculty has 
been allowed to encroach upon filial reverence; while the gla- 
mor of Ward's intellect never blinds his biographer to the sober 
realities of his theme. But it is not every one who has Mr. 
Wilfrid Ward's gifts or knows how to use them so well. Few 
are so plentifully endowed with the sense of harmony in their 
coloring and the keen instinct of proportion which, in the bi- 
ography of a parent, are such essential elements of success. 

In the Life of Thomas William Allies^* by his daughter, the 
writer has escaped many of the usual pitfalls by letting her sub- 
ject speak for himself; and even when she expresses her own 
views, she does so in the graceful manner which becomes a 
daughter who, in good measure, owes her rare mental endow- 

* Thomas William Allies. By Mary H. Allies. 1907. London : Bums & Oates. 



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I9O70 THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES 319 

ments to her daily and hourly intercourse with a mind so mas- 
sive and well-stored as that of her father. 

Thomas William Allies was no ordinary man, and, as one 
remembers the many ways in which this fact was apparent in 
his Catholic days, it is a little difficult to understand how it 
was that in the years he spent as an Anglican he was so sparse- 
ly appreciated. Nor can a wholly adequate solution be found 
in the fact that from his post as Examining Chaplain to the 
Bishop of London he was deposed, at the age of twenty-nine, 
and planted out in a country living, far away from the hot- 
house of episcopal favor. The occasion of this appointment was 
characteristic both of Blomfield and Allies. 

In January, 1842, the present King, then Edward, Prince of 
Wales, was baptized. One of his godfathers was the Protestant 
King of Prussia, a fact which Blomfield mentioned on his re- 
turn from the ceremony. Allies writes: 

This deeply offended my Church principles that a Prussian 
Protestant, who was outside the Church, should be admitted 
as godfather. With more sincerity than prudence I stated 
my scruple to the Bishop, who had been a party consenting, 
and was not a little nettled at this remark of his chaplain, for 
he wanted, as he told me afterwards, *' Moderate Oxford," 
but this was immoderate with a vengeance.* 

The Bishop waited for no more nettle- stings, and a few 
days later he offered his offending chaplain the living of Laun- 
ton, in Oxfordshire, with the significant advice that he would 
do well to accept it. This appointment, including as it did a 
convenient house, an ample old-fashioned garden, a picturesque 
church, and a stipend of ;C6oo a year, would not have been re- 
garded by most young men of twenty- nine as a serious trial. 
In the eyes of the Bishop it was a punishment, and as such it 
appeared to Allies himself. ''A heavy cross," '^a probation," 
his daughter calls this sojourn in an ideal English home. Al- 
lies wrote: 

A course of lowly, practical, self-denying obedience, cut 
off from all temptations of being influenced by the love of 
praise, was what I required, therefore surely was I sent hither, 
for where would the circumstances of my position so continu- 
ally demand such a habit as here ? 

• Thomas William Allies, P. 42. 



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330 Thomas William Allies [Dec, 

One great trial of this ** position/' though full of pain at 
the time, was certainly salutary. It opened his eyes to the ut- 
terly meagre and jejune religion of the Anglican Church and 
to its effect upon a rural population. Thus, when in burning 
words this refined Oxford scholar, who believed himself to be 
a Christian priest, was describing the joys of heaven to a dying 
parishioner, he was met with the blighting response : ** It may 
be all very well. Sir, but Old England for me I '' And a ser- 
mon which spoke of St. Joseph as the Guardian of our Lord 
provoked the remark thaf he must have been very old'' — the 
son of Jacob being the only Joseph apparently that the Laun- 
ton bucolics had ever contemplated. 

Oddly enough he was destined years later, when he had 
been five years a Catholic, to meet with the same ignorance in 
his own home. His mother, hearing that he had named one of 
his sons Bernard Joseph, inquired the reason for the second 
name, since it had not been borne by any of his family, and 
since there was no saint so-called I 

But in these early days at Launton, Allies had no thought 
of the Catholic Church. Indeed he was then a firm believer in 
Anglicanism, and he regarded himself, in the truest sense of the 
word, as a priest. The two great desires of his life at this time 
were to associate with intellectual men and to win souls. To 
satisfy the first wish in a village such as Launton was an im- 
possibility, and to his dismay he found the second wish nearly 
as difficult of fulfilment. ''The state of the people here," he 
writes, ''is frightful." Nor was he the kind of man that stolid 
English farmers could understand or appreciate. No sympathy* 
could exist between natures and aspirations so contrary. A 
priest of the Catholic Church, of course, could have done much ; 
but Allies, as he came to realize in due time, was nothing more 
than a minister of a State Establishment. 

What first opened his eyes to the real state of things was 
a visit to France in 1843, when he had had twelve months ex- 
perience of the futility of Anglicanism in a country parish. 
The French priests, he found, celebrated Mass daily. He had 
already heard of this practice from a friend. Now he witnessed 
it with his own eyes. The result was that, on his return to 
Launton, he himself began daily celebration; but purely as a 
matter of private devotion, for it was done with locked doors, 
with no one to witness it or participate in it. He also intro- 



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1 907. J Thomas William Allies 321 

duced daily matins and evensongj which was still uncommon in 
those early days. It was at least remarkable that one who was 
still so far from the Catholic Church should see nothing un» 
meaning in celebrating (as he believed) with no one present 
but himself. An ordinary Protestant, whose ideas soar no 
higher than a ''service/' on whom the notion of sacrifice has 
never dawned, would undoubtedly regard the absence of a con* 
gregation as fatal to any ministerial act. 

By 1844 Allies had made yet another step forward. He 
had come to believe in confession and absolution. Barren and 
desert as Launton was, a ''howling wilderness/' as he called 
it later on, it stood, nevertheless, within easy reach of an oasis 
— for Newman, though already on his death-bed so far as Ang- 
licanism was concerned, still prayed and fasted at Littlemore. 
In those days even, a journey across Oxfordshire was no very 
serious matter, and in April, 1844, Allies passed through Ox- 
ford and repaired by the IfSey Road towards the village where 
dwelt the man who was on the eve of his great renunciation. 
To him the Vicar of Launton made his first confession. In his 
notes on this event Allies speaks of 

two special temptations — repining at the general state of 
the Church and at one's own position therein, and idolatry of 
the intellect. Reference rather to an intellectual than moral 
standard. Entered largely into sad state of parish, with 
which N[ewman] sympathized ; approved weekly H. C, at 
8 A. M. Said I ought to have a curate. Did not seem to 
think that change of position in all cases was wrong. Left 
him, soothed and comforted. . . . He said though friends 
were received at Wttlemore for a season, yet that he could 
not undertake to direct them, being convinced that special 
education was necessary to do so. He said he was quite un- 
equal to it. As I walked over I could not but think how 
great was the privilege to be near and to have means of inter- 
course with the greatest man the English Church in her sep- 
arated state has ever produced, and a saint, I doubt not, if 
I live to see this statement ten or twenty years hence, I shall 
feel this much more vividly. At my request he fixed times 
for CLonfession], once a quarter, unless special reasons oc- 
curred.* 

Still, "soothed and comforted" though he was, this first 

*/w/. p. 47. 



VOL. LXXXVI. — 21 



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322 THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES [Dec, 

confession bad the further and very remarkable e£fect of strength- 
ening instead of lessening bis doubts about the Anglican sys- 
tem. As a reward of his humility and single- mindedness, God 
was drawing him nearer to the true Church. Commenting on 
this, while still an Anglican, he could write : '' Was a spiritual 
veil then removed ? " And as a Catholic of course there was 
no further need of the note of interrogation. He writes : 

Now it is easy for me to see, according to the usual law of 
God in bestowing grace, and rewarding with further light 
those who use what they have already, that the great effort 
of conscience made in confessing was likely to be followed 
thus, by an accession of light, as to where confession and ab- 
solution were really to be found.* 

Even before this date, however, his belief in Anglicanism 
was rapidly declining. Its total inability to deal with a heath- 
enized people, its want of union, its unsacerdotal character, 
its failure to wean his parishioners from the attractions of the 
Dissenting Chapel, had all combined to discourage him. But 
even when, added to all this, he was ** perpetually asking him- 
self why . . . our bishops were such a set of trimming, 
shilly-shally knaves ? " his confidence in ** the whole position of 
the Church of England '' was still unshaken. The doubts which 
assailed him on this latter point, or rather the growth of these 
doubts, dated from the day of his first confession to Newman. 

Allies made more than one visit to Littlemore at this time. 
Within that plain row of simple cottages was cast the anchor 
which held him true to the National Church. ''My chief com- 
fort and support," he writes, " were derived from what he said 
to me; but still more, I ihmk^ Irom seeing him where he was,'' \ 
With this testimony before us, it is a little difficult to endorse 
Miss Allies' words in which, speaking of her father, she writes: 
''Newman's step in 1845 did not hasten his own conversion by 
one hour.'' Surely this is an overstatement. It was not nec- 
essary for Miss Allies' contention that her father's conversion 
was "a hand-to-hand struggle on a dark and gloomy road."t 
To follow Newman blindly was one thing. To be profoundly 
influenced by his words and actions was quite another. And 
it was surely impossible for one who had leant so heavily upon 

* A Life's DfcUion, Second edition, 1894. P. 51. 
\Ibid. P. 53. The italics are in the original. 
X Thomas William Allies. P. 49. 



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1907.] Thomas William Allies 323 

Newman as Allies had done, in the arduous and lonely conflict 
with doubts and difficulties, not to feel that one of his props 
had been shivered when he could no longer point to Littlemore 
and lay the flattering unction to his soul: '' Newman still be- 
lieves in the Church of England.'' 

Of course it would be an overstatement on the other side 
to contend that Newman's departure settled the question for 
Allies. Indeed the facts would at once contradict such an as- 
sertion. But here again it was Newman's words which not 
merely focussed into one point the studies which ultimately 
brought Allies into the Church, but supplied him with the text 
for the volumes with which he enriched Catholic literature with- 
in the last half century of his life. When the '' blow had been 
struck from which the Church of England still reels/' the reli- 
gious world held its breath in expectation of the book which 
was known to be forthcoming. Day after day had Newman 
been toiling at it, writing at his stand-up desk, appearing to 
his disciples more and more diaphanous as he worked. Begun 
as an Anglican in doubt — triumphantly brought to a conclu- 
sion as a convinced and happy Catholic — this book, the Essay 
on Development^ fell like a bomb- shell into the Anglican camp. 
On the morrow of its appearance Gladstone declared that it 
must be answered, and Manning actually set to work to achieve 
the refutation; but he soon recognized and acknowledged that 
the task was beyond him. Since that day sixty-one years have 
gone by, and the book still remains unanswered. 

Allies then, in common with many thousands of other think- 
ing men, was looking forward to this momentous work. " Never," 
he writes, ** had I waited so anxiously for any book ; and doubt- 
less this was the case with many others; for I find remarks 
about persons still Protestants, which show in what a state of 
suspense they then were." And in his journal, under date No- 
vember 27, 1845, he writes: 

Went into Oxford to get J. H. N.'s book, so anxiously 
waited for, and with a combination of opposite feelings — love, 
fear, curiosity, Returned in evening with my treasure. 

And a few days later he notes: 

Had a long talk with W. Palmer; he thinks J. H. N.'s 
book by far the most able defence of Roman Catholicism 
which has appeared. It promises to become ecumenical.* 

* A Life's Decision, Pp. 70, 71. 



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324 THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES [Dec, 

But for Allies the palmary argument, the keystone upon 
which the whole arch depended, was the Primacy of St. Peter 
and the Popes. Fixing upon a page and a half of Newman's 
book, he wrote: 

I will test these statements. The question of the Primacy 
includes the whole question between the Church of England 
and the Church of Rome. I will follow this subject faithfully 
to its issue, and wherever it leads me I will go.* 

And his thoughts dwelt upon Abraham's sacrifice of his son, 
which, he pondered, was certainly no greater than would be 
his own immolation if he had to quit the Church of England. 

Five years went by — years of study and prayer, sixty 
months of hard, solitary struggle and groping. In many an- 
other English parsonage the same scene was being enacted ; in 
obscurity and silence many a soldier of Christ was buckling on 
the armor of light, preparing, if God so willed, to give up 
money, lands, reputation, advancement, dear friends — all that 
the world holds good — to gain the pearl of great price, the 
faith that was to make him free. 

When those five years were over. Allies had weathered the 
storm, and on the nth of September, 1850, he was landed safely 
on the Rock of Peter. Describing the agony which issued so 
happily, he writes: 

What I went through in those five years no words of mine 
can express. The ever- increasing anxiety, the direction of 
all thoughts and studies to one point, the connection of the 
conclusion to be come to with my temporal fortunes and the 
welfare of my wife and children, the wish to be certain, the 
fear of being deceived, of being warped one way by worldly 
interests or hurried another by impatience, all these formed a 
trial, which to look back upon at almost a generation's dis- 
tance fills me with horror. I feel like the man who rode his 
horse over a bridge of boats one night, and when he saw 
what he had done the next day, died of fright. 

Thus, with his heart full of the peace which surpasses all 
understanding, but with nothing to look forward to but poverty 
and fitful employment, Allies entered upon his Catholic life, 
*Mifted from shifting sands, on which there was no footing," to 
use his own words, *'to an impregnable fortress, round which 

• Thomas WilHam AUies. P. 49. 



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1907.] Thomas William allies 325 

the conflicts of human opinion rage in vain." The last days 
at Launton were fraught with anxiety as well as with those 
sordid and harassing cares inseparable from a tearing- up of a 
family by the roots. For the first time during his residence 
in the parish, an epidemic of typhus fever broke out, and for 
some weeks his studies on the great question of the Primacy 
were interrupted by constant attendance at the bedside of the 
sick and dying. To crown his anxieties, the ^rst symptoms of 
the fell disease showed themselves in Mrs. Allies, who, by the 
way, was already a Catholic. She and her husband, who was 
still technically a Protestant, began to pour forth fervent prayers 
that the illness might not develop itself. Their petitions were 
heard, and Mrs. Allies' life was spared. 

But the dreary details of the final move, and the utter 
uncertainty as to the time to come, had still to be faced. 

No occupation or maintenance for the future presented it- 
self; as to temporal matters, a more arid waste of years could 
not stretch itself before the fainting traveller than then encom- 
passed us. The convert in the first three centuries often met 
at once the Roman axe, or the torturing hook or scourge, and 
was released after a glorious conflict; but here the trial, if 
not so sharp, was far more prolonged. An indeterminate 
space of time, dark and unredeemed by hope, opened its 
illimitable lowering desert before us. The first taste of it 
was utter uncertainty what to do, with the necessity of dmng 
at once. It was certain that my successor at Launton would 
only be too anxious to get rid of such an ill-omened guest as 
soon as possible, and the moment my rights as landlord 
terminated, no quarter was to be expected. Furniture and 
books must be put somewhere^ yet it was impossible to fix 
where we could best go. The harassing perplexity of this 
situation, the sense of being mined, of having no field for 
future exertion, cannot be expressed in words. It lay all 
about us, under and above us, by day and night. 

It was indeed a venture of faith— one of the " ventures for 
Christ's sake," on which, a few months before, his friend, 
Henry Wilberforce, had preached at the opening of St. Barna- 
bus, Pimlico. And, like all such acts of generosity, it met its 
hundredfold reward. 

Towards the end of his life, indeed, he still looked upon 
himself as ''an Abject"; while for the title page of his Lififs 



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326 THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES [Dec, 

Decision he could find no motto more appropriate than the 
Psalmist's cry — so replete with humility and love: Elegi ab^ 
jectus esse. *' I have chosen to be an abject in the house of 
my God rather than to dwell in the tents of sinners/'* 

At first, indeed, it was poverty which afflicted him, and the 
glaring contrast between the pleasant parsonage, with its smiling 
garden, and the one dingy sitting-room of his London lodg- 
ings. But the tribulation did not end here. It was far from 
being merely financial. '' Oblivion and the coldness of friends 
who knew him no more," this was a trial keener surely than 
any money loss. A heroic soul who had passed through the 
pangs of this fire« assured the present writer that nothing but 
the claims of conscience could have reconciled him to the loss 
of his friends. Thus certainly must Allies have felt. His 
daughter tells us that '' some people remarked," when he chose 
his motto for A Lifers Decision^ "that they would not have 
objected to be an abject if he was one." And of course, so 
far as worldly means were concerned, there were many scores 
and probably hundreds who, in that respect, suffered more than 
he. But his own idea of '' abjection " puts a different face upon 
the word. He writes: 

The thought occurs to me, why, during the thirty years I 
have been a Cathalic, I have been so deprived of the sense of 
divine support as to temporal matters. This will require 
some study to draw out. . . . The becoming a Catholic, 
when considered in all its consequences, was in truth a crash- 
ing of the whole man. Everything I valued in the outward 
life, independence of position, a positive work, hope of dis- 
tinction, veiled with the pretext of doing good — all the glory 
of the world, went at once, irrecoverably. I have ever felt 
since that I was " an abject," nor can I think of any other 
word which so exactly conveys the world of feeling in which 
I have lived during the past thirty years ; it was only tem- 
pered with the thought that, if I was an abject, it was '* in 
the house of my God." How totally different, for instance, 
would have been my feeling if an intellectual work had been 
assigned to me by authority when I became a Catholic. I do 
not think the remark which I made in my Journal when, in 
1845, the prospect of becoming a Catholic dawned upon me, 
that it would be to me like the sacrifice of Abraham, was at 
all overstrained — ^such it appeared; such it has been in all 

* Psalm Ixxxiii. xx. 



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1907.] Thomas William Allies 327 

the thirty years, from 1850 to 1880; and it is hardly less so 
now than it was in 1850. The sting of the sacrifice undoubt- 
edly lay in this — that those to whom I came seemed not to 
care for me. . . . Wherever I turn, it has been the same. 
I walk, as it were, severed and alone. This is to be an ab- 
ject. I clearly recognize it as OeKv ti. 

But the hundredfold was there as well, and it came, above 
all, in the shape of unrufiled peace. As his hundredfold. Allies 
himself acknowledges it in words which it is impossible to re- 
frain from quoting. 

After citing the passage in the New Testament, where St. 
Peter reminded our Lord that he and others had left all things 
for him, and our Lord's sublime reply, he continues: 

On September 11, 1850, 1 was thirty-seven years of age ; on 
February 14, 1900, when I am writing this, I am two days 
past eighty-seven. I note these great blessings which have 
come to me. First, the gift of the true faith itself; an audi- 
ence of Pio Nono himself, in his exile at Gaeta ; words of 
blessing spoken to me ; a gift of our I/)rd Himself, in a 
cameo, made to me.* . . . I therefore note the verifica- 
tion of our I/)rd's promise: ^^ Centuplum acdpiet^^^ in one 
thing most marked from that time to this present time, the 
gift of inward peace. It is the planting in my heart His own 
Pax. No gift of wealth or distinction of any kind, or pos- 
sessing any friends or relations, is equal to that pax viewed 
as the settled habit of the soul, and especially as the fore- 
runner and anticipation, so to say, of the future sight of glory, 
when we shall see our Redeemer as he is. The possessing 
this inward gift amid all outward circumstances answers, I 
think, exactly to the centuplum accipiei^ so far as it concerns 
this present life, and keeps for the life to come, vitam atemam 
possideKt. The contrast between this pax and one's whole 
state in Anglicanism serves the better to establish what marks 
the Christian life.t 

It was this peace, and it may be added the love with 
which he was held by his family, that more than compensated 
him for the martyrdom of suffering he underwent in seeking for 
the truth and in sacrificing everything to attain to it. To him, 

* " I will give you each," he said, " a slight token of remembrance of me " ; whereupon he 
put into my hands a cameo of our Lord, wearing the crown of thorns and reed, very nicely cut 
and set, with small stones round it, and the letters, " Jesus Nazarenus, Rex Judaeorum," each 
on a stone. A Life's Decision. Pp. 203-4. 

t Thomas WUliam Alius, P. 194. 



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328 Thomas William Allies [Dec, 

a man whose whole being was intellectual, it was nothing short 
of martyrdom to turn his back daily upon his beloved library 
and toil like a city clerk at an office desk. He recognized it 
as the work which God had given him to do, and he did it 
cheerfully for the sake of his Master. But we are able to look 
back upon the finished work, and in so doing we can see most 
clearly why God chose him to do it. '' Oei^v Tt/' he called it, 
and much more fully than he ever suspected it was the hand 
of God ; for it is no kind of exaggeration to say that he, and 
he alone, could have done the work which he actually achieved 
for Catholic education, especially during the crisis between 1870 
and 1873. 1*l^is surely was providential. For this alone surely 
was it worth while to have lived and suffered. His humility, 
combined with the lack of perspective which distorts one's judg- 
ment of current events, prevented him from realizing the magni* 
tude of his work. And thus, after thirty* seven years of devoted 
labor as Secretary to the Poor School Committee, he could 
look back with a sigh, complaining that he had done nothing. 
Most men would have been glad to carry on their shields close 
upon two score years of sedulous toil. But to Allies this was 
merely the frame surrounding the real picture. The true achieve- 
ment of his life he felt to be the deathless volumes in which, 
with glowing pen and wealth of historic learning, he portrayed 
the formation of Christendom and the supremacy of Peter's 
See. Assuredly his name will endure as the great champion of 
the Vicar of Christ and his prerogatives. Not until the last of 
the Popes shall yield up his great charge, and the Supreme 
Judge appear, will it be known how many souls have owed their 
rescue from heresy to those golden volumes. 

And yet, at this crisis least of all, can we forget Mr. Allies' 
services to the cause of Catholic education, or allow his lowly 
estimate of them to pass as sterling coin. At a time when a 
Government, to please its Nonconformist supporters, is unjustly 
striking at the very root principle of that education by attempt- 
ing to deprive it of its Catholic character ; when- a miscalled 
"Liberal" ministry is endeavoring to force our training col- 
leges to open their doors to students who hate the very name 
of Catholic, it is impossible to forget how much we owe to the 
patient labor of Thomas Allies. Nay more, to him we owe the 
very training colleges which the Government is now attacking. 
Up to 1855 these necessary establishments did not exist. In 



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1907.] THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES 339 

that year Mr. Allies, as Secretary, was sent by the Poor School 
Committee to Namur, to place their need before the Superior 
of the Congregation of Notre Dame. The result of this journey 
was the establishment of the Mount Pleasant Training College 
in Liverpool. This foundation Mr. Allies justly regarded as his 
own, and for thirty-five years he supported it by word and 
work. 

The evening of this long and honored life was saddened by 
the loss of friends. One after another of his contemporaries 
dropped off like ripe fruit, leaving him bereaved and sorrowful. 
More than this, it was God's will that he should see some of 
his nearest and dearest, who were many years junior to himself, 
pass away. The record of his closing days is, indeed, sad read- 
ing. Two of his granddaughters, whom he loved tenderly, were 
snatched away in childhood — one of them at school, the other 
while on a visit to her grandfather's house. Three years earlier 
a specially poignant grief had come upon the old man through 
the death of his son's wife, Mrs. Cyril Allies. We are enabled 
in some degree to measure the affection he bore to her by Miss 
Allies' remark that she was a rival in his heart with his be- 
loved Formation of Christendom. 

In August, 1893, when in his eighty- first year, he under- 
took the trying journey to Innish Bofin, an island off the Gal- 
way coast, to visit his son's home. This act of love was nearly 
fatal to him, and the homeward journey was performed with 
much difficulty. When autumn was far advanced he returned 
to his house in London, never again to cross its threshold. 
Three months later his daughter-in-law, whom he had sacrificed 
so much of his strength to visit, was snatched away by a sudden 
death. The year 1897 brought a sorrow still more acute upon 
Mr. Allies. Of his sons, one was a priest. The father's heart, 
that beat so warmly for all his children, had always cherished 
a special love for him. One of the '' seventy subjects of thanks- 
giving after Mass" was for God's gift to him of Basil and for 
Basil's vocation to the priesthood, with '' the ten thousand mer- 
cies which sprang out of that vocation to us, his parents." In 
1897 this dearly-loved son came to London on a visit to his 
parents. Every one except Mr. Allies himself noticed that he 
seemed to be weighed down with depression. Perhaps the 
shadow of coming death was upon him, though to such as he 
death is XxxsXyjanua vita. Anyhow, he had not left his father's 



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330 THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES [Dec., 

house very long when he was seized with illness which quickly 
proved fatal. It was said at the time, though I find no mention 
of it in Miss Allies' book, that he gave his life in the cause of 
charity by going to attend a dying man who would otherwise 
have lacked the help of a priest, at a time when he himself was 
so ill that it was an evident danger for him to leave his bed. 

Two years after this another son died, and in 1900 his son- 
in-law Mr. James Broder. In January, 1902, death brought to 
an end the happy union which was begun on October i, 1840, 
when Thomas William Allies was married to Eliza Hall New- 
man. None who were privileged to know Mrs. Allies could 
ever forget her. The sparkle of the eye, the keen play of wit, 
the quenchless spirit of fun — often, it is to be feared, veiling a 
heart saddened by temporal trials — all this rises before the mem- 
ory when her name is mentioned. To those who knew her 
not, no amount of description would reproduce her charming, 
lovable personality. 

Mr. Allies has left us a noble record of her in his dedica- 
tion of A Lifers Decision. 

To my sole partner in these trials, the more helpless and 
yet the more courageous, the quicker to see the Truth, the 
readier to embrace it, the first to surrender her home in the 
bloom of her youth, who chose without shrinking the loss I 
had brought on her, and by her choice doubled my gain. 

The beautiful union between these two was not long severed. 
A little more than a year went by after Mrs. Allies' death be- 
fore she was joined by her husband in the eternal world. 

And here seems the right place to say a word about the 
one and only cause of complaint which we have in reading 
Miss Allies' book. Every man worthy of the name is more or 
less of a hero- worshipper, and the many hundreds who knew 
Mr. Allies, either personally or through his books, must have 
found an honorable niche for him among their intellectual idols. 
And for such as these, the second chapter of this book is pain- 
ful reading. That Allies should have been very deeply in love 
is most natural and entirely to his credit. That he should have 
confided his hopes, fears, aspirations, and joys to the pages of 
his private journal was equally natural. But where was the nec- 
essity of publishing these sacred and intimate confidences? In 
doing so his biographer has allowed her filial love to obscure 



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1907.] THOMAS WILLIAM ALLIES 33 1 

her judgment. This is precisely an example of the dangers to 
which writers are liable when they portray the life of a parent. 
They so often forget that what to them is unspeakably precious 
is apt to sound a jarring note to outsiders. Especially is this 
true when the confidences thus cast upon a rude and critical 
world are those of a man whose name we have learnt to regard 
as the equivalent of something unearthly and majestic and above 
the common herd of men. But, after all, this single error of 
judgment is well atoned for by the rest of the book; and its 
readers, while heartily thanking Miss Allies, will close its pages 
with a strengthened conviction that every day of that long life 
of ninety years was nobly spent; that the whole man — heart 
and soul — was given over to the service of God — first in search- 
ing after the truth, then in embracing it, when found, with a 
glorious disdain of consequences and at the cost of all that the 
world holds good ; and, finally, in imparting to others some of 
the enthusiastic love which filled his own soul for the sanctity, 
supremacy, and sublime grandeur of the Fisherman's Throne. 
To this last he gave himself almost wholly, except where the 
duties of his educational office intervened. " After the work of 
saving my soul," he writes in his Journal, ''it is my work in 
life to defend the See of Peter." And with what a wealth of 
learning, and in what noble, impassioned English was that work 
performed! His volumes abound in passages which can never 
die, and they come straight from the heart of their author. 
Surely, to take one example, it would be difficult to find any- 
where a more fascinating outburst of love and loyalty and de- 
votion to the Bride of Christ than the closing words of his 
Lifers Decision — words which may likewise fitly end this paper : 

O Church of the living God, Pillar and Ground of the 
Truth, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an 
army in battle array, O Mother ot Saints and Doctors, Mar- 
tyrs and Virgins, clothe thyself in the robe and aspect, as 
thou hast the strength, of Him whose Body thou art, the 
Love for our sake incarnate ; shine forth upon thy lost chil- 
dren, and draw them to the double fountain of thy bosom, the 
well-spring of Truth and Grace. 



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GLASTONBURY. 

BY ELLIS SCHREIBER. 

ONBURY, a small town in the county of 
lerset (formerly the district of the somer-scetas), 
at a remote period, an island formed by the 
trs of the River Brue and the tributary streams 
:h overflowed the fens stretching westward to 
the sea. Its name, in Anglo-Saxon Gl(Bst%ngabyrig^ " the isle of 
glass/' is said to be derived from the clear blue color of the 
surrounding water, glas in Welsh signifying blue. By the Bri- 
tons it was called Avalon, the isle of apples, the word aval be- 
ing Welsh for apple ; some writers, however, assert that this 
name was derived from that of a famous British chieftain, Ava- 
lor Avalloc. It was known to the Romans as insula Avallonia. 
Glastonbury is no longer an island; the marsh lands surround- 
ing it have long since been drained and converted into rich 
pastures. 

'^ Glastonia is a town nestled in a morass with no advantage 
of sight or pleasantness; it can only be reached on foot or on 
horseback." Thus in the early part of the twelfth century wrote 
William of Malmesbury, who may be termed the first historian 
of Glastonbury Abbey. His work entitled : De Antiquitate Glas- 
toniensis EccUsia contains all that had previously been written, 
traditional, legendary, and historical, concerning this favored 
spot where, in the very infancy of Christianity, the Gospel was 
first preached in Britain, and the earliest chapel erected. The 
account he gives thereof, referring back to the first century of 
the Christian era, is detailed and interesting ; but space does not 
permit us to review it here. 

During the period of the Saxon invasion Glastonbury had 
proved a suitable place for harboring a congregation of native 
Christians. But in 658 ''the one famous holy place of the con- 
quered Britons which had lived through the storm of foreign 
conquest," as Freeman terms it (Norman Conquest. Vol. I., p. 
436), fell into Saxon hands; a Saxon community of monks 
took possession of the wooden basilica which had replaced the 



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1907.] Glastonbury 333 

original oratory of the Blessed Virgin^ associated with the mem- 
ory of many saints of the Celtic race. In 708 Ine, king of 
the West Saxons, rebuilt the monastery, which he bountifully 
endowed, and erected the abbey church, the major ecclesia^ 
dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. 

From this period the history of Glastonbury may be con- 
sidered authentic; in the earlier times, where historic evidence 
is so scanty and legend abounds, it is difficult to draw the line 
of demarcation between truth and fiction. Until the founda- 
tion of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Glastonbury 
was the chief seat of learning in England. The town grew up 
around the Abbey as people desirous of living near its hal- 
lowed precincts settled there. Not only did the sanctuary be- 
come a favorite place of pilgrimage, but so highly was it rever- 
enced that kings and queens, archbishops and other prelates, 
coveted the privilege of interment there. The name of the town 
is asserted by some to have been taken from an English family, 
the Glaestings, who chose this spot for their settlement. 

King Ine's monastery maintained a great reputation until it 
was ravaged and despoiled, as were many other monasteries, by 
the Danes in the ninth century. Christian priests were slain at 
the altar by those worshippers of Woden, for the Northmen 
were still heathen. But under the rule of King Alfred, Wessex 
was delivered from the invaders, and religion once more revived. 

The next benefactor whose name is recorded in the annals 
of Glastonbury, and whose posthumous renown attracted many 
to the scene of his labors, was St Dunstan, a youth of noble 
birth, who at an early age was dedicated to the service of our 
Lady. This celebrated man was bom in the neighborhood of 
Glastonbury, and received his education from some Irish scholars 
who had taken up their abode there. Under their tuition he 
made extraordinary progress, and, in addition to his high liter- 
ary attainments, he excelled in painting and was a skillful worker 
in brass and iron. These accomplishments, united to most en- 
gaging manners, brought him into notice at the Court of King 
Athelstan, where the favor with which he was regarded excited 
the jealousy of the courtiers. During a long illness Dunstan 
vowed to renounce the brilliant future open to him and become 
a monk. On his recovery he received the religious habit and 
shortly after the sacrament of Holy Orders. 

On the accession of Edmund, successor to Athelstan, he was 



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334 GLASTONBURY [Dec, 

appointed Abbot of Glastonbury, where he introduced the strict 
Benedictine rule, and, with funds supplied to him by the king, 
repaired the havoc wrought by the Danes. On being raised to 
• the See of Winchester, he applied himself to effect the reform 
of the clergy ; all those whose manner of life was discreditable 
to religion were first reprimanded, then severely punished. The 
secular clergy who had usurped the place of the regulars and 
possessed themselves of the abbacies were expelled, and in the 
religious homes, both of men and women, strict monastic dis- 
cipline was enforced. Dunstan was presently made Archbishop 
of Canterbury; under his rule no less than forty-eight monas- 
teries were rebuilt or erected. 

Twenty- three years after his death the monks of Glaston- 
bury besought permission from the king to translate the saint's 
remains to their monastery. It was granted, and a company 
of monks repaired to Canterbury for the purpose. On their 
arrival they found the cathedral laid waste, the Danes having 
ravaged it ; yet they discovered among the ruins the tomb they 
were seeking, and found St. Dunstan's bones, the episcopal ring 
being still on his finger. On their return to Glastonbury, bear- 
ing the precious relics, they were received with great rejoic- 
ings. Fearing, however, lest at a later period the Archbishop 
of Canterbury might insist on the restoration of the relics to 
their first resting-place, the monks commissioned two of their 
number to deposit them in a place of secrecy, known to them- 
selves alone. The secret was only to be revealed when the last 
possessor of it should be in articulo mortis^ when it was to be 
communicated to another monk, so that one only should pos- 
sess it. The two brethren accordingly enclosed the bones in a 
coffin, and inscribed on it the words Sancti Dunstani^ and de- 
posited it in a hole which they dug near the entrance of the 
great church ; there it remained undisturbed for a hundred and 
seventy-two years. 

Meanwhile, according to Adam of Domerham, the chronicler 
who, after William of Malmesbury's death, continued his work 
as historian of Glastonbury, the Abbot Henry de Blois, brother 
to King Stephen, rebuilt the church called the major ecclesia^ 
and erected a new monastery on the foundations of the old, 
with a bell-tower, chapter- house, cloisters, infirmary, chapel, etc., 
a structure in fact which was described as ''a splendid large 
palace," in the Norman style, richly decorated. He bequeathed 



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1907.] GLASTONBURY 335 

a sum of money for the maintenance of a wax taper to be 
burnt perpetually before the image of the Blessed Virgin in the 
vetusta ecclesia; thus indicating that it was entirely distinct 
from the greater edifice of SS. Peter and Paul. But in the 
year 1184a great calamity occurred at Glastonbury; the whole 
monastery was destroyed by fire, with the exception of the 
chapel and one chamber^ which served as a refuge for the 
monks; the beautiful church shared the same fate, with its 
treasures and a large proportion of the venerated relics. After 
this lamentable event, the brethren were desirous of discovering 
the relics of St. Dunstan« and the secret of their interment not 
having been lost, the pavement was raised and beneath it the 
coffin containing them was found intact. 

Not only did the presence of the relics of St. Dunstan (at 
one time a most popular saint in England) attract many pil- 
grims to the shrine at Glastonbury, the tradition of Joseph of 
Arimathea's burial in the monks' cemetery led many devout 
persons to journey thither. The authority on which this belief 
rests are the words of an ancient British historian and bard, 
who writes: ''The disciples of St. Philip died in succession, 
and were buried in the cemetery ; among them Joseph of Mar- 
more, named of Arimathea, receives perpetual sleep. He lies 
near the south comer of the oratorio which is built of hurdles," 
The positive manner in which John Glaston, an historian of the 
fifteenth century, wrote in confirmation of the legend, caused 
the ancient name of St. Mary's Chapel to be changed into Jo- 
seph's Chapel, the appellation still attached to the beautiful 
ruins of the once favored sanctuary, not because it was dedi- 
cated to him, but because he originally erected it. 

The legend of the coming of Joseph of Arimathea has been 
immortalized in poetry as well as in prose, for not only was 
it he who first introduced the Christian faith into Britain, he 
is also said to have brought thither the Holy Grail (Sangreal), 
the chalice used by our Redeemer at the institution oi the 
Blessed Sacrament, or, as others say, the vessel wherein Joseph 
collected some of the Precious Blood shed upon the cross. 
Spenser, in the Faerie Queene (Book 12, Canto xliii.), writing 
in the sixteenth century, speaking of King Lucius, mentions 
this tradition : 

Who first received Christianity, 

The sacred pledge of Christ's Evangely; 



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336 Glastonbury [Dec., 

Yet true it is, that long before that day, 

Hither came Joseph oi Arimathy, 

Who brought with him the Holy Grayle (they say), 

And preacht the truth ; but since it greatly did decay. 

And in Tennyson's poem the following lines are found : 

The cup, the cup itself from which our Lord 
Drank at the last sad supper with His own, 
This from the blessed land of Aromat, 
After the day of darkness, when the dead 
Went wandering o*er Moriah — the good saint, 
Arimathean Joseph, journeying, brought 
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn 
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord. 

The Holy Grail was probably lost at the suppression of the 
monastery in Henry VIII.'s reign. The Holy Thorn, alluded 
to above, still exists in the Abbey precincts. Tradition asserts 
that when Joseph of Arimathea and his eleven companions, 
travel- worn and weary, reached the hill overlooking the Isle of 
Avalon, he planted there his pilgrim's staff. A stone now marks 
the spot where that staff struck root and budded. There for 
many centuries it flourished, always blossoming on Christmas 
Day. It branched into two trunks, the larger of which was 
cut down in the reign of Queen Elizabeth by a Puritan, who 
was only prevented from cutting down the other by an ill- aimed 
blow wounding his leg, and a thorn piercing his eye. The re- 
maining stem was hewn down, at the time of the great rebel- 
lion, by a fanatical soldier as a Popish relic. The Holy Thorn, 
a variety of the hawthorn, cratcegus^ was famous abroad as well 
as in England ; the Bristol merchants did a considerable trade 
by selling blossoms and leaves gathered from it. The tree 
propagated from the original one flowers twice a year ; the win- 
ter blossoms, which it puts forth at Christmas- time, are about 
twice as large as those of the ordinary hawthorn. 

The Holy Well, situated in an arched recess on the south 
side of the crypt, outside the foundation wall of the now ruined 
abbey, is said also to derive its origin from Joseph of Arima- 
thea, who by striking the ground with his staff, is said to have 
caused a stream of water to well up for the refreshment of the 
weary travelers. This spring, the existebce of which was for- 
gotten for several centuries, was in early times noted for the 



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1907.] Glastonbury 337 

miraculous cures effected by its waters ; many pilgrims jour- 
neyed thither to seek the aid of its healing power. The well 
was discovered in 1825 by a party of antiquarians searching for 
hidden antiquities. Whilst at work in the crypt, then choked 
up with rubbish, they came upon a flight of steps leading to 
the subterranean recess, where, at about ten or twelve feet be- 
low the surface of the ground, was the well, measuring two feet 
two inches in diameter; the spring which supplies it is still 
flowing. 

The disastrous fire which destroyed the vetusta ecclesia of 
the Blessed Virgin at Glastonbury, also ruined the major eccle- 
sia of SS. Peter and Paul, and the beautiful monastic edifice 
built by the munificence of Bishop Henry de Blois. The then 
King, Henry II., lost no time in rebuilding the church on a 
scale of great magnificence. He did not live to complete it, 
and after his death no funds were forthcoming to carry on the 
work, so that a period of a hundred and nineteen years elapsed 
before it was dedicated. Several successive abbots contributed 
to adorn and beautify the interior; the nave was vaulted and 
ornamented with splendid painting ; the high altar was decorated 
with an image of our Blessed Lady in a tabernacle described 
as of the highest workmanship ; the ** six goodly windows '' on 
each side of the choir were glazed — an uncommon luxury in 
those days; the great clock, the elegant choir screen and rood 
were added as years went on, as well as rich monuments and 
shrines. Of this once magnificent structure a long wall with a 
turret at each end, two finely carved doorways, and a few other 
ruins alone are left standing. 

The Abbey clock, which was placed in the south transept 
of the great church, was, according to the historian, '* remark- 
able for its possessions and spectacles." At the dissolution of 
the monastery, in 1539, it was taken to Wells, where it may be 
seen in the cathedral to this day. It is the oldest known clock, 
dating from the early part of the fourteenth century. The dial 
plate, six feet six inches in diameter, is contained in a square 
frame, and divided into three circles, marking the twenty- four 
hours of the day, the minutes, and the age of the moon. Above 
the dial figures of knights in armor, set in motion by machinery, 
represent a mimic tournament every hour on the striking of 
the bell. On the face of the clock are the words : Ne quid 

VOL. LXXXVI.^22 



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338 GLASTONBURY [Dec, 

pereatf with the name of the maker : Petrus Ligktfoot^ monackus^ 
fecit hoc opus. 

The monastery was also rebuilt on a grand scale, to judge 
by its ruins. It was enclosed by a high wall, which contained 
sixty acres within its circuit, and was complete in all its arrange- 
ments. The Abbot occupied a separate dwelling, south of the 
great hall. 

In the dormitory each monk occupied a separate chamber, 
in which was a narrow bedstead with a straw bed, a coarse 
blanket and bolster of straw or flock. By the bedside was a 
kneeling-desk with a crucifix over it ; besides another desk 
and table with shelves and drawers for books and papers, and 
one chair. In the corridors and in the middle of each dortoir 
were cressets or lanterns, wrought in stone with lights in 
them to give light to the monks when they rose at night to 
say matins. 

The above quotation is taken from Dugdale^s Monasticon^ 
Ed. 1655, in which a full description is given of each part of 
the monastery. In the guest-house all travelers were received, 
from the prince to the peasant, and entertained according to 
their rank and quality. The monks were bound to show this 
hospitality by the fifty- third chapter of their rule, wherein they 
are commanded to receive all comers as they would Christ him- 
self, who will hereafter say : ** I was a stranger and ye took 
Me in." 

The wooden cup used as a grace-cup by the monks after 
dinner is preserved at Wardour Castle. It is of Anglo-Saxon 
workmanship, and tradition asserts it to have been carved out 
of a piece of the Holy Thorn. The bowl, on which are figures 
of the twelve Apostles, rests on crouching lions ; on the lid the 
crucifixion is carved, with the Blessed Virgin and St. John. 
The cup holds two quarts and originally had eight pegs fixed 
one above another inside, dividing its contents into equal quan- 
tities of half-a-pint. This arrangement led to such vessels be- 
ing called by the name of peg- tankards. 

The inventory made by the Royal Commissioners in 1535 
shows the ornaments of the church, the jewels, the gold and 
silver plate, to have been of very great value. They were all 
delivered to the king, who himself acknowledged the receipt of 
them. The report of the Commissioners testifies to the good 



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1907.] Glastonbury - 339 

management of the Abbey by the Abbot Whiting, yet it shared 
the fate of all other religious houses at that unhappy time, when 
a storm of unbelief swept over the Church, and many of the 
venerable institutions she had founded went down in the de- 
structive cataclysm. The end of the last Abbot of Glastonbury, 
Richard Whiting, is pathetically described in a sermon preached 
by the Bishop of Clifton, on occasion of opening the new choir 
of Downside Abbey, September, 1905, from which the follow- 
ing extract is taken. 

Of all the touching and tragic scenes that were enacted 
during that bloody epoch, surely none is more replete with 
tragedy, or moves our pity more, than that which was per- 
petrated on a day in November of the year 1539, not many 
miles from the spot on which the modem Abbey of Downside 
stands. On a lonely eminence dominating the fair champaign 
below, as it stretches to the waters of the channel, may be seen 
a comely and venerable old man, over whose head eighty 
summers have passed. Around him press his executioners, 
busily arranging the ghastly apparatus of a felon's death. 
The gallows has been erected near the tower of St. Michael's 
(now vanished) church; the boiling cauldron and butcher's 
knife are ready. Naught has been brought or proven against 
the old man, save that he will not forfeit his allegiance to the 
Vicar of Christ ; or yield up his Abbey. He has led a blame- 
less life, a holy life ; he is beloved by all the countryside, 
over which he ruled with a father's sway. He is the last of 
the long line of Abbots of Glaston, and this spot of vantage 
from which he is compelled to look down upon his beloved 
Abbey has been brutally chosen for his murder, that he may 
drain the cup of bitterness to the dregs. "He took his death 
very patiently," wrote an unfeeling eye-witness of the butch- 
ery ; but had we been there, and had it been given to us to 
know the varied-emotions of his heart as he ascended the fatal 
ladder, what despondency joined with resignation, what fear 
mingled with love, what joy, yet merging in a sea of sorrow, 
should we not have found there. He clearly saw that soon 
the floodgates of error would be opened wide, and the waters 
of destruction sweep away long-cherished beliefs, banishing 
rites and ordinances that had been channels of grace to the 
people for a thousand years. The clean oblation, the holy 
sacrifice, would be abolished; no more would the sacred, 
time-honored chant resound along the aisles of his well-loved 
church, where the bodies of the saints reposed ; their shrines 



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340 GLASTONBURY [Dec., 

would be rifled and plucked down, his brethren done to death 
or dispersed, perhaps forever. This must have been the bit- 
terest draught of all to him, for the ties of consecrated love 
are as dear as those of kin, and he might be pardoned ii he 
gloried in all that his Order had achieved for the Island of 
Saints. Were they not her Apostles? Had they not given to 
Bngland many oi that illustrious line of sainted confessors 
and bishops, statesmen and writers ? Now he might exclaim : 
'' Our inheritance is turned to aliens, our house to strangers." 
But the noose is now drawn round his neck, the cart is driven 
away, and Richard Whiting takes his place among the white- 
robed army of martyrs encircling the throne of the Lamb that 
was slain. 

It was on Tor Hill that the last Abbot of Glastonbury was 
executed, with two of his monks, under the pretext that they 
had robbed Glastonbury Church. The Abbot's body was di- 
vided into four parts, according to the barbarous custom of the 
time, and sent to Wells, Bath, Ilchester, and Bridgewater. His 
head was placed over the Abbey gate. The lands were then 
sold, the property divided, and after they had been stripped of 
their treasures for the royal exchequer, the magnificent and 
venerable edifices were given up to pillage and desecration. In 
the reign of Queen Mary some of the monks petitioned her 
Majesty to *' raise their Abbey again,'' which was held to be 
the ''ancientest and richest in England." But the unsettled 
state of the realm, and the Queen's death, ended all hope of 
the restoration of Glastonbury Abbey. 

Amongst other traditions of Glastonbury in the olden time 
is that of its being the burial place of the renowned British 
King Arthur, the hero of early legend, represented as the flower 
of chivalry and of Christian valor. It is said that when mortal- 
ly wounded in his last great battle of Camleon in Cornwall, he 
bade his followers convey him to '^ the island-valley of Avilion," 
in order that he might in solitude prepare to depart out of 
this world. This scene has been the theme of many a bard's 
song, but none describes it so touchingly as the master-poet of 
the last century, Tennyson, in the "Morte d'Arthur." The 
hero speaks to his favorite knight, the brave Sir Bedivere: 

But now farewell, I am going a long way 
With these thou seest — if indeed I go 



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1907.] Glastonbury 341 

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) 

To the island- valley of Avilion ; 

Where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow, 

Nor ever wind blows loudly, but it lies 

Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, 

And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea, 

Where I will heal me of niy grievous wound. 

Formal search was not made for the grave until the twelfth 
century, when the spot, marked by two sculptured crosses, was 
found. At the depth of seven feet from the surface a flat stone 
was unearthed bearing in rude characters the words in Latin * : 
Here lies the renowned King Arthur, buried in the island Ava- 
lonia. Below was a huge oak cofHn, which, when opened, was 
seen to contain the King's bones, which were of a large size ; 
on the skull were the marks of ten wounds. The same cofGn 
contained the bones of Queen Guinevere. These remains were 
removed to a chapel in the great church. 

The town of Glastonbury has in itself little to attract the 
traveler. The population numbers about 5,cxx); the only build- 
ing of any note is the Pilgrim's Inn, a house of considerable archi- 
tectural beauty, built and once maintained at the expense of one 
of the Abbots in the fifteenth century. Every visitor was treated 
as a guest, and allowed to remain for two days. When first the 
relics at Glastonbury attracted a great number of pilgrims to 
the shrine, they found accommodation in the Abbey; then a 
hospice for their benefit was erected adjoining the monastery 
walls ; and when this proved insufficient for their entertainment, 
they were lodged at the Pilgrim's Inn, which was connected 
with the monastery by a subterranean passage. In the exten- 
sive cellars rises a spring of water, beside it is a stone seat 
whereon penitents are traditionally said to have sat up to their 
knees in water. More probably, however, if this practice really 
existed, it was destined rather for ills of the body than of the 
soul, since we read that at one time the mineral waters rising 
at the foot of Tor Hill, below which Glastonbury is situated, 
attained considerable notoriety on account of their health-re- 
storing qualities. 

^Hiejactt et stpuUus inclUus Rex Arthurus, In insula AvaUnia, 



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LISHEEN; OR. THE TEST OF THE SPIRITS.* 

BY CANON P. A. SHEEHAN. D.D.. 
Author of ''My New CuraU" ; " Luki Delmtit'* ; " GUnanaar:* eU. 

Chapter XIII. 

NEMESIS. 

'O womaiii mother or maiden, ever utterly loathes 
that which she has once loved. Her usually 
flexible nature seems to be hardened by that 
passion into a shape which cannot be bent back- 
ward or broken. There may be anger, jealousy, 
hate, under which her soul will vibrate painfully. But, at length 
and at last, it settles down into one fixed poise, which seems 
as unchangeable as the earth's axis towards the sun. 

Hence Mabel Willoughby, after her baptism of tears, took 
the regenerated soul of her husband unto her own, and settled 
down into a calm attitude of resignation and affection. The 
effect on Outram was almost startling. The unavowed forgive- 
ness of his wife for his deadly deception touched unto better 
purposes and larger issues a spirit that had grown old in du- 
plicity ; and he came to worship, with a kind of doglike up- 
look, the woman whom he had betrayed, and who had so 
nobly absolved him. Hence, during these fleeting summer and 
autumnal months, he lost all his cunning, all his cynicism ; and 
went about a humble and deferential follower of his wife, ask- 
ing for and obeying her commands ; whilst she, in turn, seemed 
to regard him with a kind of respect for his misfortune and 
forgiven fault. 

But, where men forgive, Nature and her handmaid, Nemesis, 
are sometimes relentless ; and certainly, in some mysterious 
manner, the magnanimity of men is not imitated by that hidden 
and masked executioner, called Fate. And so it happened that 
one day Outram, who was fleeing from Fate, fell into its arms; 
and expiating his sin, liberated at the same time the woman 
who had been his victim and pardoner together. 

One autumn d^^y, unlike autumn however in a strong breeze 

* Copyright. Z906. Longmans, Green & Co. 



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I907.] LISHEEN 343 

that curled the waters down in a Kerry fiord^ which had also 
become a fashionable watering-place, a curious picture could 
have been seen. 

There was a strong sunlight on the beach, where children 
were building sand-castles; and the old were sitting musing; 
and the young were gaily emerging from the bathing boxes 
for the afternoon dip in the sea. This was commonplace enough; 
but what relieved it was a strange figure of a girl, evidently 
an Oriental or a quadroon, clothed all in white, except for the 
red sash that bound her waist, and the red tut ban, with a gold 
tuft or crest, that hardly bound her black and glossy hair. Her 
feet were bare, but were ringed with silver anklets. Her arms 
too were covered with some kind of bracelets in chased silver, 
and she stood motionless as a statue, except that the wind 
caught, from time to time, her white skirt, or her red sash, 
and swung it around, and threw it back again. But there, 
against the background of the sea, green and white, and on the 
level gray sands, she stood, statuesque and imposing; and many 
a curious eye watched her, and many a curious guess was made 
about her nationality and her presence in this obscure and re- 
mote place. 

Just a little inkling of her position might have been given 
by the presence also of a lady and gentleman, who sat about 
twenty or thirty yards behind her on a little sand-hill where 
sea thistles grew. They were both silent, sketching furiously 
the figure before them ; and occasionally dabbing in some bright 
colors from a palette that lay between them. 

After about three-quarters of an hour, during which the 
white figure never stirred from its position, the lady and 
gentleman rose; the latter said something aloud so that the 
girl might hear ; and instantly, just touching her turban and her 
black hair with her fingers with a gesture of feminine coquetry, 
she turned aside, and walked with a stately and dignified step 
towards the only hotel this remote watering-place could boast 
of. Many eyes followed her; many stared at her rudely; but 
she looked over all with a certain calm grace and dignity that 
made the rude and the insolent and the curious lower their 
gaze as she passed. 

That evening the only passengers that stepped from the 
stage-coach, which plied between the village and Killarney, 
were Outram and his wife. 



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344 LISHEEN [Dec, 

They had come to spend a week or two of the closing au- 
tumnal holidays here and there on the loveliest seacoast in 
the world; and Outram, always fond of society and excite- 
ment, now sought the most secluded and hidden places, as if 
he dreaded the faces of strangers, or was jealous of aught but 
the companionship of his wife. 

He had said to Mabel, just as they approached the hotel: 

^^ Here we can manage, I think, a quiet week or two. I 
understand the season has been a poor one; and we shall be 
almost alone.'' 

And he stepped from the coach with the agility of one who 
just then was relieved from some apprehension, and had sought 
and found a respite or a rest. And they were fortunate in 
securing the two best rooms in the hotel — those overlooking a 
long strip of laureled garden, over whose foliage could be seen 
the green wastes of the sea. 

Yet, next morning after breakfast, to Mabel's intense sur- 
prise, Outram came to her and said, in a pitiful way, that 
closed all questioning: 

'^ I think we had better clear out from here, Mabel. I have 
had a wretched night, full of all apprehensions and fearsi I 
wish I had that ring from Maxwell." 

And he looked so ill that she forbore asking questions. 

The hotel proprietor was alarmed and disturbed. He had 
counted on such eligible guests for a fortnight at least. 

" Anything wrong with the room ? We can easily get you 
another I Perhaps you would like your meals alone ? " etc. 

To all which anxious interrogatories Outram could only say : 

"No, no; all is right But—" 

And they departed. Mabel mused all the way in silence, 
until they came to their old quarters on Caragh Lake. High 
up on the hills was the bell-tent of Maxwell, with the little 
red pennant fluttering in the breeze. 

'' I hope Maxwell is here," he said. ^^ I shall demand my 
ring." 

** He cannot be here," said Mabel, wishing it were so. "You 
know he's married to some English girl along the Dingle Coast; 
and I heard they have gone abroad." 

The sudden hope died away from Outram's face, and left it 
dark and gloomy as before. 

They had rooms in the hotel; and the unhappy man, hunted 



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1907.] LISHEEN 345 

by Fate, had one night's rest But the next day he looked 
fearful and unhappy and apprehensive, watching in a furtive 
manner the guests at table or in the corridors, and hiding be- 
hind curtains when the great stage coaches came with their 
burden of passengers, and went 

His wife could not help noticing it, and his dread became 
contagious. Both felt now the shadow of a great fear looming 
down on them; the meshes of Fate closing in around them. 
But, by common consent, they agreed that this Fate was to be 
met in silence. Mabel asked no questions; and Outram prof- 
fered no suggestions. 

The second day passed quietly over them, Outram having 
spent the greater part of it alone on the lake ; and even there, 
seeking the shadows aud sequestered places rather than the 
open, where eyes, themselves unseen, might rest upon him. In 
the evening he was in excellent spirits, and said after dinner to 
his wife: 

^' I think, after all, Maxwell may be here. At least, I imag- 
ine I saw that young barbarian who used to accompany him, 
and whom once, you remember, I nearly drowned at the pier. 
I must make inquiries.'' 

He did. Yes ; Maxwell was here for a few days' fishing, be- 
fore the close of the season. He lived alone in his bell-tent up 
there in the valley of the hills, and saw no one. He had been 
married to a great English heiress, who would now inherit un- 
told wealth ; for look I here is a paragraph in the Sentinel to 
the effect that Hugh Hamberton, Esq., J.P., Brandon Hall, 
was killed by a fall from a cliff in the neighborhood of his home 
last Monday, whilst endeavoring to save the lives of two chil- 
dren who had been suddenly surrounded by the incoming tide. 

^^ Lucky dog I " said Outram. '^ He was always lucky, ex- 
cept — when he lost you, Mabel I " 

And Mabel smiled sadly. 

Another day rolled by, and after breakfast Outram again 
recurred to the matter. 

" I'll go up this afternoon or to-morrow and interview him," 
said Outram. '' It will be interesting to hear of his adventures 
as a farm laborer, and I mjust have that ring. Will you come, 
Mabel? We can drive up after lunch." 

And Mabel shook her head, and said nothing. Outram did 
not go to seek Maxwell. He spent the day again on the lake. 



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346 LISHEEN [Dec, 

After dinner that evening he strolled through the grounds 
of the hotel, smoking, and seeking,, as was now his wont, se- 
clusion in the deep thickets and shrubberies that almost made 
night of day in the place. He seemed to have no fear now, as 
he walked in deepest solitude to and fro, thinking, thinking of 
many things; and yearning for that strange talisman to which 
he attached such superstitious importance. The day was de- 
clining; but red clouds hung in masses above his head. 

Once, as he was turning in his walks, he thought he saw a 
glint of color amongst the trees; but concluded that it was a 
mistake; and he gave himself up again to imagination, ending 
each strophe of his fancy by wishing he had that ring once 
more in his possession. He despised himself for attaching such 
importance to so paltry a thing; but a spell was upon him 
which he could not shake aside. 

Suddenly a low voice, scarcely raised above a whisper,, broke 
on his startled ears, and made his heart stand still in terror. 
It came from behind the thick bole of a huge sycamore, and 
was chanting as if in a soliloquy the following words in Sanskrit : 

'' Salutations to thee, O my Father I Salutations to thee, O 
thou giver of boons I Why hast thou hidden thy face from thy 
slave, and made night of her life ? Behold Brahma has brought 
me to thee across seas and mountains. I have found thee ; and 
shall not let thee go I" 

Outram stood still as one suddenly paralyzed. The voice 
of the girl went on in a similar recitative, relating her love for 
her benefactor ; her pursuit of him through India and Europe, 
and hither; her protestation of fidelity; her determination never 
to leave him again. Well he knew the terrible scorn and irony 
that were beneath her words; and her grim purpose that he 
should not escape her. He thought to fly ; but knew at once 
that she would follow him, and reach him in unexpected places. 
There was nothing for it but to face at once his evil genius, 
and ask her what she required. 

He waited for a moment to steady his nerves, threw away 
his cigar, and stood opposite the girl. 

She seemed to be taken aback for a moment; but looked 
at him with an air of deprecation and that moistening of the 
eyelids that he well knew concealed a purpose not to be shaken 
— ^a character not to be angered, or frightened— only a grim 
resolution to follow and follow to the end. 



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1907.] LISHEEN 347 

^^Satiral '' be said sternly, and as if asking a question. 

" Yes, my Lord ; your slave and bondswoman ! " 

She beld her hands hanging down clasped before her, and 
her great eyes wandered over his face. 

"What has brought you hither? Why have you come to 
disturb my peace ? '* 

'' Why does the moon hang round her mother, Earth ? " she 
replied. ''Why do the rivers run to the sea ? Why do the tides 
come and go at a secret biddance ? " 

" Yes, yes '* ; he said impatiently. " I know all that jargon* 
But what do you want? I have but little money'' — he put 
his hand in his pocket, and drew out some loose silver— ''and 
cannot promise you more. You have a situation, have you not ? 
I saw you with some persons over there at Waterville.'' 

She put aside the money proffered, gently but with some 
disdain, and looked at him with brimming eyes. 

He got angry at this. It was an unreasonable sting, and 
therefore an invincible thing. 

"You know I'm married," he said, "and you should also 
know that the past is past, and to be forgotten utterly; that 
European ways ar« not the same as those of India ; and that I 
cannot allow you to follow me here ! " 

"My Lord is angry with his servant?" she said. "What has 
his servant done to create anger ? The past is not past ; for there 
is no past, nor future, for the children of Brahma, the Eternal." 

" Look here, Satira," he said, " that jargon is all right be- 
yond the Red Sea; but we cannot listen to it here. Again I 
tell you that this is Europe ; and that our ways are not yours. 
You cannot come into my house. That's impossible. I cannot 
receive you. Why can't you remain as you are? Are the 
people kind to you ? " 

" Kind ? Yes ; but they are also kind to their dog. What 
is kindness? Will the gleaner take an ear of com when he can 
get a sheaf? Will my Lord drink water when he can have 
the grape- juice of the vineyard?" 

Outram was sorely puzzled what to do. How to get rid of 
this girl, with her brimming eyes, her deadly and tenacious pur- 
pose, her Eastern fanaticism, he knew not. 

" Satdra," he said, lowering and softening his voice, until it 
became almost caressing, " you once cared for me ? We were 
once friends ? " 



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348 LISHEEN [Dec, 

^' Nay, nay '* ; she said, ^' not friends. The slave is not the 
friend of her master ; the worshipper is not the friend of Brahma/' 

He saw it was useless. But now the evening had deepened 
down. The lights were twinkling in the hotel beyond. He 
must soon return; and — with such a companion! He made a 
final effort. 

''Cornel'' he said, and he led the way through the shrub- 
bery by a bypath down to the pier, where the little punt was 
moored. 

When the girl, walking by his side, saw him unloose the 
boat, and invite her towards it, she stepped back. But he used 
gentle words of command, and represented that here alone could 
there be the solitude required for the explanation that he 
deemed it necessary to give, because she was so slow to under- 
stand. Yet she was fearful ; and watched him with her large 
eyes open and studying every feature and play of his face to 
see what was his design. 

At last, impatiently, he coiled up the rope in the boat, and 
sitting down, drew away from the pier. Then, in despair at 
the thought of his escaping her, she cried to him, and stretched 
out her hands. He drew back gently ; and gently helped her 
into the boat. Then when she had seated herself he pulled out 
into the lake. A half- moon rose in the south and threw its 
silver over tree and lake and mountain ; and the white dress of 
the girl shone above the darkling waters beneath. 

Darby Leary, in the free hour after his master's dinner, 
had come down to the lake, and, with the view of catching a 
few trout or pike for Noney, had set his night-lines amongst 
the sedge, and was calmly enjoying the fragrance of a cigarette. 
He had now advanced beyond brown paper; and could smoke 
as many deadly cigars as his master. Once, unfortunately, he 
had the chance of a cigar; and this ruined his taste; so that, 
under the influence of that experience, there was always a 
little contempt and sense of disappointment under the more 
modest and less dangerous cigarette. But Darby was not one 
to quarrel with fate. He took his pleasures as they came ; and 
only dreamed sometimes of better things. He lay coiled up in 
a bunch of heather and ferns; and was sinking into a kind of 
delightful coma, when the hollow sound of the oar and the 
light splash of water aroused him. 

"Who the d ," thought Darby, "could be out at this 



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1907.] LISHEEN 349 

hour except a poacher like meself ? The gintry are at their 
dinner. I hope they won't pull up my night-lines/' 

He drew further back, took the cigarette from** his mouth, 
lest the smoke should betray him, and watched. Presently he 
saw clearly in the moonlight, about a hundred yards from shore, 
the white glint of a lady's dress, and then the dark form before 
her leaning forward and backward at the push and draw of the 
oars. A breeze sprang up, and curled the waters of the lake, 
blurring the shadow of the woman's dress, and swaying the 
tree-tops above Darby's head. 

'' I didn't like the look of the sky to-night," thought Darby. 
" If I were thim I'd go home." 

And then he saw the punt draw into the shadows, and she 
stood still, swaying and rocking on the light waves. Darby 
leaned down his head trying to catch a word of the conversa- 
tion. Not a sound reached him, but he saw clearly the man 
gesticulating, and once a little scream from the woman crossed 
the waters, as she clutched the edge of the boat, when it rocked 
too wildly. 

*' They're gintry, begobs," thought Darby. "But what a 
quare thing to come out on sich a night. They have their 
own ways, like common people ; and I misdoubt but that there's 
some mischief there." 

This made him think of his own little wife at home; and 
he couldn't help saying: 

" Ah, Noney, sure 'tis you're the jewel intirely." 

A half-hour passed by. The breeze died out, sprang up 
again in fiercer gusts, died away again, and then swept down 
in a hurricane that blew seething waves at Darby's feet. 

"Begobs, I must warn them," thought Darby. " If they don't 
shtop their coasterin' and codraulin', they'll be cool enough be- 
fore mornin', I'm thinkin'." 

He put his hands to his mouth, and shouted across the tum- 
bling waters: 

"There's a big wind comin'down; an' ye'll get swamped." 

Apparently they didn't hear him. He again shouted in a 
superior accent, borrowed for the occasion: 

" Hallo, there, in the punt I " 

A faint " Hallo I " came back. 

"They're dhrunk or mad," thought Darby. 

" Get home out o' dat," said Darby, again shouting through 



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350 LISHEEN [Dec, 

his hands. ^^ Don't you see the wather? Pull in, or ye'U be 
drownded! '* 

This at last seemed to awaken the rower; for he drew his 
punt around and pulled shorewards. 

But when he got out of the shelteted waters, and found the 
boat rocking dangerously, he tried to get back. But this was 
not easy. 

'^Keep her head to the north/' shouted Darby, "and pull 
in here." 

The rower, now alarmed, tried to do so; and with a few 
strong pulls, he sent the punt driving through the seething 
waters. But wind and wave were too much for him. These 
tempests, which rise so suddenly on mountain lakes, and as 
suddenly subside, raise dangerous and choppy waves, in which 
very often six and eight-oared boats perish. The light punt 
had no chance there, although just now driven by a man ren- 
dered desperate by a double terror. He struggled furiously, 
feeling that his only chance was to cut through the waters, and 
not to leave the frail little skiff at their mercy for an instant 
But Nature and, as he thought, Nemesis were too much. The 
thought of this girl, who had traveled half the globe to avenge 
his desertion or cruelty, and the thought that his talisman 
would now have been in his possession, had he not neglected 
the opportunity, smote him together ; and with a kind of groan 
or cry of despair, he threw up the oars and folded his arms 
in defiance. In an instant the boat was swung round, lifted up, 
and capsized; and Outram and the girl were in the trough of 
the waves. 

He made no attempt to save himself or her. He flung up 
his hands and went down like lead. Satdra's dress kept her 
floating, even on the turbulent seas, for awhile; but her cour- 
age too was departing, and she was beginning to see Fate in 
the coincidence of meeting Outram and her death, when a 
rough form clove through the waves, and a rough voice shouted, 
whilst he spat the water from his mouth : 

" Hould on ; an' — for — the life — of ye — don't ketch me ! " 

With her Eastern stoicism, she complied. 

"Now," spluttered Darby, "jest lay yer hand — on me — 
shoulder — ^but don't ketch me for yer life." 

She calmly obeyed him; and Darby towed the girl ashore. 

When he had pulled her up amongst the sedge and set her 



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1907.] LISHEEN 351 

on her feet, and got back his breath, he was the most thunder- 
stricken man on this planet. The dark face, the black hair now 
tossed wildly down on breast and shoulders^ the white dress 
and red sash, completely bothered him. She stood panting and 
staring at him, and then got breath to say: 

" Tank you ! Ver' much tanks I '' and strode away, leaving 
little rivers of water as she moved. 

Darby was too much surprised to follow or ask a question. 
He went home to dry himself; and in reply to the astonished 
queries of his little wife, he only said mysteriously: 

''The quarest thing ye ever hard. But whisht, till I see 
the mastherl" 



Chapter XIV. 

AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY. 

When Darby did see the ''master," he wrapped himself up 
in a cloak of mystery, that used to be exasperating, but was 
now only amusing, to Maxwell. He had learned much and 
profited wisely. 

" Where were you last evening. Darby ? ** he said. " You 
never returned home after dinner.'' 

" Sich a thing I " said Darby. 

" I suppose the attractions of home life and Noney are too 
much for you?" said Maxwell. 

"The quarest thing yer 'anner iver hard of," said Darby. 

"Well, I'll dock you a quarter's wages in future if you 
don't mind your business," said Maxwell. 

Thus recalled to practical life. Darby commenced his narra- 
tive. 

"I was goin' down the hill," said he, "sayin' me prayers, 
bekase Noney do be complaining that I do be so long at 'em 
that I keeps the supper cooling, whin, lol and behold you, I 

saw the punt on the lake. ' Who the d are out coolin' their- 

selves at this hour of night?' sez I to meself. 'They must be 
the quare people out an' out to be boatin' at sich an hour.' 
So I watched 'em; an' begobs I aimed me watchin' well." 

Maxwell grew attentive. It was so like something he had 
formerly seen, and which had changed the whole course of his 
life. 



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353 LISHEEN [Dec, 

'^ Here I '* he said, flinging a cigarette to Darby, who now 
got into the full swing of his narrative. 

*' There was a lady an' gintleman, he pullin' an' she steerin* 
the boat, ontil they got out of the rough wathers and pulled 
into the shallows where we hooked the salmon." 

Maxwell nodded. 

^^ Well, there they wor, talkin' an' codraulin', an' they niver 
see the wind comin' down from the hills, and risin' the lake 
like mad. Thin I halloed to 'em; an' they didn't hear me, 
they wor so occupied wit' aitch other. I halloed agin. Thin 
the gintleman saw his danger; an' he pulled out. But the wind 
was too much for him, and the wathers wor too shtrong. Have 
you a light about you, yer 'anner?" he cried, suddenly stop- 
ping, and addressing Maxwell. 

Maxwell flung him a box of wax vestas and waited. He 
knew from experience there was no use in hurrying Darby. 

Darby smoked placidly; and then resumed: 

^'But, begobs, he could handle the oar well. 'Twas a pity, 
out an' out — I tould him hould her head to the says — for 
she was bobbin' like a cork — An' he did — But — thin — a 
gusht of wind as from a smith's bellows — hit him — an' he flung 
up his hands — an' wint down like a cannon-ball." 

Maxwell had to wait a long time ; but he was afraid to show 
much impatience or interest 

^'The lady floated jest like a wather-lily with her white 
gownd spreadin' out all round her — an', begobs I I couldn't 
help it — in I wint, clothes an' all, more betoken — I got the 
divil an' all of an atin' from Noney about them — an' shwam to 
her — Begor, she was cool as a cucummer — bobbin' up an' 
down — ^ Hould up,' sez I, ^ an' don't ketch me for the life of 
ye ' — Bekase these wimmen put the glaum on you, whin they're 
drownin' — an' pull you down wid 'em — But, begobs ! — this 
wan puts her hand — on me showlder — as cool as if we wor goin' 
out fer a dance — an' I pulled her safe and sound — from the 
wathers." 

Maxwell was now almost excited; but he dared not say a 
word ; and, after a long pause for admiration. Darby resumed : 

^^Thin kem the quarest thing of all — bekase — when I con- 
fronted her — I said — that av it wasn't the ould bye himself in 
the shape av a woman — an' they say he appears that way some- 
times — ^it was the ould bye's wife — She wos as black as the 



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1907.] LISHEEN 353 

ace of shpades — she bad big gowld rings in ber ears, an' on 
ber arrums — ' Tank you/ says sbe, ' tank you ver' kindly/ 
and aiF sbe walked, like tbe Quane of Sbayba — You could 
knock me down wid a fedder I " 

'' You must get a leatber medal for tbis. Darby/' said Max^ 
well. " Only you're telling a d— — d pack of lies. You were 
poacbing, you ruffian, and you fell in." 

'Ton me sowkins/' said Darby. ''An', more betoken, I 
tbink— " 

He stopped suddenly. 

" Wbat do you tbink ? " asked Maxwell impatiently. 

" I tbink," said Darby, " but I ain't sure and sartin, tbat 
tbe gintleman wos tbe same as give me a cowld batb in tbe lake 
before. His turrn bave come now." 

Maxwell jumped up. 

"Outram? Do you mean Mr. Outram?" 

" Begor, I don't know bis name or address," said Darby. 
"But I tbink 'twas tbe same." 

" Why ? Wbat makes you tbink so ? You couldn't see 
him ? " asked Maxwell. 

"The moon wos shinin'," said Darby, "but that 'ud make 
no differ. But I tbink 'twas tbe way he dhrew himself back 
and forrard. I knew his shtroke; an' a good shtrong shtroke 
be bad." 

" And the woman ? The lady ? You never saw ber be- 
fore ? " 

" Oh, begor, no ; I can take me Bible oath on that," said 
Darby. " If sbe wasn't a furriner, or a wild Ingun, sbe black- 
ened ber face a purpose." 

Tbe thought was opportune; and struck Maxwell silent, al- 
though be still but half believed all tbat bis henchman said. 
He said at length: 

" How many have you told of this affair ? " 

"Divil a wan but yer 'annerl" said Darby. 

"Not even Noney?" 

"Oyeb, ketch me I You can't tell the tbruth to a 'uman. 
You'd never bear tbe ind of it." 

" You're quite sure ? " 

" Shure and sartin," said Darby. 

"Then keep it close," said Maxwell. "If all you say is 
true, there's a mystery somewhere, and you may get involved. 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 33 



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354 LISHEEN [Dec., 

By the way, did you ever tell any one about the ducking Out- 
ram gave you ? '* 

^' Divil a wan/' said Darby. '^ Oyeh, what am I sayin' ? 
Yerra, sure I tould half the parish ; and tould 'em too that I'd 
be even wid him wan day." 

'^ Precisely I Now, take care, and keep a silent tongue in 
your head, or that will come against you. Many a man has 
been hanged for less." 

And Maxwell knew that he had closed Darby's tongue on 
that subject forever. 

He called down to the hotel in the afternoon, inquired and 
found that Outram and Mabel were registered as guests, asked 
to see them, and saw Mabel alone. 

She was anxious and terrified enough ; and made no secret 
of the cause. Outram had dined, and gone out, and had not 
been seen since. He had been much frightened and disturbed 
these last days^why, Mabel could not conjecture. He had 
been anxious to change from place to place; and appeared to 
be haunted by some fear ; and she didn't know — she feared to 
utter what she thought. 

The hotel was in commotion. The shadow of a great fear 
was over the place. Something had happened. There was one 
being at least in terrible distress; and she the proudest and 
haughtiest, who would not deign to speak to any one. It was 
interesting, and the guests gathered here and there in little 
knots and nooks, and whispered and pointed and conjectured, 
as is the way with these creatures, when one of their class is 
in trouble. 

Then a search-party was organized, with Maxwell at their 
head. And they had not gone far, when they found the shat- 
tered punt amongst the sedges that lined the lake; and, later 
on, the oars floating ; and, later on, a man's felt hat, which was 
unquestionably Outram's. And Maxwell had to tell Mabel the 
sad news there in the very portico of the hotel, where barely 
twelve months ago Outram was showing his talisman to an ad- 
miring group, and he himself had known that it was all over be- 
tween himself and his fair cousin forever. 

He was uttering the usual commonplaces, ^' the vacant chaff 
well-meant for grain," that are said on such occasions, when a 
lady appeared, and just behind her came a perambulator, pushed 
by a dark young girl, clothed in white but for a red sash 



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1907.] LISHEEN 355 

around her waist, and a red fillet in her hair. The lady stopped 
to speak a word of sympathy to Mabel; the perambulator 
stopped also ; and Maxwell had an opportunity of studying the 
dark, immobile features of Satara. The girl looked around her 
in a cool, impassive way, resting her great eyes solemnly on 
Mabel, and just glancing incuriously at Maxwell. He was so 
absorbed in his study of her, that he was quite oblivious of the 
conversation between the ladies, until he heard the words : 

''Yes; it was a sudden and dangerous squall. My ayah 
was out also for a walk, and came home drenched. I feared 
she would be ill, as she is not used to this changeable climate.'* 

Satara smiled, showing her white teeth, and passed on with 
the perambulator. 

"Who are these?" asked Maxwell. 

'' Anglo-Indians," said Mabel, with a little shudder. ''They 
came here only yesterday." 

"And that is a native, I suppose?" he asked. 

"Yes; a native nurse, who has become attached to them." 

" I suppose you will return home at once, Mabel ? " he said 
kindly. " I fear there is but little use in your remaining here." 

" I should like to remain," she said, " while there is still a 
little hope." 

He was silent. 

After a pause she said: 

" Ralph was about to visit you yesterday afternoon, partly 
in courtesy, partly on business. Can you imagine what it was ? " 

"I suppose about that wretched ring. Outram attached a 
superstitious importance to the thing." 

"I wonder would it have saved him?" she said musingly. 
" He often said : ' I wish I had it back I I wish I had it back I 
I should not have parted with it.' " 

"I don't know!" said her cousin. "Perhaps I should have 
sent it to him. It was useless to me. But, you know, Mabel, 
he had a way of setting you up against him by the manner he 
asked, or demanded, a favor. He was so peremptory. I sup- 
pose it was his Indian training." 

" I suppose so," she said meekly. 

"Well, in case you decide to leave for home, that is, when 
you are assured that all hope is abandoned, you'll send for 
me, won't you ? " 

" Certainly. I shall claim your help." 



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356 LISHEEN [Dec, 

Then after a pause: 

''I haven't asked about Mrs. Maxwell. She's well?'' 

"Yes, indeed; but I haven't heard for a few days/' 

''Then there was no truth in the newspaper report about 
your father-in-law?" 

"What?" he cried. "What report?" 

" I shouldn't have mentioned it But there was a paragraph 
a day or two ago in the paper that Mr. Hamberton — is that 
the name ? — was killed in a heroic attempt to save some children 
from drowning 1 " 

"My Godl I never heard it. This comes from my hatred 
of newspapers. What paper was it, Mabel? Wonder Claire 
never wrote me." 

'' I think it was some local paper/' she replied. " I'm sor- 
ry I told you. There seems to be some Fate pursuing us." 

Horrified at the thought of Hamberton's death, Maxwell 
soon forgot all about Outram. He had to make his own pre- 
parations for leaving immediately for home; and gave orders 
to have his tent struck, and all arrangements made for departure. 

All that weary day Mabel kept her room, venturing out but 
once or twice to see a messenger, take a telegram, or send a 
message to her father. She was quite prepared to see in the 
catastrophe the hand of Fate. It did not come quite unex- 
pected. Strange histories end strangely; and a career of du- 
plicity, if not of crime, could only terminate consistently in a 
weird and tragic manner. Yet the new-bom love that Mabel 
bore towards her husband made his unhappy death doubly pain- 
ful. The woman's soul was disappointed of its ambition to con- 
secrate and make happy a life that she had rescued from worse 
than death. It was a sense, therefore, of nobler sadness that 
weighed her down, a sense of lost opportunities, of a life which 
she might have ennobled, just snatched from her hand by death. 
" Fortunately," she thought, " it was all natural and honorable. 
Outram had not gone down in disgrace, nor by his own hand, 
nor under dark circumstances. A sudden mountain squall, un- 
foreseen and unimagined; a frail boat; and that was all. At 
least, the lynx eyes of society could see nothing there. There 
could be no room for scorn in the pity that met her from so 
many eyes." 

One thing seemed to embarrass her, as the evil day wore 
on towards night. She found that she never left her room, but 



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1907.] LISHEEN 357 

that dark Indian girl was somewhere in her path. In the cor- 
ridor, on the stairs, everywhere she went, there was that strange 
girl, sometimes playing with the children, sometimes alone and 
crooning some old Indian rhyme about her gods; sometimes 
knitting, as those dreadful tricoteuses on their three-legged stools 
under the guillotine in the Terror ; but always there^ and always 
rolling round her great eyes, and letting them fall and burn on 
the white, beautiful face that was trying to conceal its grief. 
During the day Mabel became gradually uneasy. Towards 
night she became fascinated and alarmed. She didn't know 
what to make of it. Once, in the course of the evening, she 
was coming down the stairs as Satdra was going up. The latter 
stood aside and stared. A strong light fell from a window on 
the face of the girl. Mabel noticed that she looked old, strangely 
old — that she was a woman, although at a distance she seemed 
hardly more than a child. And there was always that strange, 
inquiring, half- triumphant stare, as of one who could be de- 
spised, but could not be put aside; as of one who seemed to 
claim a co-partnership in the agony of the woman, although 
her position would not allow her to presume to express it. 

As the evening advanced towards night, the idea sprang up 
in Mabel's mind that in some mysterious manner this girl was 
connected with her husband's death; and it was almost with a 
gasp of pain that she remembered the words: ''My ayah, too, 
was out for a walk, and came home drenched." 

What could take that girl, who shivered under the sunshine, 
out under the evening's chills ? 

But then the idea of connecting her husband with the Indian 
servant was preposterous ; and Mabel began to fear that, owing 
to sleeplessness and anxiety, perhaps her own imagination was 
conquering her reason. But there is that curious subter- reason, 
or intuition, or whatever you wish to call it, in some minds 
that anticipates all kinds of revelation, and jumps at its own 
conclusions with a sure and certain foot. And Mabel could not 
shake aside the fear that^ if the mystery of her husband's death 
were ever unraveled, it would be found that this girl was not 
altogether unconnected with it. 

Haunted by the thought, she was proceeding slowly up- 
stairs, just about eleven o'clock, when the oil-lamps in the 
hotel- corridor were about to be extinguished, when, on turn- 
ing a narrow step, she almost stumbled against the girl. She 



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3S8 LISHEEN [Dec. 

drew back with a certain loathing, which the girl was not slow 
to notice; and just then a door opened on the next corridor^ 
and a lady's voice cried in a suppressed way: 

'* Satdra 1 Satira 1 be quick 1 The lights are being put out ; 
and you must make your way back in the darkness!" 

Mabel clutched the balustrade with one hand, and placed 
the other over her. beating heart. The girl saw the gesture and 
smiled, showing her white teeth, and also two deep lines around 
the mouth, which made her, to Mabel's eyes, an old and hag- 
gard witch. 

She had barely strength to reach her room and fling her- 
self, in a kind of paralysis of fear, on an armchair. 

The next morning Maxwell had a tiny note to say that his 
cousin had all preparations made for her journey to Killarney 
to catch the up -mail to Dublin. He promptly obeyed the 
summons, as all his arrangements had been made, merely warn- 
ing Darby that, as he valued his life and his future prosperity, 
he would keep a closed mouth about all that he had witnessed. 

They traveled by the stage-coach to Killarney, scarcely ex- 
changing a word by the way. And, without a word, Maxwell 
saw his cousin into her carriage, provided all necessaries for 
her personal comfort, ordered dinner at 6 P. M. in the dining- 
car, etc. Then, as he said ^' Good-bye 1 " his eyes lingered a 
moment on the stony, impassive face. He was not surprised to 
see the tears silently gather and fall. And he knew that the 
tears of a proud woman are tragic tears. 

They never met again. 

After a few weeks of suflfering, and longing once more to 
see the face of "Bob," "poor Bob," the old Major,- half- petri- 
fied, was gathered unto his rest. 

Mabel went abroad. And, sometimes, in the great hotels 
at Vevay, Montreux, Cape Martin, etc., the guests amused them- 
selves by watching the stately, silent figure of the girl, whose 
hair was prematurely gray, and who walked so silently and 
gravely from the dining-room, never exchanging a word with 
themselves. And it helped to pass pleasantly the winter even- 
ings, when some one proposed, as a kind of charade, the con- 
jecture as to whether she "had a story." 

(to be concluded ) 



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LIFE SKETCHES OF THE LATE FATHER WALWORTH. 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT. C.S.P. 

fATHER CLARENCE A. WALWORTH, an Amer- 
ican Tractarian convert, author, parish priest, and 
missionary to the faithful, distinguished advocate 
of civic reform, public-spirited citizen, and one 
of the original associates of Father Hecker in the 
formation of the Paulist community, has found a competent bi- 
ographer in his niece, Ellen H. Walworth.* 

She was closely associated with her uncle during many 
years of his later life, serving him as secretary in his literary 
labors, and alleviating the pains of a lingering illness extending 
over many years. She knew him perfectly, and at his death, 
in 1900, she was made custodian of all his papers. Since then 
she has been engaged in preparing this presentation of the prin- 
cipal events in his career and the interesting traits of his strongly 
marked character. 

Clarence Augustus Walworth was born in Plattsburg, N. Y., 
in 1820, his father being a distinguished lawyer, afterwards 
Chancellor of the then prevailing judicial system of the state. 
The family on both sides was of the early Puritan stock of New 
England, and Clarence had, accordingly, a deeply religious na- 
ture, joined to the finest instinct of American freedom. Di- 
vine things were his absorbing topic of inquiry, even in child- 
hood and youth, especially after a religious experience during 
his course of study at Union College, Schenectady. But he 
did not at first think of entering the Protestant ministry, being 
destined by his father for his own profession. 

Accidental circumstances, such as neighborhood and acquain- 
tance, led young Walworth during his law studies to attend 
services at the Episcopalian Church in Albany. He soon asked 
for membership, and was confirmed by Bishop Onderdonk in 
1839. But this was by no means his initial movement into de- 
vout Protestantism, for he attributed his first deeper religious 

^Ufe SkiUhes of Father Walworth; wUh Notts and Utters, By EUen H. Walworth. 
Albany : J. B. I«yon. 



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36o LIFE Sketches of Father Walworth [Dec, 

feelings to a revival at Union College already alluded to. He 
afterwards wrote of it as follows: 

The ''conversion '' you speak of, which took place, as yott 
remind me, when we were classmates at college, and listened 
to the preaching of Elder Knapp, the revivalist, is to me no 
'' delusion." I look back to it with pleasure, and hail it as a 
happy reality. That many delusions existed in my mind 
at that time is certain enough. But equally certain am I 
that a real, substantial, and lasting impression was made up- 
on me which changed the whole current of my life. 

Although he was destined for the law, and his education 
was chosen with that end in view, he was not fitted for it by 
nature. He loved , to be sure, the intellectual warfare incident 
to litigated law practice. His mind was inquiring, very active, 
accurate, as well as aggressive. Had he remained an attorney, 
he would no doubt have had a first-rate career, taking his place 
among the foremost jury lawyers of America. But no cause, 
so he soon discovered, could deeply enlist his energies except 
it was plainly divine. He was naturally a leader of men, ra- 
ther than a manager of juries and a persuader of courts. Su- 
pernaturally he felt that God was surely drawing him closer to 
himself. He was leading him on and forming him for his sub- 
sequent vocation in the Catholic missionary priesthood. 

After passing the bar in Albany, in the summer of 1841, he 
went into the western part of the state to begin practice, and 
finally formed a partnership in the city of Rochester. Here he 
learned two things; one was that he could succeed at his pro- 
fession, and the other that his success left him vacant of real 
joy. He was, in the undercurrent of his thoughts, really ab- 
sorbed in religion, and must soon devote himself more entirely 
to God. 

The account of the decisive step, from a secular to a re- 
ligious career, he has thus given in one of his publications : 
'' We were doing a good [law] business, and I liked my pro- 
fession well enough. But about that time my mind had been 
turned toward religion more steadfastly than ever before." 
Opening his mind to his Episcopalian pastor, he declared his 
desire to devote himself wholly to a spiritual vocation, received 
a letter of recommendation, and, meeting no opposition from 
parents or friends, entered the General Theological Seminary 



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1907.] Life Sketches of Father Walworth 361 

in New York in 1842. His relief at being now entirely ab- 
sorbed in devout exercises of heart and mind for God's praise 
and man's salvation, was always remembered gratefully. He 
threw himself into his tasks with his native ardor, and after- 
wards affirmed that his pleasure in them was supreme. 

But soon he felt the first tremors of the upheaval of Angli- 
canism, known as the Tractarian movement. He was among 
the earliest of those bright spirits in the American branch of 
the Episcopalian Church, who sought for apostolic ideals in that 
communion. Almost the first result was the invasion of a horde 
of ugly doubts about the genuineness of his Church's catholic- 
ity. 

He was thrown into an agony of misgivings. He has left 
on record that at times he seemed wholly forsaken by God, and 
used to feel the full share of our Savior's desolation on the 
Cross. Once, while suflfering from this desolation of spirit, he 
rose at midnight from a sleepless couch, sank upon his knees, 
and exclaimed : *' My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken 
me ? " — promising, meanwhile, that if God would only show him 
what to do, he would do it, cost what it might. Many another 
honest soul has since then thus struggled towards the light in 
that same institution, and not a few with the same result as in 
the case of young Walworth. Edgar P. Wadhams was associated 
with Walworth in the seminary, and shared all his mental trou« 
bles. Of course they sought advice, choosing those ministers 
whom they deemed the more spiritual and disinterested. But 
the young men's consciences were too thoroughly aroused, their 
natures too upright, to be cured by remedies worse than their 
disease. Father Walworth afterwards said that all these restora- 
tives were reducible to three or four, such as: "Take advice"; 
" Take orders " ; " Take a parish " ; " Take a wife." 

The reader is urged to peruse Father Walworth's charming 
book. Reminiscences of Edgar P. Wadhams for a full account of 
this parting of the ways from Protestantism in their journey to 
the truth. Another book of his, The Oxford Movement in 
America^ is also of absorbing interest in this connection. Both 
abound in touches of fine humor, for these most earnest souls 
were driven back and forth on the most eccentric tides of 
humanity ; some heroes like themselves, many more time-servers 
or superficial characters. 

Walworth's inclinations were even then towards community 



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362 Life Sketches of Father Walworth [Dec, 

life, as is shown by some curious experiments made before leav- 
ing Episcopalianism and while visiting with his friend in the 
country. Therefore, it is not surprising that when he made up 
his mind to become a Catholic, he chose the Redemptorists, in 
Third Street, New York City, as his instructors. And he was 
received by one of them into the Church, May i6, 1845. The 
creed of Pius IV., he wrote at the time, sounded most musical- 
ly in his ears, and he took pleasure in repeating it very slowly 
and distinctly at the ceremony. This reminds us of Newman's 
saying, that to him the Athanasian creed was always a most 
beautiful poem. Wadhams followed his friend into the Church 
soon after, and in later years he became first bishop of Ogdens- 
burg. His conversion was hastened, we may well imagine, by 
the following touching letter of farewell, written at the moment 
Walworth was starting from their place of sojourn in the country 
to enter the Church in New York: 

Dear Wadhams : In a few minutes I shall be gone, and, 
oh, it seems to me as if I were about to separate firom every- 
thing I love ; and my poor heart, faithless and unconscien- 
tious, wants to be left behind among the Protestants. I am 
not manly enough to make a stout Catholic ; but it is a great 
privilege to be a weak one. Well, do not forget me. Indeed, 
you cannot, you have been such a good, kind, elder brother 
to me, and would not be able it you tried toiorget me. When 
hereafter you speak of me, speak freely of me, for truth's sake, 
with all my iaults ; but when you think of me alone, try to 
forget all that is bad, for love's sake, and although your im- 
agination should in this way create a different person, no 
matter, so you call it by my name. We have stormy times 
before us, dear Wadhams ; but may God grant us the privilege 
to ride the storm together. Farewell until we meet again, and 
when and where shall we meet ? " Lead Thou us on ! " 

C. W. 

We must refer our readers to Miss Walworth's volume for 
further details of the first era of her uncle's Catholic life. He 
went to the Redemptorist novitiate, in Belgium, in company 
with James A. McMaster and Isaac T. Hecker, the latter hav- 
ing become a Catholic nearly a year before Walworth. Having 
made his vows, been ordained priest, and served a short time 
on the English missions. Father Walworth, again in company 
with Father Hecker, returned to America. Of the fifteen years 



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1907.] Life Sketches OF Father Walworth 363 

spent as a missionary^ Redemptorist and Paulist, Father Wal- 
worth^ looking back from extreme old age, said that they were 
the best work of his whole life, a life engaged in many other 
glorious undertakings for God and Holy Church. 

He was truly a great preacher of missions. The writer of 
this tribute to Walworth cannot number the times he has heard 
his preaching praised by men who had attended the old mis- 
sions. They praised him as a man of God who had rescued 
their souls from the pit of hell. Even yet we meet with very 
old men, who recall Walworth's mission sermons with an awe 
and reverence that have not lessened in the lapse of over fifty 
years. 

Lately we met a nun, who told us of her father's conversion 
to Catholicity. One evening he was passing by a Catholic 
church in Philadelphia, when he was brought to a stand by the 
sound of a preacher's voice. It was so strong and sweet and 
moving, that though he could not catch a single distinct word, 
he was glad to stop and enjoy its mere music. ''I will go in 
and listen to him," he said to himself. He listened to Father 
Walworth preaching a mission sermon to a hushed congrega- 
tion of Catholics. *' I will, I must, speak with that man," he 
said. And so he at once sought an interview, and soon was 
placed under instruction. 

It was not God's will that this powerful preacher and writer, 
and, let us add, this very devout priest, should cast his final 
lot with our Paulist community. But he had an essential part 
to play in its origin, and, during the first seven or eight years, 
we might almost say that he was of real necessity to its exist- 
ence. The other Fathers loved him devotedly, and when severe 
illness and other causes brought about a separation, there never 
ensued the least estrangement of aflfection. He was charming 
company in the community, being of a sunny nature, a well- 
stored mind, deeply religious, and one of those open, candid 
characters that draw and hold men's best loyalty of friendship. 

On leaving the Paulists he returned to his native diocese, 
and after serving a parish in Troy for a short time, was made 
pastor of St. Mary's, in Albany, the mother church of the 
city and diocese. Father Walworth was a model parish priest. 
He was in very deed the shepherd who leadeth his sheep. As 
long as he could lift voice or pen, let any infidel proclaim his 
shameful lies at his peril in Albany. Father Walworth was 



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364 Life Sketches of Father Walworth [Dec, 

upon him the next morning in the newspapers, full of sound 
doctrine, power of reasoning, sarcasm, and perfect at-homeness 
with his readers. Christian or semi- Christian. Every fraud and 
villany knew him for its instant foe. The liquor men met him 
at every election; they attempted to turn to their vile profit 
the spokesman of civic decency and the priestly champion of 
the holiness of the family life. 

The Episcopalian Bishop Doane, associated closely with Father 
Walworth in his struggles against the liquor power before the 
Legislature, says of him, that he rendered the best service to 
state and city in striking for the laws upon the subject of 
the drink-evil. Wise, moderate, temperate in principle, he 
was dauntless in assailing drunkenness, convivial habits, and 
the saloon. He met their effrontery with boldness, their cun- 
ning with candor and vigilance. Sometimes beaten by bribery, 
he was often victorious by the very shame which he heaped 
upon his adversaries — legislators who acted as attorneys for the 
very dregs of our degenerate classes. And what Catholic who 
knew Albany in those days, but felt proud of his religion, and 
thanked God for the great priest who thus interpreted his faith 
in the interests of the personal and public good of all citizens ? 

But not only in refuting error and assailing vice was Father 
Walworth a model pastor. His zeal for Christian education 
was conspicuous and wisely directed* His dispensing of the 
word of God made old St. Mary's the shrine of all who would 
be sure of the truth, spoken as eloquently as it was plainly. 
His care of the sick and of the poor was almost nervously de- 
voted and assiduous. His management of the finances of a 
down-town decadent parish was both thrifty and enterprising 
and highly successful. And by no means least in his praise as 
a pastor, is the testimony of the long line of priests who were 
by turns his assistants, and who, both by their successful careers 
and edifying lives, and by their burning words of eulogy, 
have spoken their gratitude for the training he gave them in 
their holy ministry. 

It pleased God that this most aggressive spirit should be 
duly tried in the quiet virtue of patience. For several years 
before his death he was afflicted by almost total blindness. 
For several months of his last illness he was also stone deaf. 
And for some weeks preceding his happy passage to eternity 
he was deprived of the power of speech. 



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1907.] Life Sketches of Father Walworth 365 

In all this trial he was the same powerful Walworth as ever 
before^ cheery and humorous in conversation while his tongue 
obeyed him^ and iuU of views and opinions on current affairs, 
ever and again adverting to religious topics. 

In his interior soul there reigned a deep calm. How glad 
he must have been in his blindness of his full knowledge of 
Holy Scripture, whose glorious sentences spoke for God by the 
instinct of a devout memory; how glad of the memory of 
many years of daily Mass, offered in humble love of Jesus 
Crucified; how glad of his well-loved friends in heaven, the 
Mother of God and all the angels and saints, who doubtless 
often communed with him in the long hours of his unbroken 
darkness. We know not if he ever considered his own deserv-* 
ings; but surely he must have thanked the Holy Ghost in all 
sincerity for the grace of treading under foot his youthful am- 
bition, joining a Church despised by all his friends and asso- 
ciates, burying himself in a religious order wholly foreign — in 
their eyes — to every American sentiment. And then the toil- 
some years of those heroic missions, the fiery eloquence that 
consumed his vitality whilst it lit up the fires of penance in 
so many thousands of wretched sinners; the weary, dragging 
trial of the confessional, often from ten to twelve hours daily, 
when, by his priestly words, the very sewers of hell were made 
clean by the waters of heavenly peace; the cheerless journeys 
back and forth over pioneer America ; and finally the steadfast 
devotedness for a whole generation to the multiform, respon- 
sible cares of a city parish. 

May his strong, gentle soul rest in peace! 



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IN MISS FELICIA'S GARDEN. 

BY CHRISTIAN REID. 

was a charming place, this old garden of Miss 
Felicia Ravenel, with its hedges of box, its for- 
mal flower-beds, its wealth of roses and flowering 
shrubs, its green stretches of turf, its old sun-dial 
with the Latin motto, and its quaint cedar sum- 
mer-house, as carefully clipped and trimmed as when first con- 
structed in the early years of the nineteenth century. There 
had been periods during its long existence when the garden had 
been very much out of fashion, and therefore very disapprov- 
ingly regarded by the large class to whom whatever is unfash- 
ionable is anathema, periods when Miss Felicia had been earn- 
estly advised to uproot the great box hedges and replace them 
with borders of flaunting new plants. But Miss Felicia was 
happily a born conservative, and she held fast to every shrub 
of the old garden where she had grown up, and where the ro- 
mance of her life had been played. It had been rather a sad 
romance, but nevertheless, or perhaps the more. Miss Felicia 
clung to its memory. 

She was a beautiful woman still, for all her fifty years, with 
her graceful figure, her clear-cut features, her lustrous dark eyes, 
and the aristocratic air of her whole personality. And her 
beauty being thus, like Olivia's, *' V the grain " and warranted 
to bear wind and weather, she had the look of a grand duchess, 
even if she was wearing a cotton frock and gardening gloves. 
Attired in this manner, she was clipping away at a rosebush 
with a large pair of shears one morning in May, when a girl, 
with a striking likeness to herself, entered the garden, and rush- 
ing up to her eagerly embraced her. 

"Fay!" she exclaimed, as in her surprise she dropped the 
shears, "where do you come from?" 

" From home. Aunt Felicia," the girl replied, as she kissed 
her. " I have run away." 

"You have — ?" Miss Felicia gasped. 



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1907.] In Miss Felicia's Garden 367 

** Run away/' the newcomer repeated distinctly. *' Of course 
you are shocked^ but equally of course you know why I have 
done it/' 

** YeSy I suppose I know '* ; Miss Felicia answered. She 
looked at the girl and shook her head, half- sadly , half- severely. 
"You are a bad child, Fay!'' 

" You don't think that, Aunt Felicia— I'm sure you don't I " 
Fay pleaded. Then she threw her arms again around the other. 
'' Sit down and let us talk about it," she cried. ** I've come 
to you for sympathy and — help." 

"Sympathy in abundance you shall have," Miss Felicia said, 
as they walked over to a garden- seat under a climbing rose and 
sat down; "but the only help I can offer you is the help to 
do what is right." 

" And that is—? " 

"To go back home quickly, like a good daughter." 

"You know what that means," Fay said, fixing her with 
bright eyes. " It means submitting to my father's arbitrary com- 
mand and giving up Geoffrey Brett" 

If Miss Felicia shrank a little at the sound of that name, 
there was no outward sign of it. She simply said : " Your fa- 
ther has a right to your obedience, Fay." 

" The right to my obedience within reasonable bounds, yes " ; 
the girl returned, "but not when he asks what is unreasonable 
and tyrannical." 

"Fay!" 

"Oh, let us speak plainly. Aunt Felicia! Do you think I 
don't know the old story of how you gave up the other Geof- 
frey Brett — my Geoffrey's father — because your family refused 
to allow you to marry him, on account of a century-old feud? 
I have burned with sympathy and indignation for you as long 
as I can remember; and I always said to myself that / would 
never be coerced in such a manner. So when I met Geoffrey 
Brett I regarded him with more interest than I might otherwise 
have done, because of your romance with his father, and I soon 
found that there had been very good reason for that romance. 
If Geoffrey Brett, the elder, was half as charming as Geoffrey 
Brett, the younger. Aunt Felicia, I don't — I really don't see how 
you ever gave him up I " 

" If Geoffrey Brett, the younger, is half what his father was," 
Miss Felicia said, as she glanced around the garden where a 



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368 IN MISS FEUCIA^S GARDEN [Dec., 

gallant young figure had once walked with her amid the roses 
of a long vanished May, ''I do not wonder that you think so, 
Fay," 

'' And, therefore, I am quite determined,'' the girl went on, 
" that I will be wiser than you were, that I will assert my right 
to my own individuality, my own life ; and that I will not give 
up happiness when it is offered to me because my father de- 
mands an obedience which I should r^ard as submission to 
tyranny." 

''That is the modem creed," Miss Felicia said quietly, "but 
it isn't the creed in which I was brought up, you know." 

" Oh, I know I " The bright young eyes swept the garden 
enclosure in eloquent commentary. "You were brought up to 
accept whatever was laid on you, to obey all commands, how- 
ever arbitrary, and to sacrifice the happiness of your whole life, 
rather than revolt against the authority of your parents." 

" I should put it differently." Miss Felicia's tones were clear 
and sweet and a little proud. " I was trained to believe that 
there were certain obligations higher than that of following 
one's own will and seeking one's own happiness, obligations of 
honor and respect due to one's parents, of loyalty to one's fam- 
ily traditions, and of the necessity of bearing whatever burdens, 
or making whatever sacrifices, are demanded in the name of 
duty." 

" It is a fine doctrine," Fay admitted, '* and you are a fine 
product of it. There's something wonderfully exquisite about 
you — ^like the perfume of your own roses — ^but, nevertheless, my 
whole soul rises in revolt against the doctrine, and your life 
which is the consequence of it. I never expect to understand 
how you could let yourself be browbeaten into giving up the 
man you loved because your family disapproved of him." 

Again Miss Felicia corrected her. " You choose your terms 
badly," she said. "I was not browbeaten in the least. But 
when I found that I had to choose between seeking happiness 
in my own way, at the cost of wounding and alienating those 
whom I loved and who had a right to my obedience, or yield- 
ing my own wishes — " 

"Why, you just immolated yourself on the family altar," 
Fay interrupted. "And not only yourself, but Geoffrey Brett 
also. Now you had a right, perhaps, to sacrifice your own life, 
but not his." 



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1907.] In Miss Felicia's Garden 369 

Miss Felicia looked at the speaker with an expression in 
her beautiful dark eyes which clutched at the girl's heartstrings. 

'' I did not sacrifice Geoffrey Brett's life," she said. '^ He 
married within a year/' 

" Oh I *' Fay cried, " but every one knows — " 

Miss Felicia's glance stopped her. 

'' His wife had a very unfortunate disposition," she said, '^ and 
I fear there is no doubt that she did not make him happy. 
But there are other, there are even better, things than happi- 
ness in the world. Fay. I have been glad to hear that he 
bore with her admirably, and that even she, before she died, 
acknowledged his wonderful kindness, forbearance, and consid- 
eration. Our great work in life is character* building, dear, and 
I cannot tell you what a comfort it has been to me to believe 
that the difficult discipline of his married life perhaps wrought 
better results for Geoffrey Brett than if he had been happy 
— with me." 

" That," Fay declared, ^' is impossible ; for the man who 
missed spending his life with you missed not only happiness 
but the most inspiring influence. The only trouble is that your 
ideals are too high. You have given up your own happiness 
to them, and you would make me give up mine if I allowed 
myself to listen to you. But I can't — I won't!" She shook 
her head mutinously. *' Sacrifice and renunciation don't appeal 
to me. Aunt Felicia." 

'^They don't appeal to any of us," Miss Felicia told her 
gently. ** But the power to make them is the test of charac- 
ter. You will make them if they are required." 

" No, Aunt Felicia." 

''Yes, Fay. Listen to me now. You have been a head- 
strong, undutiful child, not only refusing obedience to your fa- 
ther, but absolutely defying him in the manner in which you 
have left home — " 

"I've come to you — there's no harm in that." 

" Speak the truth, Fay. Have you only come to me ? " 

A quick flush rose into the girl's face. 

"Well— no"; she admitted. "I wrote to Geoffrey Brett to 
meet me here. I thought that perhaps you would be glad to 
help us; and if I could be married in the old Ravenel home, 
with your sanction, it — it wouldn't be like an elopement." 
VOL. Lxxzvi.— 24 



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370 IN Miss Felicia's Garden [Dec , 

There was something of indignation, as well as of reproach, 
in the eyes which looked at the speaker now. 

^' In other words, you thought I would help you to do a 
disgraceful thing/' Miss Felicia said severely. '^No; the Rav- 
enel roof shelters no runaway daughter, Fay.'' 

Fay rose to her feet — disappointment and anger struggling 
together on her face. " Then I — I'll go to Geoffrey," she said. 

'^You will do nothing of the kind," her aunt replied. She 
drew the girl down beside her again. ''You did not let me 
finish," she said. '' I was going to tell you that, although you 
have been such a disobedient child, your father has written me 
that he puts your love affair into my hands, and allows me to 
give or withhold consent to your marrying Geoffrey Brett." 

'' Oh, Aunt Felicia ! " The girl fell to kissing her raptur- 
ously. " Then, of course, you will be glad to make us happy." 

'' Don't be too sure of that," Miss Felicia said, smiling a 
little sadly. '' I may call upon you to show the mettle of your 
courage, your power to make a sacrifice if necessary — " 

'' But it isfCt necessary 1 Haven't you just said that my 
father has practically consented ? " 

'' No ; I only said that he has left the responsibility of con- 
senting to me; and my consent depends on — do you know what. 
Fay?" 

The girl mutely shook her head. 

'' On Governor Brett's consent, my dear. This, as you 
probably know, he has explicitly and, I am sorry to add, in- 
sultingly refused. In a letter to your father he says that since 
in times past the Ravenels declined to accept him as a husband 
for one of their daughters, he can only suppose that if they 
are now willing to accept his son for another, it is owing to 
the fact that he has won great wealth, while the Ravenels have 
lost almost all theirs. He therefore begs to decline the alliance, 
and adds that he has informed his son that if he persists in 
marrying Miss Ravenel he will never inherit any part of his 
fortune." 

" Oh ! " Fay's eyes blazed. " And this is your Geoffrey 
Brett — the man you loved. Aunt Felicia ? " 

" This," Miss Felicia said, " is the Geoffrey Brett whom long- 
cherished resentment and too much association with the vulgar 
side of worldly prosperity have made. And so the case stands 



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1 907. J In Miss Felicia's Garden 371 

thus, Fay — you may call yourself as modern and as independ- 
ent as you will, but I am sure you can't disown the traditions 
of self-respect and pride that make it impossible (or you to 
enter a family, the head of which has refused to receive you, 
and to condemn the man you love to poverty, as well as to 
alienation from his father." 

With a very pale (ace the girl looked at the speaker. ** Aunt 
Felicia 1 " she gasped appealingly. 

Miss Felicia took both her hands. ''Fay," she said, ''you 
will not disappoint me?" 

It was as i( a spark of fire went out from her soul to kin- 
dle the spirit ol the other. Fay lifted her head. " No " ; she 
replied, " I won't disappoint you. I will not marry Geoffrey 
Brett unless his father consents." 

Miss Felicia leaned forward and kissed her. " I was sure of 
you," she said simply. " And now tell me, is Geoffrey Brett — 
your Geoffrey Brett — in town ? " 

"Geoffrey Brett, who isn't to be mine any longer, is no 
doubt in town, though I haven't seen him," Fay answered. " It 
was arranged that we should both come here to-day ; but I 
couldn't tell by what train I would arrive, and besides I didn't 
want him to meet me in public. So I sent a note from the 
station to his hotel, making an appointment to meet him to- 
night — in your garden." 

"Fay!" 

" I thought," Fay said with something between a sob and a 
laugh, " that it would be delightfully romantic and appropriate 
for a Felicia Ravenel and a Geoffrey Brett to meet again in 
this old garden ; and — and — oh. Aunt Felicia, how you must 
have suffered I And how can I — how can I ever give up my 
Geoffrey ? " 

The bright head went down in the elder woman's lap, and 
while the sobs overpowered the laughter. Miss Felicia looked 
around the garden, which had heard such sobs before, with a 
glance which said many things. Then she bent over the weep- 
ing girl. 

"Fay," she said gently, "have courage, dear. Suffering 
passes after a while and leaves things behind it which are worth 
gaining, worth learning at any cost. I, who have suffered, as- 
sure you of this. I am glad that you have responded, as I 



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372 IN Miss Felicia's Garden [Dec, 

thought you would, to the appeal I have made to you, but I 
promise you that I will spare no effort to gain happiness for you 
if it can be gained—" 

Fay lifted her tear-stained face proudly. ''There is no ef- 
fort possible, Aunt Felicia/' she said, " least of all for yon.^' 

** There may be one/' Miss Felicia answered. ** Let the ap- 
pointment you have made to meet your lover in the garden 
here to-night remain unrevoked. When he comes I will meet 
him, and then — well, then we shall see/' 

The roses, the syringa, and the honeysuckle were filling the 
soft night air with almost overpowering perfume, and the young 
May moon was hanging in silver beauty in a hyacinth sky, 
when a man's figure stopped at the gate half-hidden in the 
hedge which bordered the Ravenel garden. Almost unconscious- 
ly his fingers sought a familiar latch, while he had an odd sen- 
sation of stepping back across the gulf a quarter of a century 
and finding his youth waiting for him amid the flowering sweet- 
ness of the garden within the green enclosure. He hesitated 
an instant, then, with an impatient gesture, opened the gate and 
entered. 

How familiar it all was I — and how unchanged ! As he 
glanced around he felt as if he were welcomed on every side 
by old friends, who stretched out cordial hands of greeting to 
him. The tall green hedges, the great flowering shrubs, the 
climbing roses — how piercingly full of recollection they all were, 
and how he could see Felicia, in her princess- like beauty and 
grace, coming to meet him down the rose-arched path ! He for- 
got what had brought him there, forgot that he had come to re- 
pay his old suffering by making another suffer, to offer scorn 
where he had been scorned. He could only think of the Felicia 
whom he had loved so well and never forgotten, because she was 
not of the order of women whom men can forget. 

And then, as if in a dream, he saw Felicia herself coming 
to meet him — with her delicate beauty untouched, so it seemed, 
by time. He caught his breath. Had the years indeed rolled 
back and youth returned to him and to her? As she advanced 
and saw the tall figure awaiting her she too paused and uttered 
a low exclamation. '' Geoffrey I " she cried — or, rather, breathed. 

At the sound of that voice he stepped forward, and the next 



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1907.J IN Miss Felicia's Garden 373 

instant her hands were in his. '' Felicia I " he said ; and so they 
stood, for a silent minute, looking at each other in the white 
moonlight Then the man spoke again : 

"Am I dreaming?" he asked. 'Mt seems incredible that I 
really find you here unchanged, in this old garden where we 
used to meet, and out of which I was cast as Adam out of 
Paradise. Felicia, have we died? — And is this heaven in the 
guise of earth?'' 

" No, Geoffrey " ; the sweet tones for which his ears had so 
often thirsted answered him, '' we have not died ; and this is 
surely not heaven, for heaven holds no bitterness; and you — 
why are you here?" 

He dropped her hands and drew back a step. 

''You are right," he said in a changed voice. ''I am here 
because of bitterness. I have come in place of another Geoffrey 
— a letter intended for him was by mistake delivered to me — to 
meet another Felicia, and repay the old scorn — " 

She interrupted him. ''Was there ever scorn?" she asked. 

" Not from you, never from you." he answered quickly, 
" but from others, yes. And so I have grasped the means of 
retaliation. As the Ravenels once refused alliance with me, so 
I now refuse alliance with them; and I am here to-night to 
tell the girl who bade my son meet her that if she marries him 
she will marry a man who has cut himself off from his family^ 
even as your family once told you'' 

"Yes"; Miss Felicia said gently, "I see. And as you came 
to meet the other Felicia, so I came to meet the other Geoffrey 
and tell him — well, never mind what I meant to tell him ! For, 
instead of what we intended, fate has set us two once more face 
to face, and I think it will be well that we shall tell each other 
how life has gone with us in the long years since we parted. 
Come — here is our old seat." 

She walked, as she spoke, over to the bench where she had 
sat with Fay a few hours earlier, and with a gesture of her 
hand summoned the man to a seat beside her. When he sat 
down she turned her beautiful eyes on him in an intent regard. 

"You have changed very much," she said, "but I should 
have known you anywhere," 

" And you have changed hardly at all," he answered, devour- 
ing her with his sombre gaze. " It is as if one of the roses of 



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374 IN Miss Felicia's Garden [Dec, 

that long past spring bad been laid away and had never faded, 
only gained a deeper sweetness from time, which robs most things 
of sweetness. In God's name, Felicia, how have you done it ? " 

** If I have done it," she answered, '' it has been by putting 
away from me everything which was not sweet, all memories of 
bitterness, all vain and enervating regrets for happiness which 
was denied. It is because I have lived like the roses, to which 
you are kind enough to liken me, in the sunshine, and tried to 
give a little of it back in fragrance." 

" A little I " he murmured. " A little ! *' 

'' You see," she went on, '' I could not do great things like 
you, neither serve the state in public life, nor accumulate wealth 
in enterprises which have enriched many beside yourself. But 
I have watched your success from afar, and been proud and 
glad of it." 

'' Success I " he repeated — and in his voice now was a great 
bitterness. '' Do you know that what you call success has been 
to me little more than failure, because it has never given me 
one hour of satisfaction? Believe me or not, but since I left 
this garden in rage and disappointment, when you told me that, 
being forced to choose between your family and me, you chose 
your family, I have never known what happiness means." 

Then said Miss Felicia to him, as she had said to the girl 
who sat beside her in the morning: "There are better things 
than happiness in the world, Geoffrey. The anger with which 
you left me was very sad; but perhaps it was a goad to make 
you accomplish things which you might else have left unac- 
complished." 

''It was certainly that," he agreed. "I had not only to 
forget my suffering and to forget you — for which purpose I 
plunged into work and gave myself hardly a moment in which 
to think — but I had also to fulfil my determination to make 
the Ravenels regret what they had done. I swore not only to 
rise so high that they would recognize the mistake they had 
made, but to gain power by which to injure them as they had 
injured me. And I have accomplished all that I promised 
myself. I have risen high, I have had power more than once 
to shut your brother out from political and business combina- 
tions which would have meant greater worldly prosperity for 
him had he been allowed to enter them — " 



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1907.] IN MISS FELICIA'S GARDEN 375 



« - 



^Yes'^; she assented quietly, ''I have heard him speak of 
that ' Brett never forgets/ he said. ' I can always count on 
him as an implacable foe."^ 

'^ And then/' Brett went on, '' my son came one day and 
told me that he wished to marry Felicia RaveneL" He paused 
a moment. '' I can never tell you what I felt when I heard 
that name. All the past rushed back on me, and I saw that 
fate had given me my chance to strike a last blow. So I told 
him that I would never consent to such a marriage, and that 
if he persisted I should cut him off not only from association 
with me, but from any share in my fortune.'' 

'' Well ? " Miss Felicia's tone implied that there was no 
finality in this. 

" Then " — was it anger or was it pride in the father's tone ? 
— '' he told me that his word was given, and that while he was 
sorry to grieve and alienate me, he was bound, as man and as 
gentleman, to stand by it. There the matter rested, until I 
learned yesterday that he had left for this place. I followed, 
determined that the Ravenels should at least know my exact 
position, and when I reached my hotel, a note was put into 
my hands — a note which bade Geoffrey Brett be in the garden 
here to-night to meet Felicia Ravenel." 

'' And so, without any arrangement of yours or mine," the 
woman beside him said, '' Geoffrey Brett and Felicia Ravenel 
have met to-night. Do you think that it has been for nothing ? 
— or to give you an opportunity to express bitterness and re- 
pay, as you put it, scorn for scorn ? No ; I am quite sure 
that it was for something much better. It was, perhaps, that 
I might tell you that in the years since we parted I have 
learned a great deal in the garden here, where I have chiefly 
spent my life. And the best thing which I have learned is 
that strength comes from suffering and renunciation. It is like 
the pruning of the rose-trees. One cuts them back severely, 
and for a time their bloom appears to be thwarted and stunted, 
but afterwards there comes the fuller, the more perfect, bloom- 
ing. When I gave you up I seemed to cut away all the better 
part of myself, all the leafage and the flower of life ; but you 
never understood that the force compelling me to this was not 
hate— but love." 

"Love, Felicia?" 



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376 IN MISS FELICIA'S GARDEN [Dec, 

'' Love, Geoffrey — the love which has its deep root in the 
beginning of our lives. My mother was slowly dying of a 
lingering disease, and it was for me to choose whether I would 
leave her to a sadness and desolation which would surely 
shorten her already short days, or whether I would surrender 
my own happiness to stay with her and brighten her life to 
its end. Geoffrey," — her voice was very solemn in its sweet- 
ness now — '' I cannot express how earnestly I thanked God, 
after she died blessing me, that I had had the strength to 
choose as I did, and to send — yes, to send even you away." 

''And you did not think of #r^/" he cried in quick re- 
proach. ''You may have risen to heaven through your sacri- 
fice, but I sank down almost to hell. For, determined that you 
should think I had forgotten you, I married a woman whom — 
God forgive me I — I did not love, and life with her — ah, I can- 
not speak of what life with her was I " 

" I can speak, though," Miss Felicia said gently. '' Life 
with her was a discipline of the soul in which you bore your- 
self so bravely, so well, that all the world spoke of it. Do 
you think I was not proud of that f And although I care less 
for the honor and wealth you have' gained, I recognize what 
great power for good these things give you, and I think you 
would hardly have gained them in such full measure if you 
had been what is called a happier — that is, a more satisfied and 
contented man." 

" You are right," he said with something like wonder. " It 
was the unhappiness of my life, the emptiness of my home, the 
gnawing unrest at my heart, which drove me into action and 
developed all my powers. But at what a cost it has been 
gained — your sweetness and my success ! Ah, Felicia, do you 
remember how I used to read Browning to you ? There are 
some lines which always haunt me, when I think how much 
we have missed. For, whatever we have accomplished — 

'"Each life's unfulfilled, you see 

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free. 
Starved, feasted, despaired — been happy.' " 

" That is true," she assented with a sigh. " We have missed 



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1907.] In Miss Felicia's Garden 377 

much — who knows it better than I ? But we must balance loss 
with gain. You have quoted one verse of our old, much-loved 
Browning. Let me quote another — one which I have said to 
myself many times during these long, lonely years: 

"'Then welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! 
Be our joys three parts pain I 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang: dare. 
Never grudge the throe I "* 

'' Felicia I '* he said, as the exquisite tones sank over the 
last words. And then again, " Oh, Felicia ! '' 

Her hand fell on his. "GeoflFrey," she said, "we needed — 
be sure we needed that earth's smoothness should have been 
turned rough for us. But is there need that, through the 
memory of that past bitterness, we should turn it rough for 
others? Should we not rather thank God if, from what we 
have suffered, we are enabled to smooth, rather than to roughen, 
other paths — especially the paths of those we love?'' 

He rose to his feet. "Where is — the other Felicia?" he 
said. " I want to ask her if she will do my son the honor of 
marrying him." 



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THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC LIBRARY. 

BY JAMES J. FOX, D.D. 

NOTABLE and promising effort, on a large 
scale, to place at the disposal of English-speak- 
ing Catholics, who have intellectual interests, 
books combining a spirit of faith with the graces 
of literature or the fullness of scholarship, is the 
series which has been started by Messrs. Kegan Paul, under 
the editorship of the Rev. Dr. Wilhelm. The antidote for the 
pernicious influence exerted by means of books of all sorts of 
anti-Catholic and anti- Christian principles, opinions, estimates 
of life, and ways of thought on all serious subjects, is to op- 
pose to this literature another that will present Catholic ideals 
in such living, attractive form as will enlist attention and com- 
mand respect. 

The present series promises to offer the best results of the 
labors of competent scholars, in every language and in every 
branch of study, that are judged helpful towards promoting 
religious growth in cultured men and women. The volumes 
which form the first fruits of this enterprise are varied in char- 
acter and indicate a high general standard of excellence. They 
are translations from the French. 

The initial number is the first volume of Abbe Jacquier's 
History of the Books of the New Testaments It opens with a 
general introduction to the chronology and language of the 
New Testament; and then proceeds to a close and critical 
study of the epistles of St. Paul from the historical point of 
view. 

In the other volumes of this work he takes up the remain- 
ing books according to their probable dates: The Synoptic 
Gospels; The Acts of the Apostles; The Catholic Epistles; 
and The Johannine Writings. The author has already acquired 
for himself a high reputation for erudition and acumen. He 
approaches his subject with all the knowledge that is to be 

* History of the Books of tfu New Testament, By E. Jacquier. Authorized Translation 
Irom the French by Rev. J. Duggan. Vol. I. London: Kegan Paul ; New York: Bendger 
Brothers. 



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1907.] The International Catholic Library 379 

gained from the study of contemporary scholars, which he em- 
ploys with sobriety and due attention to the rights of Catholic 
tradition. The present translation will, we have no doubt, be 
welcomed in our seminaries; and it is to be hoped that the 
editor of the Catholic International Library will have the en- 
tire work of the Abb^ Jacquier translated in due time. 

The next volume of the Library that claims our attention 
just now is a translation of M. Paul Allard's Lectures on the 
Martyrs,^ A notice of the original appeared not very long 
ago in these pages. In ten masterly lectures the distinguished 
historian, together with a brief sketch of the spread of Christian- 
ity in the Roman empire, discusses the character of the anti- 
Cnristian legislation, the causes of the persecutions, the number 
and social standing of the martyrs, the methods of procedure, 
and the moral worth of the martyrs' testimony to the truth of 
Christianity. M. AUard's strength lies in the fact that he is 
indefatigable in the collection of evidence, and offers none that 
is not well established. In his hands the martyrs of the early 
Church become a formidable obstacle to those who would re- 
duce Christianity to the level of a mere natural religion. 

Another historical volume is a translation of M. Louis de 
Combes' fine study on the finding of the true cross by St. 
Helena, t The author first identifies, as thoroughly as possible, 
the various places connected with the Via Dolorosa, the Passion, 
and the Burial of our Lord. He then considers the question, 
upon which the Gospel gives not a hint, of what became of 
the instruments of the Passion. He gleans whatever light he 
can from Jewish and Roman customs, regarding the burial of 
the cross; and discusses the fate of the holy places from the 
time of our Lord till the beginning of the fourth century. 

The history of St. Helena^ the early life of Constantine, 
and the political and warlike events which led to his becoming 
the master of Rome, are related with little regard to some of 
the venerable legends that have grown up around these sub- 
jects. M. de Combes' estimate of Constantine is in contrast 
with some of the ancient eulogies of the liberator of Chris- 
tianity. 

* Ten Lectures on the Martyrs. By Paul Allard. Authorized Translation by Luigi 
Cappadelta. London: Kegan Paul; New York: Benziger Brothers. 

t The FiMding of the Cross, By Louis de Combes. Authorized Translation by O. L. 
Dessoulavy. London : Kegan Paul ; New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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38o THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC LIBRARY [Dec.^ 

Being more of a man of the world, Constantine did not, 
like Clovis, immediately solicit baptism ; he feared that by 
doing so he might curtail his freedom. So long as his 
mother lived, his sympathies were with the Orthodox, but 
after her death he turned to the Arians. He never yielded 
up his heart to God, but strove to repay the debt he owed Him 
by his munificence towards the Church ; he lived to learn to 
what an end a Catechumen who resists the call of grace 
must inevitably come ; he never was a great Christian, but 
he remained to the end a careful politician and patron of re- 
ligion. 

M. de Combes tells the story of the discovery of the 
cross; and meets the various objections that have been made 
to it from those of the Centuriators of Magdeburg to those of 
M. Paul Lejay. He enters at considerable length into the 
claims of the relics which are preserved in Treves, to which 
city, the story goes, they were given by St. Helena, who was 
deeply attached to it. 

M. de Combes' verdict is altogether adverse to the claims 
advanced for the relics. There is nothing to show, he says, 
that the Holy Coat of Treves is Christ's tunic — " it has no pre- 
scriptive right to this title, the brief which accompanies it is 
worthless, and, speaking generally, there is no argument what- 
ever in its favor." But, he holds, there is reason to believe that 
it was a gift of Helena, and was, probably, an article of dress 
belonging to some early martyr. It is gratifying to see that 
the editor has paid his prospective readers the compliment of 
carefully preserving in the English versions of the above studies 
the footnotes, references, and bibliographies of the originals. 

Turning to another trio of the series, we are brought to an- 
other age, and invited to observe different manifestations of the 
same spirit. Probably to ninety-nine out of every hundred 
English-speaking persons the court of Louis XV. of France is 
but a synonym for shameless profligacy. Yet in that debauched 
society, in the very family of the monarch, the queen herself 
remained a model of Christian virtue; while, for many years, 
her youngest daughter, in secret, nourished the hope of conse- 
crating herself to God in the religious life; and at length she 
realized her heart's desire by entering a Carmelite convent, in 
which for many years she rigorously submitted to the austere 
rule of St. Teresa. 



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1907. J The International Catholic Library 381 

The story of Madame Louise of France, in religion Sister 
Therese of St. Augustine, with its contrast between the extreme 
situations filled successively by the heroine, carries with it a 
power for edification more forcible, at least as far as persons of 
the world are concerned, than the lives of many religious women 
whose sanctity was greater than her own. Her life has been 
written, recently, in French by two biographers, Geoffrey de 
Grandmaison and L^on de la Bri^re. The work of the latter* 
has been selected for translation into English by the editor of 
the present series; though, in our judgment, it is in many re- 
spects inferior to the former biography. It is less systematic 
and full, more sketchy, and much less successful in conveying 
a just idea of the character of the subject. M. de la Bri^re 
too, unlike M. de Grandmaison, dispenses himself, almost en- 
tirely, from references and footnotes that would be necessary to 
justify some of his statements and judgments. However, his 
biography is an eminently readable book, and deserves a wel- 
come in its English dress. 

Under the rather indefinite title of Sursum Corda f we have 
a collection of intimate letters written to her family and friends 
by a lady of rank who, after the death of her husband, and while 
still young, became a Sister of Charity. The letters are pre- 
ceded by an exquisite sketch of the lady, written by her brother. 
Baron Leopold de Fischer, who, we believe, is a Protestant, as 
was his sister up till the time of her husband's death. 

Blanche Marie de Fischer was born in 1856 of an ancient 
patrician family of Switzerland. In 1875 she married the Count 
de Saint- Martial, and coming to live in France she fell under 
Catholic influences in her husband's family. Lively and accom- 
plished, she threw herself with zest into all the gaiety and ele- 
gance of aristocratic life. On the death of her husband, in 1886, 
she became a Catholic. Soon after this event a note of weari- 
ness with the vanities of the world, and a desire to seek, not 
happiness, but peace in self-immolation rings in her letters. 
To her mother she writes: 

Alas, suffering is the universal law of this world, from 
which none can escape, and if we take the trouble to reflect 

* Madame Louise de France, By L^n de la Bri6re. Authorized Translation by Meta 
and Mary Brown. London: KeganPaul; New York: Benziger Brothers. 

t Sursum Corda, Letters of the Countess of Saint-Martial, in religion Sister Blanche. Au- 
thorized Translation from the French. London : Kegan Paul ; New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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382 THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC LIBRARY [Dec, 

on the matter, we get to understand that this must be so. 
Consequently, it is better to accept it willingly, and thus to 
acquire merit. If our Calvary raises us to heaven, it is be- 
cause of our sacrifice, rather than our anguish ; it is not the 
suffering undergone, but the suffering which has been freely 
accepted; it is the willing resignation in sorrow. . . • 
But one step more, and we reach the point where the soul 
seeks to suffer, and this is the characteristic of noble and 
generous souls. But this degree of virtue is rare, although 
we all groan beneath the weight of the crosses, more or less 
heavy, which are laid upon us, and of which, sooner or later, 
we understand the utility. 

Soon after the date of this letter she writes as a postulant 
from a hospital in Turin, where she had joined the Sisters of 
Charity : 

The other day, when passing in front of a window, I saw 
myself for the first time in my new costume, and, doubtless by 
the law of contrasts, my thoughts reverted to the fancy ball 
when I was dressed as a lady's maid in the time of Louis 
XV.; this was ten years ago, and then every one compli- 
mented me in madrigals on my small waist. How astonished 
these fine coxcombs would be if they saw me in my sack. It 
does not matter, I am not yet an ideal Sister of Charity, who 
must be as long as she is broad ; however, I do what I can to 
get a square waist, and wear my habit very loosely. It I act 
this new part, as I acted in the drawing-room in private the- 
atricals, I think I shall please God, and that will not be so 
critical as an audience composed of pretended friends. 

The correspondence, dated in the earlier years from Italy, 
afterwards chiefly from France, continues till 1899, when Sister 
Blanche died suddenly while bearing on her shoulders the cares, 
great and small, of a large house of refuge not far from Paris. 
Her letters, always cheerful and sometimes touched with deli- 
cate humor, afford intimate glimpses of the life of a Sister of 
Charity, with its constant sacrifice, its varied programme of well- 
doing, its trials, and its occasional innocent distractions. Sister 
Blanche's letters, too, show that in the heart of the religious 
woman complete consecration may exist along with the tender- 
est affection for family and friends. 

This is a book eminently suitable to remove from ill-informed 
minds commonplace prejudices against convent life. 



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1907.] The International Catholic Library 383 

'' Has any one ever wondered what passes in the heart and 
mind of a blind girl of twenty who enters a convent ? " Most 
of our readers, probably, would find themselves prompted to 
answer this question by another : '' Do blind girls of twenty 
enter a convent?" or, "Is there any religious order of wo- 
men which the blind may enter ? '' The History 0/ the Blind 
Sisters of St. Paul^ — in many respects a remarkable book, 
written by a blind man — opens with the above question, and 
is a long, eloquent answer to the others. 

The author, an accomplished scholar, lost his eyesight at the 
age of nineteen. For twenty years and upwards he has de- 
voted himself to the blind. He founded for their welfare a 
flourishing society, of which he is secretary ; he edits two news- 
papers for the blind; and his principal work — for he has writ- 
ten several — Les Aveugles par un Aveugle^ was crowned by the 
French Academy. Before entering on his task of historian, M. 
de Sizeranne treats us to a delightful psychological study of 
the consciousness of the blind, for the purpose of leading us 
to understand that, contrary to what is commonly supposed, a 
blind girl may have much to sacrifice on entering the religious 
life. He analyses the impressions which a blind girl may re- 
ceive from the things of nature, places, and individuals. 

In support of his views, he introduces many apposite pas- 
sages gathered from French writers. His analysis of the feel- 
ings and impressions of the blind is keen and subtle; and his 
exposition is, in its simplicity and tenderness, touchingly pa- 
thetic. Having brought to a close his detailed portrayal of the 
blind woman's contact with people, nature, and things, he con- 
cludes that she may picture comfort, independence, home life, 
and friendship, and may imagine in her youth that perfect hap* 
piness would consist in possessing such blessings. But such 
pictures, it may be objected, are illusions ? He answers : 

Everywhere and in everything our illusions are what we 
hold dearest ; since created by ourselves, they are absolutely 
conformed to our tastes and aspirations ; the reality is sure to 
jar, wound, or disappoint us in some direction. And, to 
speak frankly, are we to gauge the depth of a sacrifice by the 
real enjoyment of the thing sacrificed ? Does not virtue be- 
come easier, when we have discovered how very little real 

* TJu Blind Sisters of St, Paul, By Maurice de la Sizeranne. Authorized Translation bj 
L. M. Leggatt. London : Kegan Paul ; New York : Benziger Bxx>thers. 



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384 The international Catholic Library [Dec 

pleasure is to be got out oi the forbidden action ? Is not the 
most difficult thing of all to give up the fancied good which 
we have clothed in all our own ideas and illusions ? In the 
spiritual combat of life the struggle lies more between 
thoughts than realities ; appearances are tempting, for when 
the harm is done, if we persevere in it, it is more from a weak 
will than from attraction to what so soon satiated us. Sacri- 
fice as well as happiness is essentially subjective. God alone 
can judge of the relative value of either. It follows that it 
would be as cruel as unreasonable to say to any one: '^ In 
giving yourself, you think that the gift has value ; it has 
none ; you think that you are offering up realities, they are 
phantoms." Would you have the questionable courage to 
open the eyes of a child who, in his great love, offers you a 
trifle or a flower ? 

M. de Sizeranne relates the life of M^re Bergunion and the 
circumstances which, almost without any express intention on 
her part to become the foundress of a community, led, or com* 
pelled, her to assume that work and to establish the communi- 
ty of the Blind Nuns. The aim and spirit of the congregation, 
its constitutions, the occupations of the members, the work of the 
classrooms, the present condition of the society and its future 
prospects, are treated with a charm that cannot fail to hold the 
attention of the reader. When he reaches the end of the vol- 
ume he will have a much wider knowledge of, and a livelier 
sympathy with, a large number of our afflicted fellow-beings than 
he possessed before he had read M. de Sizeranne's story. 



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THE OBEDIENCES OF CATHOLICISM. 

BY CORNELIUS CLIFFORD. 
I. 

|T is now more than sixty years since Emerson, in 
his memorable Essay an Self - Reliance^ gave ex- 
pression to the hope that in these days we had 
''heard the last of conformity and consistency/' 
The words were to be '' gazetted and ridiculous " 
thenceforward and for all time. Neither the English-speaking 
races in general, nor Americans in particular, to whom the mili- 
tant attitude of soul commended in that sturdy hope was pri- 
marily addressed, nor, indeed, the civilized world at large, can 
be said to have laid the radically impossible lesson to heart. 
Conformity, we are beginning to perceive, is the note of our 
present epoch; and collectivism, in politics, in education, and in 
economics, is undoubtedly the goal towards which we are mak- 
ing in obedience, apparently, to some profound instinct that 
philosophers have not yet been able to diagnose. 

The fact, which is probably a grave one for all of us, and 
certainly a mysterious one for many of us, becomes all the 
more remarkable when one remembers how acute has been the 
sense of language and nationality during the period out of which 
we have just emerged, and how insistent has been the claim for 
some working form of separatism and home rule all round. As 
we look back over the years that have elapsed since the New 
England philosopher's too transcendental plea for a refined an- 
archism of character was first formulated, we can hardly help 
noting how, in spite of the stress and turmoil and estrange* 
ments of intervening events, the Christian peoples of the earth 
have, for the most part, been drawn closer together by the ties 
of a conformity which is not less real for being in many re- 
spects paradoxically international and psychologically difficult to 
understand. 

Not only have distinctions of race and country, of birth and 
VOL. LxxxTi.— 25 



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386 THE OBEDIENCES OF CATHOLICISM [Dec, 

social station, shown a tendency to become less defined; but, 
what is more ironically significant still, the boundaries of scho- 
lastic privilege have been in large measure graciously removed, 
and the old academic exclusiveness, which once made of the 
scholar a creature hardly less cloistral than a monk, has given 
way to a cheerful and market-place kind of readiness to rub 
shoulders with the untutored mob. Aristocracy of intellect has 
been replaced by a contented, because largely state- made, com- 
munism of mind. Everybody is " educated,'' or sincerely be- 
lieves himself to be, which amounts to the same thing; univer- 
sities are as common as mushrooms, and probably as nutritive; 
while opinions, as distinct from deep-rooted convictions, grow 
daily as plentifully as thistle-downs in a waste field. 

If that reads like too hard an account of the general lack of 
faith in Emerson's type of Nonconformism, we may comfort our- 
selves with the reflection that there is an obverse and more 
serious side to the phenomenon too. For, in addition to the 
inevitable sameness which is slowly settling upon the superficies 
of things, it is impossible not to be struck by the pervading 
simplicity of pattern to which the notions of such men as do 
think are beginning to shape themselves ; a simplicity, let it be 
gravely remarked, which is mysteriously saved from being mo- 
notonous and stencil-like, because it springs, however uncon- 
sciously, from an actual impulse on the part of toiling mankind 
to achieve themselves and live. 

Collectivism, it is discovered, means efficiency ; and efficien- 
cy, even if it must be accompanied by a prevailing level of 
uniformity that threatens to play havoc with many of the his- 
toric unevennesses of an erstwhile picturesque world, is felt, some- 
how, to spell progress; and progress is always God's matter. 
We may not all of us be agreed what the compelling word may 
import; but it is something, at all events, to be alive in a 
generation that has learned to lisp the blessed syllables ; some- 
thing to be allowed to reach out curiously towards its bewilder* 
ing connotations, even as an infant in arms reaches out joyously 
to every shining object within the sweep of its wondering eyes. 
That such an attitude of the general soul of our time may 
be said to mirror fairly enough the interests which have pre- 
dominated in the secular order during the past half century or 
more, few, we imagine, will be tempted to deny; whether it 
reflects likewise those deeper prepossessions of the spirit, which 



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1907.] The Obediences of Catholicism 387 

it is surely one of the functions of religion both to satisfy and 
to guide, may be open to question; but even in this connec- 
tion, also, it should be urged, one may read signs not a few 
that point to a similar instinct for conformity which seems in- 
variably to accompany, if it does not directly derive its being 
from, that strange insistent sameness of outlook to which we 
have already referred, save that in this instance it reveals the 
world's gaze as turned beyond the forbidding barriers of space 
and time. 

If one needs an illustration of what we mean, one may find 
it in the rationalist's pathetic paradox about ''this most unbe- 
lieving age of ours which still busies itself about God." True 
as those words were when first uttered, they have become in- 
comparably truer in our own time as applied to what may not 
irreverently be described as non-Catholic pre-occupation with 
Christ. He is everywhere in evidence, it might be said, if not 
as a personality at least as a problem ; and for those who in • 
voke his name outside the obedience of the historic Church, 
which claims exclusively to hold its high commission from him, 
he is still an ever- recurrent argument— some would say a goad 
and an inspiration; for the prick of his influence and the light 
of his countenance have been felt before now in many a strange 
darkness — for some workable form of ecclesiastical unity which 
will lead his captives home from every place^ while not denying 
them either the liberty or the larger word of knowledge which 
they feel can be realized only in obedience to his will. 

Christ I we are Christ's ! and let the Name suffice you. 
Ay, for us too He greatly hath sufficed; 

Lo! with no winning words we would entice you, 
We have no honour and no friend but Christ. 

• • • . a • 

We, even we who from the fleshly prison 
Caught (we believe it, but we dare not say). 

Rise to the midnight of the Lord arisen. 
Wake to the waking rapture of His day ! * 

Not Anglicans only, but Lutherans and Presbyterians, and, 
indeed, thousands of sincere-minded adherents of every phase 

• Adapted from Poewu by F. W. H. Myers. 



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388 THE OBEDIENCES OF CATHOLICISM [Dec, 

of confessionalism throughout the Teutonic and English-speak- 
ing worlds, feel keenly the anomaly of their position, and would 
take concerted action for its removal to-morrow, if Rome would 
only consent to meet them half-way. 

If Rome would only consent I Why does she not do so? 
Is it really pride, or hereditary lust of power, or a theological- 
ly rancorous worship of mere consistency, that hardens her heart 
so bafflingly to this pathetic latter-day appeal for compromise? 
Is mere obedience so wonderful a thing that, for the sake of it, 
the official guardians of Catholicism may jeopardize the cause 
of Christ in modern society, and set every other virtue in the 
calendar behind it as though it were a kind of eighth and all- 
inclusive sacrament? That in substance is the question one 
often hears put in these days when the newspapers print re- 
ports — very sorry reports too— of the proceedings of Protest- 
ant clergymen met together in extraordinary congressses to con- 
sider plans for the promotion of Christian unity in a naughty 
and dissident world. Frequently enough the question is asked 
in the secular reviews and urged with adroit and provoking bit- 
terness. 

What happens on these occasions the judicious on both sides 
of the high ecclesiastical paling can only two well recall. A 
pair of self-elected champions will incontinently equip them- 
selves with the traditional "five pebbles" from the oldest and 
least trustworthy encyclopaedia of reference — these being the 
sort of books, as we all know, that abound mightily in "clear 
statements" and "hard-hitting facts" — and descend jauntily in- 
to the arena. A letter or two appear from either party to the 
debate, each containing a mole-hill of pertinent fact to a moun- 
tain of impertinent words. The impartial, because not too well- 
instructed editor, writes a perfunctory, but shrewdly non-com- 
promising, phrase or two in comment ; the contestants withdraw ; 
the technically^ interested quote tags from the correspondence for 
a week or two; and the greater outer public forgets. 

Is anybody ever converted by these methods? Are unity 
and Christian ideals really promoted by them? Sometimes, it 
is true, a sincere and unaffected eirenicon is devised; as when 
a man like Lord Halifax heads a movement, and gives body 
and definition to the secret thoughts of charitable men, or a 
book like England and the Holy See appears, or a quiet little 
community on the Hudson publish a periodical like The Lamp. 



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I907-] THE Obediences of Catholicism 389 

For the success of all such attempts, however deserving of 
criticism they may be in detail, there is no true child of the 
old Church that will not pray ; and, if his zeal be according to 
ordered knowledge, labor too; yet — and this is the hardest 
paradox of all to understand — not even along such well-meant 
lines is the hope of the single-minded likely to be realized. 
We are heart to heart here with a mystery; for we have 
touched upon one of those facts which faith deals with more 
vitally in the ethical order than it does in the theoretical or 
semi- rational order. It is the work done that matters here and 
not the theological account of it ; though that last will be found 
convincing enough, we imagine, to whoso believes. 

Catholicism, in brief, deals with mankind as it deals with 
the individual conscience. It turns to the world, as Christ 
turned before it, and declares in effect: / am the Way and 
there is no other/ What is more significant still, the Roman 
and Hierarchical Church,* which is the only concrete expression 
of the vaguer and wider collective called Catholicism that the 
historical student knows, makes this bid for the world's obedi* 
ence in precisely the same recondite and mystical sense that 
Christ did in the famous passage we alluded to in our first 
essay. Through her men pass, not to Christ, but with Christ, 
to the Father. 

To put the truth in that way is not to Arianize or to be- 
little the great dogma of our Lord's divinity; it is rather to 
enter into it more deeply; it is to realize by personal obedi- 
ence to her and to her sacramental ordinances another truth 
equally insisted upon in the ringing phrase she has appended 
to every prayer and collect of her wonderful liturgy, and most 
of all in the triumphant climax that marks the close of the 
long consecratory prayer of the Mass. Per Ipsum et cum Ipso 
et in Ipso est, Tibi Deo Patri Omnipotenti omnis honor et gloria. 
In this sense is Christ the Way; and she, as embodying, even 

* It is worth remarking that, when St. Ignatius of Loyola first conceived in rough outline 
the idea of restoring the shattered obedience of the Roman Church amid the northern races of 
Europe, he proposed to do so by inculcating loyalty to our Lord's own Person as an indispen- 
sable condition beforehand. Tht Rules for Thinking with ihe Orthodox Chnrch^ which enter 
so curiously into the Book of the Exercises^ are seldom to be given before the Third Week and 
only after the exercises on the Kingdom of Christ and Two Standards have been thoroughly 
made. It is also significant that it is here that the saint insists upon the phrase which we have 
used above : Vera Sponsa Christi Domini Nostril qua est nostra sancta Mater Ecclesia HitT' 
atchica. In the Antiqua Versio, as Father Roothan reminds us, he had used the expression : 
If me autem est sancta Afater Ecclesia Hierarchica qua Romana est. 



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390 THE OBEDIENCES OF CATHOLICISM [Dec, 

in her secular experiences, what St. Augustine * practically calls 
our Lord's larger human life, is the same exclusive sacrament 
of obedience not less truly. 

In this sense, at least, it is hardly an exaggeration to main- 
tain, that Catholicism is a Way almost before it is anything else. 
It insists upon discipline quite as much as upon dogma; and, 
what is surely most pertinent to our present scope, it does so 
almost as much with the intention of bringing the mind of the 
believer into tune with its ineffable cycle of verities touching 
upon God, the human soul, and the after-life, as with the idea 
of turning that same cycle of verities into a motive for high or 
even heroic Christian morality. In the world of abstractions, 
too pale and colorless, always, for the average man, who needs 
to have his truths writ plain in terms of flesh and blood, the 
verities undoubtedly come first ; but in the actual world, in the 
realm, that is, of every-day incident, where the pilgrim soul is 
brought momentarily under the pressure of the particular and 
the concrete, the order is reversed; it is the discipline that is 
thrust resolutely into the foreground. 

There are the best of reasons why this should always be so, 
as Aristotle in more than one remarkable passage in the Ethics\ 
would seem to imply ; but we cannot stop at this stage of 
our argument to discuss either the passages or their implica- 
tions. We are dealing at present with Catholicism as a fact; 
and it is to facts, accordingly, that we must make our appeal. 
The institution of paedo- baptism affords a striking illustration 
in point Whatever one may say of Apostolic or sub •Apostolic 
practice in the matter, our present custom can indubitably be 
traced back as far as Irenaeus,t who was born, probably, about 
the year 97 of the Christian era. 

* The idea is common enough among the Fathers ; but few of them have expressed it so 
frequently and with such point— it might almost be said, with such boldness — as St. Augus- 
tine has done. His favorite Scripture passage is: Std erunt duo in came tma {h/L^Xi, xix, 6), 
and he seems never to tire of ringing the changes upon the mystery it illustrates, even in the 
most unlikely contexts. Cf, Enarrationes in Psalmos, passim ; v^., /n Ps. 14a, n. 3 ; ^ Enar, in 
Ps, 18. n. 10 ; In Ps, 61, n. 4. He recurs to it also in his Sermons, and in one of them {Serm^ 
361, 4) he frankly admits th^t the analogy by which he explains the idea has a great attraction 
for him : lam sape diximus, he writes, sed quia similitudo apta est ei rem bene insinuate re- 
petenda est, 

t n., ii. (Weldon's Tra/tsl.) ; see also I. ii. fidid.J, and Caird's Etfoluticn of Theology in 
the Greek PhUosophets, Vol. I., c. xi. 

tirenaeus, Mar, ii., 39 (al, 99). Hamack ignores, where he does not belittle, the evi- 
dence adducible at this period. Cf. Art. on " BapUsm " in Smith & Cheetham, and Roper's 
Apostolic Age^ p. 198. 



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1907.] The Obediences of Catholicism 391 

An instance of this sort surely reveals Catholicism in the 
very attitude which we have described as most significant of 
its inner temper and spirit. From the womb up the Catholic 
child must be lapped and cradled in mystery. It must be taught 
a sound form of conduct long before it is capable of under^ 
standing the sound form of words by which that conduct may 
be justified in moments of stress, either to its rebellious natural 
self, or to an always doubt- engendering world. Here, if any- 
where, Catholicism declares, in effect, that the ''child is father 
to the man." 

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings praise is perfected 
to the adult Christ, who is, in the Apostle's profoundly signifi- 
cant phrase, to be fotmed in each one of us. He is that Other 
by whom, and unto whom, Catholicism, in this case, at least, 
becomes most imperatively a Way ; and the elaborate symbol- 
ism of the rite by which the beginner's feet are set in the 
sure path of his commandments is prophetic of the still more 
elaborate pragmatism of enjoined ''pieties" and "devotions" 
by which his self-conscious- growing faith in after years will 
learn its first bungling prentice- lessons of actuality and life. 

The curious temper of jealous and sometimes dogged reserve, 
which, at various epochs and notably in our own day, has char- 
acterized the official demeanor of Catholicism in matters of edu- 
cation, is another and hardly less convincing example of the 
same mysterious truth. This demeanor, as the reader scarcely 
needs to be reminded, is too often described by shallow ob- 
servers among us as though it were a mere unmannerly ex- 
hibition of religious greed. When, as is frequently the case in 
an age in which minorities are free to organize, it succeeds in 
shaping a policy of scrupulous abstention, as here in the United 
States, or in carrying on an aggressive and formidable propa- 
ganda of a politico- religious kind, as we have witnessed in re- 
cent years in Belgium and Germany, and, with certain modifi- 
cations, also in the British Isles, it is hastily put down to more 
sinister instincts on the part of the Church's pastors, and is 
deprecated as unprogressive bigotry, as unwitting obscurantism, 
and the like, by large bodies of devout and presumably enlight- 
ened Christian men, in whom the unrestricted habit of profes- 
sional dissent seems to have dulled the edge of clear religious 
thinking — by which is meant, we might suggest, charitable 
thinking and, let us add, historical thinking also. 



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392 THE Obediences of Catholicism [Dec,, 

On the other hand, statesmen whose knowledge of the past 
is much more profound than that of the critics in question, and 
whose sense of the psychology of Catholicism, so to call it, is 
more rational, are ready to deal tolerantly with this rooted pre- 
judice of Faith and to find place for it among the various eco- 
nomics of a society which tends yearly to grow more rigorous- 
ly secular and non- religious. If Catholicism were, indeed, a 
mere abstract theory of ordered beliefs, as many of the religious 
bodies that have opposed it on this score have themselves 
tended to become, if it were a mere philosophy of Christ and 
the Christian profession based upon a particular reading of the 
Bible, and not, as it is inevitably constrained by the law of its 
life to be, an obedience and a servitude — a hard and somewhat 
narrow servitude, it might be said, where many of the conven- 
tional liberties of commerce and society are in question — one 
could understand this hostility to its mysterious pedagogic claim. 

But because it is more than this, because it is a Way and 
a tradition rather than a view, a Sacramant of Sacraments be- 
fore becoming a theology, it feels that its secret can never be 
learned out of a book, or be caught by listening to the per- 
functory utterances of any master, however broadly-read or well- 
intentioned, who speaks not as one having true apostolic au- 
thority. It comes forth from a Person and is itself clothed 
above every other body of believers that history has known, 
with a uniquely personal character; its interests are personal, 
its immediate and ultimate scopes are personal ; its regimen, in 
spite of the dry aspect of its great body of Canon Law, are 
triumphantly and most condescendingly personal; having loved 
its own, it will love them unto the end. That, we imagine, ex- 
presses its attitude towards its own followers, young, adolescent, 
or peacefully mature, better than more precise theological de- 
scriptions could do. Its appeal is ever to the inward character 
and personality of men; and the response, as one reads it 
broadly in the history of the peculiar religious conscience which 
it seems to have begotten among the noblest portions of the 
race, is of the same unique and indefinable quality. One can 
only say that one recognizes it when one meets it. A Catho- 
lic is psychologically like no other being on the face of the 
earth, if he be taken all in all; and his feeling for his religion 
can best be denoted by confidently reading a deep mystical 
sense into Burke's immortal climax : it is a proud submission ; 



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1907.] The Obediences of Catholicism 395 

a dignified obedience ; a subordination of the heart whieh keeps 
alive even in servitude itself the spirit of an exalted freedom t 

Each looks upon each ; 

Up grows a thought without speech ! 

That is why it would scarcely be venturing too far to say 
that the opposition to many of the new ideals prevailing in 
primary, secondary, and higher, or university, education, which 
we observe in Catholic centres of opinion to-day, is largely tem- 
peramental. An opposition need not, of course, be accounted 
less rational in claim and content, because one chooses to char- 
acterize it with reference to its psychic origin ; but it is not 
logic or numbers that will enable sensible men on both sides to 
allay the regrettable irritation. Contact and mutual understand- 
ing will be needed for so devout a consummation in the reli- 
gious world ; and it is in Catholicism viewed as a way that one 
may more surely hope to discover the happy modus vivendi. 

To be wise before the event is not always the truest wis-^ 
dom; but this much may safely be hazarded by way of fore- 
cast. The problem of the primary schools may be grave enough ; 
but that created by the extraordinary centripetal drift of uni- 
versity ideals during the past twenty years is assuredly not less 
pressing. Whether our sons be suffered to benefit to the full 
extent of present opportunities by the undeniable advantages to 
intellect and character held out by the great non- Catholic seats 
of learning, as is the case to-day under the highest ecclesiasti- 
cal sanctions at Oxford and Cambridge, and, under less formal 
safeguards, in certain of the State foundations of Belgium as 
well, or whether, as the majority of our American Archbishops 
seem to think should be the rule here, the hard semi- monastic 
policy of enforced aloofness should be preached a little longer^ 
it will be all one in the end. The choice that terminates the 
distracting question of alternatives has been dictated from the 
beginning. It is one of direction and implied obedience to an 
ultimate Voice always. Catholics are committed to a Way be- 
fore they can aspire to learn a truth ; and the least loyal among 
them feel that there is no going back of their End. 

We have selected these illustrations of Catholicism on its 
pragmatical side — the word is used here in its accepted literary 
sense and with no desire, of course, to impinge hazardously on 



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394 THE Obediences of Catholicism [Dec, 

its less comfortable associations — because, in the first instance, 
the inquirer will find that the tendencies they portray are ac- 
tual and familiar, not merely to the men of our own time, but 
to the historical student of every stage of the Church's insti- 
tutional development. Besides, what is nearly as germane to 
the general drift of the argument, they are mysteriously related 
to each other and to certain equally palpable embodiments of 
the obediential spirit as well, which it will be our business to 
interpret more explicitly later on. These tendencies may be 
described briefly as : sacramentalism, sacerdotalism, liturgicalism, 
monasticism, together with the various latter-day developments 
of the ccenobitical idea exemplified in the careers of the post* 
Tridentine congregations, and, last of all, what, for lack of a 
more significant term, must be roughly denoted as devotionalism, 
or the drag of the neo -mystic lay instinct away from the main 
currents of ordered and liturgical piety. 

Behind each one of these uncouth Hellenic names there throbs 
a distinct force which has played an important t6U in the grad- 
ual evolution of the more complex activities of Catholicism. 
In every one of them, too, misunderstood and misdenoted as 
each of them in turn has been at sundry crises in the history 
of the Church at large, we may study the full sweep, so to call 
it, the tide-tike ebb and flow of that all but formless thing 
which seems ever to defy analysis, because it is so strangely 
in advance of the reflective wonder that would adequately name 
it, the Way of Catholicism collectively in an always half- unheed- 
ing world, and the Way of Catholicism playing individually 
upon the half- responses of the solitary spirit. It is a rule of 
conduct, a divine art, a mysterious instinct for sure action, 
long before the theologian appears and interprets it, rationally 
or not, in proportion to his insight, as a formulated doctrine 
never henceforth to be diminished. 

And now we have arrived at a stage of the argument at 
which it seems proper, in the interests of what may be called 
current scientific prejudice, to introduce a consideration which 
we have had in mind all along, and which will help us to de- 
termine with less apparent arbitrariness the true significance of 
Catholicism viewed historically as a vast, far-reaching, and 
sometimes over- mechanical Rule of Life. Judged from this 
vantage-point, Catholicism as a Way will be found to be essen- 
tially the same in all its bewildering and picturesque ramifica- 



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1907.] The Obediences of Catholicism 395 

tions; because from the very beginning it has been inexorably 
shaped^-or, as its unkindly critics aver, too authoritatively and 
imperiously shaped — to what we can only describe as an abid- 
ing and conscientious preference for a soldier-like submission of 
will on the part of all those to whom its message is addressed. 
What is not less significant, it seems unwittingly to inculcate 
this demeanor of the inner spirit as an incalculably more ef- 
fective preparation of the expectant heart ior Christ than the 
apparently more rational and — it might be maintained — more 
apostolic attitude of open-mindedness. Sit rationabile ohsequium 
vestrum^ says St. Paul; Humiliate capita vestra Deo^ says the 
Church. 

Both attitudes are, indeed, invariably recommended by the 
practised convert- maker who understands logic but is afraid of 
instinct; but the Church, when studied in her broader move- 
ments of national or racial evangelization, seems to lean rather 
to the austere pragmatism of that Lenten cry. She accounts 
a human heart stripped of all conceit, whether of itself, its own 
passions, or the world, as the chief requisite and noblest prep- 
aration of a believer groping through her low western portals 
on his way towards Christ. Naked, it would seem, we come 
into both worlds — the world of sense and her wider world of 
the spirit. The justification for this naive prepossession of hers, 
so completely at issue with the prejudices of logic, Hegelian 
or Aristotelian, in an age as predominantly intellectual as our 
own, may be hazarded, perhaps, in the consideration that 
follows. 

Whatever view one may feel impelled to take of the real 
origin of the Papal idea as an ultimately controlling factor in 
the development of mediaeval Christianity, no scholar worthy 
of the name will deny that Catholicism in its less centralizing 
aspects is recognizable as a full-blown product of the Gospel- 
movement as far back as the closing quarter of the second 
century.* It is also, at that point in its development at least, 
in a most true and scientific sense, a genuine derivative of the 
religion described, adequately enough for our purpose here, in 
the Acts of the Apostles. Critical questions as to the author- 
ship and character of that portion of the New Testament writ- 
ings have no bearing on the simple fact to which that idyll- 

* Harnack {Das Wtan des Christentums, s. lao) places the date about twenty years later ; 
but he does this by way of rhetorical device, not as a critical affirmation. 



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396 7 HE OBEDIENCES OF CATHOLICISM [Dec., 

like narrative bears striking testimony in connection with the 
present drift of this essay. 

The simple fact amounts to this. There are four distinct 
passages* in the book whereof we speak, in which the Chris- 
tianity of that seminal period is described, not as a creed or 
as an articulate body of doctrine, but as a Way. No doubt 
good evidence could be cited from the unchallenged Epistles 
of St. Paul to show that even then grave stress was laid upon 
right formularies as a reasonable plea for the acceptance of 
that Way ; but the formularies were not many and the sum of 
the Pauline Gospel was Faith in Jesus as Lord. 

That very fact, however, so far from weakening, tends rather 
to confirm the view upon which we are insisting. Just be- 
cause Jesus was Lord was his doctrine primarily inculcated as 
a Way of Life. His obedience was to be, not the bare pat- 
tern, but the inspiring and meritorious cause of all subsequent 
submission of the heart in the New Church or Convocation of 
Israel. If the submission implied liberty and largeness of spirit 
for all those who felt that they had received a call, it meant 
also a definite and detailed imitation of the various teachers, 
who, as having been sent, spoke and acted with authority in 
the Eucharistic assemblies. What does all this involve if not a 
Rule and a Way in the sense we have indicated ? 

Baptism, the institution of presbyters and overseers, the regu- 
lation of marriage, the tendency to ignore the machinery of the 
civil law in the settlement of disputes, the creation of a dia- 
conate, the practice of assembling early on the first day of the 
week, now become, through the most sacred of associations 
and the hallowing of the Eucharist Loaf, pre-eminently the 
Lord's day, the mysterious bond of Church unity explicitly 
affirmed to lie in that same Loaf — surely, these things and 
others like them, which might be cited as convincingly, point 
to an organized and accepted polity which the more conserva- 
tive Jews must have looked upon with horror, because it set 
up, in opposition to the ''way of the elders" and the tradi- 
tional Mosaic code, the vaguer and easier code of Christ, who 
was said to have proclaimed himself to these infatuated Naza- 
renes the personal and human Way by which alone men could 
hope to have access to the Father. 

It will not do to attempt to weaken the force of these curi- 

* ix. 9 ; six. 9-23 ; xxii. 4 ; xxiv. 14-99. 



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1907.] The Obediences of Catholicism 397 

ous coincidences by suggesting, as might conceivably be done, 
that the word employed by the writer oi these passages of the 
Acts is a manifest quotation put into the mouth of St. Paul in 
his earlier and unregenerate character of Jewish inquisitor, or 
adopted by him, as in the other passages in question, by way 
of convenient reference to the separatist tendency of nascent 
Christianity, felt even at that early stage of its mustard-seed 
growth. The remarkable thing is that the word with its prag- 
matic implications should have been used, whether by friend or 
foe, at all, when a less significant term like aTpeaci;* would 
have answered just as well. Its employment in any contingen- 
cy points clearly to the existence of a prevailing and not yet 
fully rationalized obedientialism^ inspired from first to last by a 
spirit of enthusiastic loyalty to that Leader, older than Abra- 
ham, greater than Moses, and wiser than the prophets, whose 
death and resurrection had proved that He was in truth the 
Way.\ 

This enthusiasm for an art rather than a theory of the Chris- 
tian life was, then, an inheritance from our Lord himself, passed 
on in unbroken succession to historical Catholicism. And what 
Catholicism had thus legitimately received it fostered and ex- 
panded under the influence of an ever- deepening, because ever 
loyal, consciousness which can only be adequately understood by 
watching it at work. It is there, under the guise of the activi- 
ties to which we alluded above as sacramentalism, sacerdotal- 
ism, and the rest, that we detect its true ethos, a something 
that makes for a Way, an ineluctable instinct for the practical, 
both in its mode of seeing things and in its bent for doing 
things, that issues in triumph always. 

These are its obediences. Long before its apologists elabor- 
ate the metaphysic which seems to lay bare the secret of its 
energy to a generation grown devoutly curious, instead of re- 
ligiously energetic, the victory has been spoken and the Church's 
best work for that generation would seem to have been done. 

SeUn HaU, South Orange. N. J. 

* On the sense of tUptaec in N. T. Greek consult the Eruyclopadia Biblical in verb. Vol. 
II., p. 2,019. 

t The argument, it should be remembered, is by no means invalidated by the most recent 
positions taken up by critics with reference to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. The 
point is that sayings like those embodied in the Discourse at the Last Supper and in St, Matt, 
xi. 10, must have been current in Christian circles and familiar to the Christian consciousness 
long before they were committed to writing. Cf, Allen's 5/. Matthew in the IntetnaiUnal Criti- 
cal Commentary Series t p. XX5« 



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I^ew Boohs* 

The second volume of Father 

THE LIFE OP CHRIST, Hickey's translation of the classic 

By Mgr. Le Camus. nfe of our Lord by Mgr. Le 

Camus * covers the period extend* 
ing from the Sermon on the Mount to the healing of the ten 
lepers, and the interview between Jesus and the rich young 
man who declined to follow him. The original work is a mon- 
ument of erudition and critical scholarship combined with apos- 
tolic zeal and simple, fervent piety. 

The learned author, without losing sight of the ancient land- 
marks, does not hesitate to incorporate in his pages the well- 
established results of contemporary critical methods. This not 
too common union of prudent progress and equally prudent 
coniservatism received the high approbation of the Holy Father, 
who holds up the methods of Mgr. I^ Camus as the realiza- 
tion of that just medium which is inculcated in the recent en- 
cyclical. In a letter addressed to Mgr. Le Camus, on the pub- 
lication of his work on the Apostles, the Holy Father said : 

As we must condemn the temerity of those who, having 
more regard for novelty than for the teaching authority of the 
Church, do not hesitate to adopt a method of criticism alto- 
gether too free, so likewise we should not approve the atti- 
tude of those who in no way dare to depart from the usual ex- 
egesis of Scripture, even when, faith not being at stake, the 
real advancement of learning requires such departure. You 
follow a wise middle course. 

Father Hickey's translation is excellent. In its pure, idio- 
matic English one finds none of those crudities which in so 
many of our religious books constantly remind us that we are 
reading a version made by somebody whose competence for the 
task was not beyond question. 

Many priests declare that they are able to draw from vol- 
umes of sermons very little assistance towards the preparation 
of their instructions and discourses. Let them betake them- 
selves to Le Camus, who will provide them with ample mate- 
rial, ready to hand, for sound, solid, and attractive preaching 
on the whole circle of our Lord's life and teaching. 

* The Ufi of Christ. By Mgr. Le Camus. Translated by WilUam A. Hickey. Vol. II. 
New York : Cathedral Library Association. 



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ipo;.] ^Ew Books 399 

Opening with a description of the 
THE AMERICAN REVOLU- situation, immediately after the bat- 
TION, ties of Trenton and Princetown, in 

By Trevelyan. 1777, Trevelyan's third volume • 

follows the course of Qvents down 
to the outbreak of war between France and England. The first 
chapter is chiefly concerned with the doings of Congress and 
the assemblies. The author handles the politicians contemptu- 
ously ; and even Samuel Adams has to be content with a rather 
uncomplimentary rating. The meddling inefficiency of the mem- 
bers, and their jealous obstruction of Washington, are roundly 
castigated. As for Washington himself, no American writer sur- 
passes Trevelyan in his boundless admiration for Washington, 
'^ the Chief and leader of heroic proportions and stainless repu* 
tation." Indeed, the most touchy of patriots can find nothing 
to complain of in the treatment measured out in this volume 
to the worthy American leaders and the Americans as a nation. 
Washington, Nathaniel Green, Colonel Morgan, Philip Schuyler, 
are names which, along with humbler ones, receive their full 
mead of eulogy; while Gates, Charles Lee, Conway, Dr. Rush, 
are judged with unbending severity. 

The retreat of Sir William Howe, after Morristown, his vig- 
orous conduct at Brandywine, the defence of the Chew Mansion 
at Germantown by Colonel Musgrave, are among the few events 
from which a little solace for British pride is extracted. The 
story of the contest for the Delaware, the occupation of Phila- 
delphia, the winter of discontent at Valley Forge, with the con- 
temporary gaiety of Philadelphia as the comfortable quarters of 
the British, offer a fine opportunity, which is not missed, for 
Trevelyan's picturesque pen. With all his uncle's contempt for 
"the dignity of history," he makes use of homely details and 
trivial yet significant incidents, to give his pictures life and con- 
crete strength. 

Then, too, there is no disquisition or tedious dissertation. 
If he has any philosophic reflections to offer, they are usually 
condensed into a terse, pregnant sentence or two. It is a pleas- 
ure, in these days when the scientific method is making most 
of the historical works that are coming out very hard reading, 
to take up Sir George's narrative, which runs along with un- 
flagging life and verve. 

* Tk4 Anurican RevoluHom, Part III. By the Right Hon. Sir George Otto^Trevelyan, 
Bart. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 



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400 NEW Books [Dec., 

To the preposterous character of Lord George Germaine's 
famous plan, and to his failure to keep the Howes informed in 
time of the necessity of supporting the Northern Army, Tre- 
velyan chiefly ascribes the catastrophe of Saratoga; though he 
does not stint his praise of Arnold and Morgan. The impor- 
tance which he assigns, throughout the whole struggle, but es- 
pecially at Stillwater, Bemis's Heights, and Bennington, to the 
work of the American rifles, indicates that, together with most 
Englishmen since the Boer War, Sir George considers good 
marksmanship a much more valuable military asset than ripe 
proficiency in parade drill. 

Naturally, in his relation of the American side of the strug- 
gle, and for his judgments on the leaders here, he depends 
chiefly upon his American predecessors. But when he turns to 
London, and to Europe in general, his familiarity with his 
ground inspires him with more independence. The last chapter 
in the book, therefore, which describes the course of opinion 
among European courts and statesmen is of a more original 
quality than any other portion of this volume. 

Franklin's personal influence he considers to have been of 
incalculable weight at this point of the struggle. In the first 
years, he says, '' the prospects of the young Republic were seri- 
ously and irretrievably damnified by the mismanagement of Con- 
gress; but the position was saved by the ability, the discre- 
tion, and the force of character of one single man — Benjamin 
Franklin." 

'' He was," Sir George says elsewhere, ** a great ambassador, 
of a type which the world had never seen before, and will never 
see again, until it contains another Benjamin Franklin. Tried 
by the searching test of practical performance, he takes high 
rank among the diplomatists of history. His claims to that 
position have been vindicated — " and Sir George proceeds to 
repeat Wharton's eloquent summing up of Franklin's claims to 
fame. 

This chapter contains also a brief but striking portrait of 
Beaumarchais, and a keen estimate of the attitude taken by 
Frederick of Prussia towards the belligerents. The only affair 
about which Sir George's resolute fidelity to the ** hands-across- 
the-water" sentiment relaxes, so far as to permit him to indulge 
in severe strictures of American behavior, is the action of 
Congress with regard to the prisoners of Saratoga. Though 



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1907.] New Books 401 

by no means an admirer of Gates, he acknowledges that the 
American general throughout the transactions of the surrender 
behaved like a man of honor. He admits, too, that he accorded 
Burgoyne terms far more lenient than he might and ought to 
have imposed. But the refusal of Congress to ratify and carry 
out these terms he condemns without qualification, though, it 
must be said, rather in sorrow than in anger. The approba- 
tion of the ** Resolutions of Congress concerning the Embarca- 
tion " by the Count de Vergennes, who pronounced them 
''fortes bonnes,'' is, he says, the only approval that they have 
ever received. 

With that solitary approval from a quarter which was 
neither unprejudiced nor disinterested, Americans, then and 
thereafter, had to be contented. Their true friends and sin- 
cere well-wishers, in all countries and in every generation, 
would give much if these unseemly pages could be expunged 
from their history. The ablest among the contemporary 
English chroniclers, and the most favorable to their cause 
(Annual Register of 1778), recorded his profound regret that 
they had so widely departed from the system of fairness, 
equity, and good faith which had hitherto guided their 
actions, and was particularly essential to the reputation of a 
new State ; and his opinion has been shared by all careful 
and responsible writers from his day to ours. The young re- 
public had adopted a line of conduct which ranked it below 
the moral level of civilized and self-respecting nations. 

Then, after recalling how the British public sustained the 
Convention of Cintra, though at a critical moment it restored 
twenty thousand splendid troops to Napoleon ; and, on the con- 
trary, the Spanish Junta set aside the Convention of Baylen ; 
and the Neapolitan Bourbons refused, in 1799, to respect the 
terms granted to the Neapolitan garrisons. Sir George con- 
cludes : 

The odious cruelty which accompanied and aggravated 
these infringements of public faith had no parallel in the 
treatment of Burgoyne and his army; but none the less, 
when every allowance has been made, and all excuses have 
been impartially considered, the violation of the Saratoga 
Treaty remains a blot on the lustre of the American Revo- 
lution. 

Two large maps, one of Saratoga and Bemis's HeightSi 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 26 



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402 New Books [Dec, 

the other of the country between Morristown in New Jersey 
and the Head of Elk in Maryland, accompany the volume. 
With their help, and thanks to the remarkable clearness of the 
narrative, the reader may easily follow even the more com- 
plicated details of the military operations. It may be pre- 
dicted with safety that this History of the Revolution will take 
rank as a classic. 

As its sub-title indicates, this vol- 
HEDITATIONS. ume* consists of short medita- 

tions on the Holy Ghost for every 
day in the year. They are drawn from a wide range of sources : 
The Holy Scripture, the Fathers, papal documents, lives of the 
saints, theologians, ascetical writers, pulpit orators, ancient and 
modern, have been laid under contribution. The selections, 
which are, in about equal proportion, instructive and devotion- 
al, are intended chiefly for the use of teachers and instructors, 
to assist them to instill into the minds of their pupils a knowl- 
edge of the part played by the Holy Spirit in the sanctifica- 
tion of the soul, and to create in their hearts a strong devo- 
tion to him. If there is any dogmatic and moral truth of the 
first order on which our Catholic people, speaking generally, 
might be much more thoroughly instructed than they are, it 
certainly is that which relates to the Third Person of the 
Blessed Trinity. Every effort made to supply this deficiency 
is an emphatically good work, and deserves to be warmly com- 
mended. Father Lambing's book belongs to the kind of devo- 
tional literature of which there cannot be too much, and of 
which, in fact, there is too little, notwithstanding the fecundity 
of our own religious press. 

The ever-faithful Sulpicians can always be relied upon to 
do honest, thorough, excellent work towards facilitating the 
practice of meditation among priests. This most recent volume,t 
written for that purpose, is particularly well arranged and neatly 
edited. Each meditation, given in the well-known method 
taught in the Sulpician seminaries, includes a preparation ''for 
the night before," and then about eight pages of careful, rea- 

• The Fountain of Living Water; or. Thoughts on the Holy Ghost for Every Day in tht Year* 
By Rev. A. A. Lambing, D.D. New York : Fr. Pu«tet & Co. 

\ Meditations for the Use of Seminarians and Priests, By Very Rev. L. Branchereau, S.S. 
Translated and Adapted. Vol. I. The Fundamental Truths. New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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1907.] New Books 403 

sonable, sensible reflection upon the subject in hand. The 
present volume treats of the " Great Truths." We presume 
that other volumes are to follow. 

Like its predecessor, the present 
THE SEVEN SACRAMEMTS. series of Letters • is a full, clear, 

and detailed exposition of doc- 
trine and discipline for the use of the laity. The present vol- 
ume takes up the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, Pen- 
ance, and the Holy Eucharist, including the Sacrifice of the 
Mass. Father de Zuluetta, in pleasing, familiar style, explains 
every point of doctrine and practice so fully as to anticipate 
all the questions that frequently occur to Catholics on various 
points where the catechism requires further elucidation. The 
scale of his exposition may be indicated by the fact that six 
pages are given to explaining just what is needed to break the 
fast, with regard to the reception of the Holy Eucharist. 
Though Father de Zuluetta addresses himself to the faithful, 
he has an eye to the inquiring non-Catholic; and the book is 
a suitable one to place in the hands of Protestants who desire 
information on Catholic life. 

The appearance of a new volume 

THE TENTS OF WICKED- by Miriam Coles Harris should be 

N^SS. an event of great interest in liter- 

By Mrs. Harris. ^ry circles. No living American 

novelist can claim her years of 
service — fifty in all — to the cause of literature. Her first novel, 
Rutledge^ which appeared in the early sixties, received a most 
popular welcome. Since then she has written some half-dozen 
others ; and now comes her latest volume. The Tents of Wicked^ 
ness.f 

Leonora, the heroine of the tale, is a young girl who has re- 
ceived her education in a French convent. The girl returns to 
America, and is introduced by her father, a millionaire, to so- 
ciety ; or, rather, those who are in her father's set. Religiously 
trained, she is shocked when asked to subscribe to the customs 
and codes of this social class. Without being a prude, she re- 
mains steadfast to her principles. 

* Letters on Christian Doctrine, (Second Series.) The Seven Sacraments, By F. M. 
de Zuluetta. S.J. New York: Benziger Brothers. 

t The Tents of Wickedness. By Miriam Coles Harris. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 



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404 NEW BOOKS [Dec, 

Mrs. Harris' description of the Catholic's method of makiog 
his confession is admirably done, and for those outside the 
Church will be highly instructive. 

The shortcomings and the sins of that class of society of 
which the author treats are well pictured. Sin has its power 
and its charm, but the wages of sin is death. 

The great theme of the work is a contrast between those 
who recognize religious guidance and those who in their lives 
know no law. Against the picture of unworthiness and selfish- 
ness, of the power of money, and of marital infidelity, stands 
the striking description of life at the Cumberford Rectory. 
Edward Warren struggles manfully through doubt and tempta- 
tion, against prejudices within and without, against sister and 
mother, towards the spiritual light and -in faithfulness to the 
guidance of God. The keen appreciation, the deep sympathy 
shown in the telling of that story, bespeak a personal note — 
something perhaps of what the author herself has experienced 
in her way to the Catholic Church. 

The book treats in an able way a theme of the utmost prac- 
tical importance to-day, and we bespeak for it an encour^ing 
and hearty welcome. 

Mr. McSpadden's book* does not 

FAMOUS PAINTERS OF purport to be a detailed or even a 

AMERICA. popular criticism of American art 

By McSpadden. i^ is, instead, a series of chatty, 

readable anecdotes dealing with the 
lives and personalities of noted American artists. In the author's 
own words, it is ''directed to the reader rather than the critic 
— to the man who avoids technical definition as he would the 
plague, but who would be interested to know that once upon a 
time Benjamin West was a little Quaker boy in Pennsylvania, 
pulling fur out of the cat's tail to make his first brushes." 
Some eleven representative painters, from Copley and Stuart to 
Whistler, Sargent, and Sir Edwin Abbey, have been chosen for 
discussion — a list which might well be augmented, but cannot 
in itself be disparaged. The book is freely illustrated with 
portraits of the artists and reproductions of their works; and it 
ought to appeal to the holiday buyer who is interested in art 
from the outside. 

* Famous Patnttrs of America, By J. Walker McSpadden. New York : Thomas Y. 
Crowell & Co. 



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1907.] NEW BOOKS 405 

At the instance of Archbishop Ire- 
THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL, land, the professor of Catechetics in 

the Seminary of St. Paul has pub- 
lished the lectures which he delivered to his students on the 
management of the Sunday- School.* Father Feeney deals with 
this difficult problem in a thoroughly practical way. He dis- 
cusses the qualifications and duties of the director and the teach- 
ers ; the gradation of classes ; efficient methods of teaching ; and 
the means to enlist the co-operation of parents. Father Feeney 
has a wealth of suggestions and counsel on pedagogical, as well 
as on administrative, matters which are well worth the study of 
everybody who shares in any way the responsibility of the 
catechetical office. 

It would, perhaps, be more ap- 
" THE MEW THEOLOGY." propriate to call this small pam- 
phlet t a denunciation, rather than 
a refutation, of the theology of the Reverend Mr. Campbell. The 
temper in which Rev. W. Lieber writes is not irenic ; and one 
would like to see a more methodical statement of the position 
attacked, and more systematic development of the arguments 
and proofs deployed against it. We think that a perusal of 
this refutation would never convert a follower of Mr. Campbell, 
though it would be pretty sure to exasperate. But it might be 
said that Mr. Campbell's claims that his ** theology " contains 
any Christianity at all, in the long- received sense of the term, 
is so futile that it scarcely calls for any serious dialectical treat- 
ment. 

Mr. Mure, who seems to be a 
ADVICE TO ECCLESIASTICAL kindly, sensible gentleman, of 
STUDENTS. philanthropic disposition, has no- 

ticed that the ecclesiastical stu- 
dent has not the same opportunities as the office boy, the ap- 
prentice, or in fact any secular youth, for picking up some 
items of knowledge, which it is the business of nobody in par- 
ticular to teach, yet which are not without their value in life. 
So, to remedy this want, Mr. Mure has thrown together a num- 
ber of hints and advices on a variety of topics | pertaining to 

^Tke Caikclk Sunday'SehooU Stmt Suggestions on its Aim, Work, and Management. By 
Rev. Bernard Feeney. St. Louis : B. Herder. 

t " The New Theology " ; or, the Rev, R, J, CampbelTs Conclusions Refuted, By the Rev. 
W. Lieber. New York : Benziger Brothers. 

XTyronUus, Commonplace Advice to Church Students, By Harold Henry Mure, St. 
Louis : B. Herder. 



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4o6 New Books [Dec, 

personal habits, dress, hygiene, deportment, which he places at 
the disposal of the cleric. Some of the proprieties and impro- 
prieties that Mr. Mure calls attention to are so obvious that it 
is hard to believe them unknown to even the most Boeotian of 
ecclesiastical students. But not a little of the information and 
advice anticipates faults and blunders that are frequently per- 
petrated. 

The interest in ancient Ireland 
IRELAND. created by the Gaelic movement 

continues to stimulate the press 
to a brisk production of literature dealing with early Irish his- 
torical questions. Dr. Joyce issues a new compendium* of his 
large Social History of Ireland, in two volumes. Some time ago 
he published his smaller Social History^ which was an epitome 
of the former. The present little handbook is a very com- 
pressed synopsis of the second publication. It dispenses with 
references, amplifications, illustrations, quotations, etc., and pre- 
sents in bare outline, an account of the condition of the coun- 
try in ancient times. It will be a boon to those who want to 
know the facts, divested of all critical disquisition. 

The Reverend Canon Fleming returns to the perennial 
question of St. Patrick's birthplace.f He disagrees with the 
two recent biographers of the saint. Archbishop Healy and 
Professor Bury, who also differ from each other. Neither Dum- 
barton nor Wales is to be allowed the honor, if Canon Fleming 
has his way. He insists on the claims of Boulogne. The Canon, 
who does not bring forward any new evidence, assigns great 
weight to the testimony of the life of the saint by Probus. 
The question remains just where it was; and we must continue 
to say, with Katharine Tynan, in her Rhymed Life of St. 

Patrick X: 

Sunny France, Scotia gray — 

It is not known to this day 

Which gave us Patrick. Which it was, 

To that land glory and grace 

Prom Patrick's sons and Bride's daughters. 

• The Story of Ancient Irish Civilization, By P. W. Joyce, LL.D. New York : Long- 
mans, Green & Co. 

\ Bouhgne-Sur-Mer : St. Patrick's Native Town, By W. C. Fleming. New York: 
Bensiger Brothers. 

X The Rhymed Life of St, Patrick. Written by Katharine Tynan. Pictured by Lindsay 
Symington. With a Foreword by General Sir William Butler, G.C.B. New York : Benziger 
Brothers. 



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1907.] New Books 407 

Thus starts The Rhymed Life^ and in lively recitative ballad 
verse, Katharine Tynan tells the entire story of St. Patrick, with- 
out missing a single incident of any significance or importance. 
The book consists of thirty-two large folio pages, where '' a 
rivulet" of large, opulent, type '^ meanders through a meadow 
of margin," set off by artistic illustrations. If Blessed Patrick 
and sweet St. Bride only respond to the prayer of the Envoy, 
and 

"Bless this book and scatter it wide," 

old and young may easily acquire and retain a comprehensive, 
if not complete, knowledge of all that is to be known of Ire- 
land's patron saint. The short Preface, by one of England's 
most distinguished living soldiers, is so eloquent that one is 
tempted to quote it in full. We must be satisfied to give only 
the closing periods : 

If there be in the great life beyond the grave a morning 
trumpet note to sound the riveille of the army of the dead, 
glorious indeed must be the muster answering from the tombs 
of fourteen centuries the summons of the Apostle of the 
Gaels. And scarce less glorious can be his triumph when 
the edge of sunrise, rolling around this living earth, reveals 
on all the ocean isles and distant continents the myriad scat- 
tered children of the Apostle, whose voices answering that 
sunrise roll-call, re-echo in endless accents along the vaults 
of heaven. 

The appearance of a fourth edition of Father Morris' Ire- 
land and St. Patrick^ attests the permanent value of the Ora- 
torian's splendid tribute to the Irish nation as the living evidence 
of the high spiritual and moral type which the Catholic religion, 
when faithfully practised, can produce. One of the essays, that 
on the Bull of Adrian IV., has no critical value. Another, the 
longest of the collection, '*St. Patrick's Work Past and Pres- 
ent," has, to a great extent, lost its original interest. It was a 
vigorous onslaught on the credit of the historian, James An- 
thony Froude, whose reputation was at its zenith when Father 
Morris assailed him for his misrepresentation of Irish character 
and religion. But for many years past Froude's name has be- 
come for everybody a synonym for inaccuracy and deception. 
The entente cordiale between the British Government and the 
Catholic Church in Ireland, which Father Morris announced to 



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4o8 Neiv Books [Dec., 

be near at hand in his essay on ''The Future/' has not yet 
arrived. Some prospect of its partial realization, on the sub- 
ject of the University problem, is a hope of to-day. But the 
** non-conformist conscience " may prove politically powerful 
enough to postpone again indefinitely the fulfilment of the 
amiable Oratorian's expectation. 

The subject of this biography* 
ROSE LUHHIS. was the daughter of a gentleman 

By Delia Gleeson. of fortune, who withdrew from the 

life of business and society to 
settle down on his estate at Sodus Point, on the shores of 
Lake Ontario, where Rose Lummis was born. Her mother be- 
longed to an old Philadelphia family. Her biographer says: 

Brought up in an atmosphere of extreme culture and refine- 
ment, imbued with a deep respect for authority, thrown with 
people of wit, learning, and espfit. Rose Lummis was to spend 
among ignorance, lawlessness, and vice the greater part of 
her life, which her love for God and her zeal for souls made 
not only pleasant, but happy beyond words. 

Among her earliest recollections was that of hearing, at her 
grandfather's home in Philadelphia, her grandparents and her 
aunt speak in tones of horror of ''Cecilia becoming a Catholic." 
Wondering what the dreadful disgrace could be, she asked : 
" Aunt Rose, what is it to become a Catholic ? " " Something 
awful Rosie, and Aunt Cecilia has made us all very unhappy," 
was the reply. Aunt Cecilia was the wife of Judge Lord, of 
St. Louis, who had been received into the Church by Arch- 
bishop Ryan. This incident sufficiently indicates the density 
of the prejudice which surrounded Rose's family. Yet Rose 
was converted at an early age. When at the fashionable Epis- 
copalian boarding-school, St. Mary's Hall, New Jersey, where, 
with her classmates, she was prepared for confirmation by Dr. 
Doane, she refused to be confirmed, because she did not be- 
lieve in the Episcopal Church. 

Shortly after, she went frequently to visit the family of her 
father's brother William, who had married a Catholic, and whose 
children were all brought up Catholics. This family came, in re- 
turn, to Sodus Point. On one of these visits, in 1862, came, with 
the cousins, William Pardow, a nephew of Mrs. William Lummis. 

* Madams Rose Lummis, By Delia Gleeson. New York : Benxiger Brothers. 



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1907.] New Books 409 

One ol the last days of the holidays the whole party had 
gone to spend it on one of the islands. Rose, as usual, flung 
her whole heart into the day's enjoyment, clinging, to the 
last moment, to the pleasant hours that for her, she knew, 
must end to-morrow. Standing apart, looking down reflect- 
ingly on the bright scene, William Pardow joined her to tell 
her a most astounding piece of news. On his return to New 
York he intended entering the Jesuit novitiate. His mother 
alone shared his secret. 

Rose burst forth into denunciations, and endeavored to per- 
suade her friend from his design ; but without success. On his 
departure, the following morning, William Pardow gave her as 
a farewell token a copy of Butler's penny catechism. Rose re- 
flected on the significance of his sacrifice. 

''I was a Catholic from that moment," Rose said years 
later, speaking of this event in her life. **The little cate- 
chism was now my sole instructor ; I read chapter after chap- 
ter slowly and carefully, hunting up the references in my own 
Protestant Bible ; and as I read, my only wonder was why I 
had not become a Catholic long ago, seeing the truth as it 
really was.'* 

Rose was soon baptized; and then she organized a little 
chapel for the poor Catholics around her home. She vigorously 
fought the local Episcopalian clergyman, Mr. Salt, with the re- 
sult that he, too, soon became a Catholic, and was followed by 
his sister, who, ** though she died young, lived to see her 
brother President of Seton Hall College, and Vicar- General of 
the Diocese of Newark." 

From the moment of her conversion Rose desired to become 
a religious. When she found herself, after her mother's death, 
in the little Canadian town of Simcoe, she again began a work 
of apostleship among the poor population, in which both morals 
and religion were at a low ebb. Here she worked wonders, and 
proved a ministering angel to a number of Irish immigrants who 
drifted under her protection. For her subsequent career — her 
essay on the religious life, her return to Simcoe, her later labors 
among the negroes and " po' white trash " in the South, we 
must refer our readers to this biography, which is a well drawn 
picture of a singularly beautiful character. 



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4IO NEW BOOKS [Dec, 

In P^re Eudes, the editor of Les 
THE VENERABLE PERE Saints series • had a subject well 
EUDES. suited to give him scope to display 

his distinctive method oi writing 
hagiology. P^re Eudes was an apostolic man of action who, on 
a prominent stage, played a part in scenes and struggles which 
belong to the history of the Church in France. A contempor- 
ary of M. Olier and St. Vincent de Paul, he was a fellow-worker 
with them in the movement which ** reconstituted the religious 
soul of France in the seventeenth century." He entered the 
religious life in the Oratory. After spending some years in it 
he withdrew ; and established, successively, the Company of the 
Blessed Sacrament, the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, and 
the Congregation of the Good Shepherd. He was, besides, an 
ardent defender of the devotion to the Sacred Heart against 
the Jansenists. 

The story of his life runs through the troublous currents of 
Jansenism and Gallicanism. He was in relations with Richelieu, 
Mazarin, Anne of Austria, and, at the close of his life, with the 
then young Louis XIV. More than one episode of his career 
illustrates the extent to which the French monarchy exercised, 
and the still greater extent to which it claimed to exercise, 
native authority over the Church in France. 

An incident that occurred towards the end of P^re Eudes' 
life throws some light on the importance which this question 
enjoyed at the time. P^re Eudes was] considered one of the 
great missionaries and preachers of France. He was respected 
by Anne and her son, although, or because, he did not hesitate 
to reprehend the frivolous life of the court. In 167 1 he preached 
a jubilee before the court ; and Louis was so pleased that he 
gave Pere Eudes two thousand pounds for his works. Shortly 
afterwards he was spoken of as coadjutor to the Bishop of £v- 
reux. He did not wish to accept the appointment and he had 
enemies enough to assist him to escape it. 

When, many years previously, he was endeavoring to obtain 
the approbation of Rome for the Congregation of the Good 
Shepherd, one of his agents, in a petition to the Curia, de- 
clared that the Congregation wished to bind itself to defend all 
opinions, even doubtful ones, of a nature to support the authority 

» Let Saints, Le VinirahU Pire Eudes (1601-16S0), Par Henri Joly. Paris : Victor Le- 
coffre. 



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1907.] New Books 411 

of tbe Pope. P^re Eudes had never signed such an engage- 
ment. 

Somebody ferreted the document out of the files of the Con- 
gregation of Bishops, and published it. Louis XIV. was angry. 
P^re Eudes wrote a solemn disavowal of the document. He 
received a lettre de cachet ordering him to quit Paris within 
twenty-four hours, which he obeyed, April, 1674. Only after 
many supplications, full of grief and humility, was he allowed 
to return, in 1679. He died the following year. The orders 
which he instituted are spread throughout the world. The cause 
of his beatification is under consideration at Rome. The bio- 
grapher has given us a volume of powerful edification, and at 
the same time an excellent historical monograph. 

In this delightful study of the ar- 
MOZART. tistic, intellectual, and moral life 

of Mozart,* the compilers have 
given to musical literature an admirable collection of such 
writings and sayings of the great master as serve to reveal 
concisely, uniquely, and convincingly the greatness of his genius 
and the beauty of his character. The book possesses the ex- 
ceptional value of an unconsciously written autobiography an- 
notated with memoranda which epitomize in historical form the 
principal events of the artist's life. 

While much has been written concerning Mozart, the master 
and composer, we are here brought into intimacy with Mozart, 
the man. We follow him into the privacy of his musical '' work- 
shop," and again into the glare of his public career. We are 
taken with him to public musical performances; we enjoy the 
benefit of his opinions concerning his works and those of his 
contemporaries ; we are made acquainted with his strivings and 
labors, and, difficult though it be to associate the idea of sor- 
row with cheerful, sunny Mozart, we have occasion to sym- 
pathize with him as we find him at times suffering under criti- 
cism, afBiction, and poverty. 

Throughout his life, Mozart is first of all musician and 
artist. In the self- revelation of himself recorded in this volume, 
his significance in this respect is attested as clearly as in the mag- 
nificent productions he has given to the world. 

* Moxart the Man and the Aftist, as revealed in his own words. Compiled and annotated 
by Friedrich Kerst. Translated into English, and edited, by Henxy Edward Krehbiel. New 
York : B. W. Huebsch. 



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412 New Books [Dec, 

The book does not deal with the technicalities of music to 
an appreciable extent, though the musical reader can gather 
much that is of technical value. 

'' Being home for the holidays and 

HOME FOR GOOD. home * for good ' are quite diflFer- 

Mother Mary Loyola. ent matters, and it is her (a girl's) 

business to see that her settling 
down in the home circle is distinctly for good — her own good 
and the good of all around her." This passage, which occurs 
in one of the later chapters, might be prefixed to Mother Loy- 
ola's new book for the instruction of girls,* as an announce- 
ment of its purpose and scope. Passing, usually with no ''re- 
luctant feet," from the boarding school, where she has passed 
several years, to the home, in which during the same period 
she has been but an occasional, and generally a much- indulged, 
visitor, the young girl finds herself more her own mistress, sub- 
ject to new calls of duty and new allurements to pleasure and 
self-indulgence. Her character is still plastic, and its future 
largely depends on how the girl now responds to the irrecon- 
cilable competitors for her preferences. 

To girls at this crisis Mother Loyola offers herself as a 
Mentor. She lays the foundation of her instructions by insist- 
ing on the seriousness of life, the duty incumbent on everybody 
to employ it to some serious purpose, and to guide it by the 
life of faith. She unfolds, very persuasively, the motives which 
urge, and the methods which conduce to, the formation of a 
noble, unselfish, useful character; and lays bare the processes 
by which petty vices and ugly traits, that afterwards spoil a 
woman's life, are formed. Mother Loyola does not deal in ab- 
stractions and generalities. She writes as if she were living 
amid a family of young persons, and taking occasion of the in- 
cidents of daily life to point her moral. She does not preach ; 
she converses ; and she permits her audience to have their turn, 
which they employ usually to put forth reasons for preferring 
the primrose way to the stern, hard road — reasons which, it is 
unnecessary to say. Mother Loyola resolves into pitiful excuses, 
or unavailing subterfuges of selfishness or frivolity. 

Though intended for English girls, and English girls of a 
certain class — people of wealth and leisure — Mother Loyola's 

* Home for Good, By Mother Mary Loyola. New York : P. J. Kenedy & Sods. 



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1907.] New Books 413 

counsels are sufficiently broad and catholic to be useful over 
a wider sphere. Mother Loyola, however, must suffer the pen- 
alty of her skill. She has so nicely adjusted her instructions 
to the condition, character, and needs of her young English 
sisters, that they will not quite so perfectly fit girls of a dif- 
ferent mentality. A young American girl, who is '' home for 
good," would probably acknowledge the first chapter or two to 
be mature enough in tone to merit her respectful considera- 
tion. But when she would pass on to the subsequent chapters, 
she would, we fear, very often, gently, or impatiently, accord- 
ing to her character, close the book with the reflection : ** Pshaw! 
this is for the juveniles." In that case, she would prove her- 
self a benefactor to her younger sisters and friends by passing 
Mother Loyola's book on to them. 

The excellent taste and care of the book- making and the 
literary selections shown in the Mosher Publications* are too 
well-known to need comment. A number of Mr. Mosher's latest 
publications have just reached us, and they are a delight to the 
eye and refreshment to the mind. Among them is a truly poetic 
collection : A Little Book of Twenty^four Carols^ by Katharine 
Tynan; the famous letter. Father Damieny by Robert Louis 
Stevenson ; The Children's Crusade — queer, and in great meas- 
ure horribly fantastic tales from the French of Marcel Schwob, 
by Henry Copley Green ; the preface gives a good estimate of 
this eccentric Frenchman's literary work ; Stars of Thought^ ex- 
tracts from the writings of Emerson, made by Thomas Coke 
Watkins, with index ; the beautiful Legend of Saint Julian Hos- 
pitaler^ from the French of Gustave Flaubert, by Agnes Lee, 
who gives a short appreciation of the French author; A Little 
Garland of Celtic Verse^ containing selections from Samuel Fer- 
guson, W. B. Yeats, Nora Chesson, Moira O'Neil, Ethna Car- 
bery, Lionel Johnson, and others; and The Sweet Miracle. From 
the Spanish of Ega de Queiroz, by Edgar Prestage. 

All the books are printed and bound with exquisite taste. 

* Thomas. B Mosher, Portland, Maine. 



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jForeion Ipetiobicals, 

The Tablet (28 Sept.) : In a reprint from the Daily Chronicle of 
a letter written by Rev. G. Tyrrell, and one from his 
subsequently published explanations, a considerable di- 
vergence of opinion is pointed out. ^The Right Rever- 
end Abbot Gasquet is appointed Chairman of the Com- 
mittee for the revision of the Vulgate. 
(S Oct.): Father Tyrrell's comment on the Encyclical pub- 
lished in the Giomale d'ltalia is deplored.-^— Cardinal 
Logue in an important speech in Derry gives warning 
against socialistic tenets. 

(13 Oct.): The criticism of the Encyclical from The 
Times. The ecclesiastical seditions of a century surveyed 

editorially. An account of the death and the work of 

Father H. I. D. Ryder, of the Birmingham Oratory. 
(19 Oct.): The attendance of ecclesiastical students at 
civil universities as defined by the Encyclical, 

Ihe Month (Oct.): Attention is given to the Catholic Confer- 
ence held at Preston this year. Dr. Windle's appeal for 
Catholic literature, expressed in his paper ''Scientific 
Facts and Scientific Hypotheses," elicited considerable 
discussion. The proposition to establish a daily news- 
paper, suggested by a member of the clergy, was regarded 
as impracticable. It was urged that an appropriation 
be made for the translation of the anti-socialistic publi- 
cations of German Catholics. A critique of the life and 

works of the German writer Novalis is given by Harold 
Binnis. — — The novels of William de Morgan receive at- 
tention from Rev. Herbert Thurston. He suspects that 
the name of the author given is a pseudonym. He says 
that the novels, Joseph Vance and Alice- f or ^ Shorty have a 
highly commendable philosophic value. While he con- 
siders that, in part, they are ill-constructed, yet there is 
no fiction since that of George Eliot so effulgent with 
epigrammatic brilliance as is displayed in these two books. 

The Dublin Review (Oct.) : Dr. Barry reviews the Papal Depos- 
ing Power as a product of the evolution of Roman Law. 
The Trilogy of Joris Karl Huysmans reveals at once, 
says Rev. P. J. Connolly, SJ., his characteristic gifts of 



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1907.] Foreign Periodicals 415 

power and color, and those tendencies toward exaggerated 
naturalism which he inherited from his master, Zola. 
The recent reaction against the Liberal party in Spain is 

discussed. Mrs. Wilfrid Ward regards Charles Dickens 

as a realistic portrait painter. Hugh Pope, O.P., gives 

the results of the excavations at Gezer, and points out 

the light they throw upon the Bible. Katharine Tynan 

writes an intimate sketch of Lionel Johnson. 

The Irish Theological Quarterly (Oct.): Rev. John O'Neill, Ph.D., 
discusses ''Kant as Apologist of Theism,'' first giving in 
a few pages a clear exposition of the general teaching 
of the great philosopher, with a view of showing his ba- 
sis of natural theology. As an apologist, therefore, his 
worth is doubtful, while, as a thinker and a man he re- 
mains a marvel. Dr. Harty continues his discussion 

of "The 'Living' Question of the Living Wage.*' Inci- 
dentally, he highly commends Dr. Regan's work of the 
same title, though taking the liberty to disagree with 

him on occasion. Fr. Pope, O.P., prefers the name 

" Literary Criticism of the Bible," to that of " Higher 
Criticism," illustrates the meaning of the phrase, and ar- 
gues for the necessity of lawful and reasonable criticism. 
Rev. David Barry discusses "A Forgotten Matri- 
monial impediment," Ecclesice Vetitum. r-Dr. W. Mc- 
Donald criticizes the arguments alleged by Cardinal Maz- 
zella in proof of the Infallibility of the Church. He 
finds them all faulty and inconclusive; and then gives 

the proof he himself thinks strongest. Rev. John J. 

Toohey, S.J., contributes an article on " The Grammar 
of Assent and the Old Philosophy." He declares New- 
man's system *' unique in conception and execution," but 
denies that "his doctrines cover the entire compass of 
the modern system," and thinks that the subjective side 
of Newman's philosophy is receiving undue emphasis at 
the hands of the disciples of "a rising school of phi- 
losophy." 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Oct.) : The Rev. Daniel Cogh- 
lan elucidates the recent Encyclical on " Modernism.'* 
Each proposition is examined separately, and the sig« 
nificance of the condemnations laid bare. He objects to 
the use of the term " Modernism," on the ground that 



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4l6 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec, 

the fundamental proposition implied by it has been the 
basis of rationalism in all ages. That the fame of the 
Apostolic Mission House has crossed the sea is attested 
by the Rev. Michael O 'Flanagan in a sketch of the non- 
Catholic Mission Movement in the United States. The 
work and method of the Mission House are treated in 
detail. Deserved prominence is given to the indefatiga- 
ble zeal of Fr. Elliott. A correspondent, writing on 

the proposed substitution of abstinence from alcohol in- 
stead of meat on Fridays, expresses the opinion that if 
bona fide Total Abstainers were dispensed from the Fri- 
day abstinence, it would greatly increase their number. 

The Church Quarterly Review (Oct.): C. F. Rogers believes 
that the main difficulty of the present education contro- 
versy in England is that the question has been inex- 
tricably mixed up with politics An exhaustive ac- 
count is giveii of the strange career of Joachim of Floris, 
and an appreciation of some of his doctrines. The wri- 
ter believes that the teaching of Joachim was ''Montan- 
ism returned, and that its failure was due to the same 
causes as that of its prototype/' H. C. Beeching dis- 
cusses the problem of revising the Prayer Book, calling 
attention to some possible changes and improvements, 
and pointing out certain difficulties with which the un- 
dertaking might be confronted. ^T. A. Lacey writes 

on the Christian idea of grace. 

Le Correspondant (25 Sept.): In reply to the Minister of the 
Navy, M. Thomson, who, in July, taunted Admiral Bien- 
aim^, in the Chamber of Deputies, with having been re- 
sponsible for the bungling which marked the opening of 
the expedition of Madagascar in 1896, the Admiral gives 
a detailed account of the affair, and shows that the fail- 
ure was not due to him. General Van Vulmen con- 
tributes a short account of the Dutch regiments which 
formed part of the Grande Arm^e, and, almost to a man, 

perished in the Russian campaign. Count de Miramon 

Fargues relates the story of the last Marquis de Beau- 

vau-Tigny. M. de Weede reviews the provisions made 

by various European states for the religious welfare of 
their armies and navies; and he contrasts the conduct 
of France in this respect with that of the other powers. 



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1907.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 417 

(i Oct.): M. de Broglie writes on the events and meas- 
ures which marked the application of the Napoleonic 
Concordat in France. Protesting against the project, al- 
ready bruited in the Chambers, of withdrawing the na- 
tional subvention granted to Catholic missionaries in the 
East, M. Gervais Courtellement, who has traveled in the 
Near East and the Far East for twenty years, records 
the services which the missionaries render to French 
travelers as well as to French interests, commercial and 
political ; and he gives reasons for his conviction that if 
anti- clerical ism succeeds in having the national protec- 
tion withdrawn from them, France will lose considerably. 

Revue Pratique d* Apologitique (i Oct.): A r^sum^ of the late 

Encyclical by J. Lebreton. Dom Cabrol takes P. Saint- 

yves to task, who, in his Essais de Mythologie Chritienne^ 
tries to prove that the saints are but the successors 

of the gods of Rome and Greece. ^J. Guiraud gives 

an appreciation of a dozen or more books relating to the 
ancient history of the Church. In the succeeding num- 
ber he does the same with several books on the Church 
in the Middle Ages. 

(15 Oct.): Mgr. Batiffol begins a series of articles, which 
will appear later in book form, on UEglise Naissante 
ei la Caiholicisme, His aim in this installment is to show 
that, while St Irenaeus is considered the chief exponent 
of Catholic doctrine among the early Fathers, his prin- 
ciples were not of his own creation. ^J. Guibert sug- 
gests the proper attitude to be taken by Christians to- 
wards the latest Encyclical. It should be regarded as a 

*' safeguard and not as a menace or burden.'' L. CI. 

Fillion concludes his criticism, begun in the first number 
for September, of the two recent German novels which 
deal with the life of Jesus. 

Annates de Philosophie ChrStienne (Oct): Laberthonnifere comes 
to close quarters in his contest with Le Roy's Dogme et 
Critique. Laberthonni^re's critique is exhaustive, and is 

to be continued in subsequent numbers. F. Galibert 

writes of the •* Faith of the Negro," a study of the ele- 
ments of religion found in that race. H. Bremond re- 
views a work of C. Latreille, on Francisque Bouillier, 
''the last of the Cousiniens." 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 27 



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41 8 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec, 

Revue Biblique (Oct.): Fr. Lagrange contributes an article on 

the decree Lamentabili sane exitu. Fr. Lagrange also 

has in this number a paper on the historical remains of 

ancient Crete. R. P. Vincent devotes an article of 

several pages to an exegetical study of the description 
of Solomon's Temple given in I. Kings, chapter 6. 

La Civilta Cattolica (2 1 Sept.) : The Encyclical of Pope Pius X. 

is given in the full Latin text. In an article entitled 

'' Positive and Historical Studies in Theology/' the writer 
criticizes the latest results of scholarship in theology, 
and points out their value and place in the curriculum 
of a Catholic seminary. 
(19 Oct.): "Modernism and the Old Naturalism'' is the 

title of the leading article. The Dantean conception 

of Purgatory is examined with reference to the poet's 

determination of the seven vices. *• The Lay School" 

treats of Freemasonic attempts to drive religion from 
the Italian schools. 

Revue Benedictine (Oct.): Dom Morin states his objections to 
certain views expressed recently in regard to the Liber 
Dogmatum of Gennadius. He gives critical arguments 
in proof of this thesis, that Gennadius was really the 
author of the Liber in its original anonymous form, but 
not the writer of all that appeared in a later recension 

placed in circulation under his name. Dom de Meester 

continues his studies on orthodox theology, taking up 
in this number the Creation. 

Revue Thomiste (Sept.-Oct): "The Miracle, a Supernatural 
Phenomenon," is the thesis of a paper by Father Mer- 
cier. In his conclusion, however, he concedes that the 
question of the existence of miracles is one of fact, and 
must be studied as such. M. Sentroul, of Louvain, 
writes on the Subjectivism of Kant. He insists, con- 
trary to what his opponent, Abb^ Farges, maintains, 
that he can demonstrate the objectivity of propositions 
of the ideal order, without refuting idealism and demon- 
strating the objectivity of sensation. 

Die Kuliur (Oct.) : Dr. V. Kralik discusses the epic and lyric 

poetry of Shakespeare. ^The Centennial Anniversary 

of the death of the great artist, Angelica Kauffmann, gives 
occasion for a sketch of her characteristics. Prof. Hart- 



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1907.] Foreign periodicals 419 

wig treats " Uses of the Stereoscope/' and shows of what 
importance for astronomical study this instrument has 

recently become. Since the labors of Prof. L. Pastor^ 

in his great History of ike Popes^ have now progressed to 
Adrian VI., this last German pope is the subject of a 

paper. Kuk writes on National Navy Corporations, 

and relates how much is done in this direction in some 
countries, chiefly in Germany. Kuptschinsky contri- 
butes sketches on his captivity in Japan during the Rus- 
sian-Japanese war. 
TheoIogisch^Praktische Quartalschrift (Oct.) : Rev. Albert Weisz, 
O.P., contributes the fourth of his series of articles un- 
der the title, ** Has the Priest still a Place in Modern 
Christianity ? " The article deals with the task of the 
priest of to-day in relation to the widespread indifference 
and hostility to the idea of the supernatural and spiritual. 

Dr. Johann Litschauer writes of "Private Property 

Among the Ancient Civilized Peoples from Profane and 
Sacred Sources." Citing many passages from both 
sources, he shows that from the earliest times the right 
of private property was universally recognized among 
civilized peoples. This number contains the concluding 
article on the historical development of the Roman Mis- 
sal by Beda Kleinschmidt, O.F.M. Other articles afe: 

" In the Treatment of Superstition " and " Exclusiveness 
in Spiritual Direction." 



NOTICE. 

The latest Encyclical of the Holy Father on " Mod- 
emism " is too extensive for publication in The Catho 
Lie World. Desirous that it should be obtainable in 
handy form, we have issued a complete English transla- 
tion in pamphlet, and will mail it to any address on the 
receipt of twenty-five cents, postage free. Address, The 
Catholic World, 120 West 60th Street, New York City. 

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Current Events, 

When the Assembly adjourned in 
France. July the Ministry of M. Clemcn- 

ceau was thought to be on the 
point of falling. For this there were several reasons, the strong- 
est of which seems to have been the want of an organized op- 
position. The many factions of which the Assembly consists, 
having accomplished the work of separation from the Churchy 
had no common ground of action, and personal rivalries were 
coming to the front. The vacation, however, has supplied 
what was lacking. The unpatriotic efforts of M. Herv^ and 
M. Jaur^s, and the Unified Socialists who have been prop- 
agating sedition in the army and teaching the soldiers that they 
should betray their country even in the face of the enemy, have 
rallied to the support of the ministry the various parties, so 
that the first attack made upon it was repulsed by a majority 
of 4cx> votes to 80. Conservative Republicans like M. M^line, 
Socialist Republicans like M. Briand, together with the Radical 
Socialists, have all joined in the condemnation of the abominable 
theories of those who are crying: ** A das la Patrie.** Ener- 
getic action was taken by the government, anti-militarist demon- 
strations suppressed, the promoters of desertion arrested and 
sentenced to imprisonment. Toleration could not be stretched 
so far as to extend to men who taught that they would choose 
the moment when the existence of the nation was at stake to 
turn their arms against their fellow-citizens and help the for- 
eigner in crushing their native land. 

The most ardent lovers of civil liberty cannot blame the use 
of coercion in the repression of such a propaganda. That there 
should be found persons willing to promote it is the thing to 
be wondered at. The an ti- Militarists are professedly lovers of 
peace, and also logicians who, like people in certain other 
spheres, push their narrow conclusions to absurd extremes and 
thereby ruin the cause which they would serve. Good sense 
and open discussion are the best means of saving the situation. 
In fact, these have led M. Jaures to dissociate himself from M. 
Herv^'s advocacy of desertion in face of the enemy, and to a 
secession from the Unified Socialists, involving the formation 
of yet another party in addition to the already large number. 

Another anxious question has arisen in France, and that is 



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1907.] Current Events 421 

whether the Republican administration of the army and navy 
is efficient ; whether it is not even corrupt ? Doubts have been 
raised by various events, such as the Una disaster. The Radi- 
cal Deputy for Verdun, M. Charles Humbert, formerly employed 
in the Ministry of War, has published a work in which he 
criticises the state of the eastern defenses. He declares that 
the fortresses are inefficiently defended, that there have been 
malversations, bad construction of works, and negligent man- 
agement. Millions of money have melted away without result. 
He goes into details in order to show that when France was 
within an inch of war with Germany, in 1905, about Morocco, 
the frontier fortresses were armed with guns which could not be 
aimed or even loaded, because the ammunition which had been 
voted by Parliament was not at hand ; and he asked what had 
been done with the money. Owing to favoritism generals have 
been retained in command although physically unfit for it. 

A leading newspaper has begun a series of articles on the 
anarchy which it declares exists in the Arsenals. The work- 
men, it is said, recognize no control^ do little or no work, 
amuse themselves in their own way, and spend their time in 
talking politics ; 2,000 men could easily do the work for which 
6,500 are employed. The allegations made by M. Humbert 
were, however, denied by the defenders of the government in 
the debate upon the question in the Assembly. These de- 
fenders admitted a few exceptional defects indeed, but declared 
that unwarranted generalizations had been made. The Minister 
of War said that the defects pointed out were unimportant and 
had been remedied. The general impression, however, seems to 
be that everything is not as it should be, but that the discus- 
sion which has arisen, and the light thrown thereby upon the 
matter, will lead to the taking of remedial measures. The gal- 
lantry of the forces in the conflicts before Casablanca, and the 
efficient way in which the expedition has been managed, have 
tended towards the restoration of public confidence. 

The ministerial programme for the Session which has just 
opened includes the long- deferred Bill for the imposition of an 
Income Tax and a project for the easier acquisition of property 
by working-class associations. By the abrogation of the Loi 
Falloux further steps are to be taken to transfer all teaching 
into the hands of laymen. The first Bill actually introduced has 
been a measure to facilitate the spoliation of the Church. The 
church property that would have gone to the public worship 



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422 Current events [Dec, 

associations if they had been formed has devolved, by the 
Separation Law, upon the departments and communes, and is 
to be administered by them for the benefit of the poor. This 
provision of the law is held to be a violation of the rights of 
the relatives of the donors of the foundations, and some 20,- 
000 actions have either been instituted or are on the point 
of being instituted in vindication of their rights under the 
common law. To prevent the possible success of these actions 
is the object of the Bill. By a majority of 400 to 163 the 
Bill was introduced. 

A series of robberies of churches has been going on, pictures, 
shrines, and various other church articles have been stolen and 
sold by the thieves to private collectors in England and this 
country. Some of the criminals are in prison. And so the 
Church is suffering at the hands both of the government and 
of the private individual. 

Very little progress has been made in Morocco. The rival 
Sultans are face to face. Raisuli maintains his independence 
and retains Kaid Sir Harry Maclean in captivity. France holds 
possession of Ujda and Casablanca^ but has made no advance 
into the interior, keeping within the limits of the Act of Alge* 
ciras. Spain, who seemed to be drawing back from co-opera- 
tion with France, is giving more active assistance. Meanwhile 
anarchy and chaos reign. If it had not been for the pacific 
state of the atmosphere, brought about by the various agree- 
ments which have recently been made, no one would be rash 
who should predict war. Even as things are it cannot be said 
to be impossible. 

In addition to her other troubles France has been visited 
by a succession of inundations, which have caused not merely 
a vast destruction of property, but a considerable loss of life. 
Not for forty years has so great a calamity happened, twelve 
departments having been devastated in various ways. The Presi- 
dent paid a visit to one of the districts that suffered, while 
the Assembly has granted six millions of francs for the relief 
of the sufferers. 

Another change has taken place in 

Germany. the Imperial Cabinet. The Foreign 

Secretary, Herr von Tschirschky, 

who has held ofHce for about 20 months, has resigned, having 

found his position uncongenial. It is rumored that he has split 

upon the same rock which wrecked Count Posadowsky. The 



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1907.] Current Events 423 

Chancellor, Prince Btilow, with his firm determination, notwith- 
standing his mild manners, not to be the anvil, did not find the 
Foreign Minister sufficiently useful. He is succeeded by Herr 
von Schoa, a Hessian nobleman, who has for the past two years 
represented Germany at St. Petersburg. The appointment, of 
course, is made by the Emperor, without reference to Parlia- 
ment, in the same way as President Roosevelt appoints the 
members of his Cabinet. A new Statthalter also has been ap- 
pointed for Alsace and Lorraine, Count Wedel, who has hither- 
to been German Ambassador in Vienna. To him is credited the 
prediction that within two years there will be an entente cor- 
diale between Germany and France. 

The realization of this prediction is not very probable. 
There are, however, in Paris a number of financiers who are 
ready to admit German stock to the French money market, a 
thing very much desired in Berlin, for the fii^ancial embarrass- 
ment there is very great, and is said to be growing daily worse. 
In a certain sense this embarrassment is very creditable, for it 
arises, in part at least, from the stringent laws which were passed 
some years ago against the gambling which goes on in the other 
Stock Exchanges, and which is called speculation. The dearth 
of money in Germany is so great that all the resources in the 
possession of the government would do no more than pay for 
the cost of mobilization in the event of war. A loan would 
have to be issued even for hostilities lasting only four months. 
Where it could be raised no one knows. France, on the other 
hand, was never so prosperous, and nothing would please the 
Germans better than that French money should flow into Ger- 
man coffers. The French, however, evince a not surprising un- 
willingness to unlock their safes. It is not likely that the 
desired quotation will be granted. 

Germany as well as France has a number of Anti-Militarists. 
Although they are far from being so extreme as the French, 
they are treated with greater severity. Dr. Karl Liebknecht 
has just been sentenced to 18 months' confinement in a fortress 
for having published a pamphlet in* which he developed theories 
in favor of exciting antipathy against the army in all countries. 
The army was to be reduced to impotence by arousing univer- 
sal indignation against the idea of war. This would render war 
impossible. No specific act which could be construed as trea- 
son was recommended. The sentence passed is therefore wide- 
ly condemned as unjust, and Germany has still to be looked 



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424 Current Events [Dec, 

upon as a land in which political and personal freedom are still 
held in bondage. 

The Poles in Germany are having a further experience of 
the truth of this. A new Associations and Meetings Law has 
been submitted to the Federal Council, which renders it neces- 
sary that at all public meetings in Germany the proceedings 
must be carried on in the German language. Permission to 
speak in any other language can only be obtained from the 
government. This measure is directed against the Poles in East 
and West Prussia. 

Such an action as that brought by Count Kuno Moltke 
against Herr Maximilian Harden should not be even mentioned 
in these pages, were it not an illustration of the inevitable 
weakness attendant upon personal government. The Emperor 
William is as strong and able as any of the present rulers in 
Europe; yet a coterie of reprobates, made up of princes and 
generals, drew a circle round him and excluded all other in- 
fluences, thus leading to decisions which had the greatest im- 
portance not only for the Qerman people, but for the whole of 
Europe. The breaking up of this infamous gang was due to the 
disclosures made by a newspaper. The truth about these men 
was unknown, and as soon as it was learned swift punishment 
fell upon them. The means by which they obtained the influ- 
ence for evil which they so long exerted were as old as the 
hills. To quote Prince Bismarck : '' These gentlemen always say 
the monarch is in the right when the Kaiser expresses an opinion. 
When he looks round, he sees nothing but agreeing and adoring 
faces. They conflict with the responsible advisers of the Kaiser, 
who have the obligation to express to the ruler their opinion, 
even when it is contrary to his.'' The trial also shows how little 
private morals are influenced by the form of government. 
Strictly disciplined semi-absolutist Germany is as bad as our 
undisciplined land of liberty ; princes and nobles are as degraded 
as the worst specimens of the nouveaux riches. 

The subjects of the Emperor-King 
Austria-Hungary. have had of late two reasons tor 

gratitude. His majesty has re- 
covered from a serious illness, an illness so serious that a fatal 
termination was at one time anticipated. And secondly, after 
years of negotiation, a settlement has been made of the econ- 
omical relations of Austria and Hungary. This agreement, or 



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1907.] Current Events 425 

Ausgleichy as it is called, is subject to the approbation of the 
respective Parliaments, but there are good hopes that this ap- 
probation will be given. For ten years there has been a state 
of chronic unsettlement, mitigated by various temporary ar- 
rangements. To this an end has now been put. The details of 
the agreement are too technical to be of general interest; the 
conclusion of a treaty, however, is of great importance, for a 
state of ecomonic warfare between the two parts of the Dual 
Monarchy, while unnatural in itself, might have led to civil and 
even to European war. The new arrangements give satisfaction 
to large numbers both of Austrians and Hungarians, but meet 
with criticism in some quarters, especially in the ranks of the 
Independence Party of Hungary. But a more moderate spirit 
seems to be growing, and a recognition of the advantages of 
peace. 

The Socialists of Hungary, exasperated at the delay in in- 
troducing the Universal Suffrage Bill, which has been so long 
promised, signalized the recent reopening of the Hungarian 
Parliament by an immense demonstration, 60,000 or 70,000 per- 
sons took part in a meeting. All shops, caf^s, and places of 
business were shut, and workmen of every trade made holiday 
except the railway and tramway men. The city, except where 
the demonstration took place, seemed deserted. The strength 
of organized labor was shown by the absence of fresh bread, 
newspapers, and amusements. A petition was presented to the 
President of the Chamber of Deputies, in which the grievances 
of the workingmen were detailed. These grievances certainly 
call for redress. The demonstration, we may believe, has not 
been fruitless, for a few days afterwards the Minister of the 
Interior, Count Julius Andrassy, announced in the Chamber 
that the Franchise Reform Bill would be laid before the House 
very soon. 

If any one is tempted to feel dis- 
Rttssia.. heartened by the present political 

conditions of our country, he should 
study the state to which Russia has been reduced by an auto- 
cratic government. He would, while deeply regretting the evils 
which exist in this free country, be thankful that he does not 
live under the rule of a despot, who has twice violated his 
solemnly plighted word, where the military and the police and 
their spies have complete domination, except in so far as the 
exasperation of the people leads to reprisals in defence of the 



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426 Current events [Dec, 

most sacred rights of man. Residents in Russia declare that 
the only two powers are the police and the revolutionaries. 
Every movement of the Tsar himself is under police regulation, 
in order to safeguard his life; and the liberty of every Rus- 
sian is at their mercy. Law, even such law as is possible when 
it is dependent on one man's will, has been superseded by the 
state of ''re-enforced security" which has been established 
through most of the Russian provinces. It would be monoto- 
nous to give a list of the murders and outrages which occur 
week by week. The condition seems well-nigh hopeless. 

A life-long student of Russian affairs, M. A. Leroy-Beau- 
lieu, however, thinks that a return to the unmitigated autoc- 
racy which existed before the Manifesto of October 30 is impos- 
sible, but that Russia may have to struggle on for some thirty 
years before it attains decent conditions of life. What those con- 
ditions are one striking fact reveals: the Life Insurance Com- 
panies have cancelled their policies upon the lives of all who 
are in any way connected with the Third Duma which has just 
opened. 

This new Duma will be meeting just as these lines go to 
press. Its exact constitution, the various parties of which it 
consists, need not be particularized; every effort has been 
made to pack it according to the mind of the government, and 
these efforts have resulted in the return of a majority accord- 
ing to its mind. We must confess to taking very little interest 
in it or its proceedings, looking upon it as one of the many 
shams with which the world abounds. There are, however, 
others who ought to be well-informed, and therefore better 
able to judge, who take a more hopeful view. They find in 
the fact that it will have the confidence of the Tsar — a thing 
which we think very doubtful — ground for hope that it may do 
better work than its predecessors ; and as it is made up of re- 
actionaries, these will not destroy an instrument which gives 
them power ; while even the appearance of free discussion will 
prepare the way for its reality. 

The treatment accorded to the Catholic Bishop of Vilna, 
Mgr. Roop, is condemned even by the Russian press as an act 
worthy of the times of Mouravieff and not of what M. Stoly- 
pin has told us is a constitutional government. Without any 
process of law he was deprived of his bishopric and exiled from 
Poland. No one is safe. 



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1907.] Current Events 427 

The conclusion of the Convention with Great Britain and 
the peace with Japan having closed to Russia the prospect of 
expansion in either the Far or Middle East, the Near East 
is the only sphere of activity left outside her own borders. 
No time has been lost in resuming her long-suspended activity 
here, and so far it is to be hoped that it may prove beneficial. 
The internecine warfare between the numerous various Christian 
races in Macedonia, which threatens a practical extermination 
of each and all, found a motive in a clause of the Miirzsteg 
programme which runs as follows: ''As soon as the pacification 
of the country shall have been ascertained, the Ottoman govern- 
ment is to be requested to modify the territorial delimitation of 
administrative districts in the sense of a more regular grouping 
of the various races.'' Those various races drew the conclusion 
that the extent of the districts to be assigned to each would 
be regulated by their success in driving out the rest, and ac- 
cordingly made a mutual warfare one with the other. Russia 
has now joined with Austria in declaring that any appeal on 
their behalf to be made to Turkey is dependent upon peace 
being made among themselves, and upon the disappearance of 
the bands for a long time, that the two Powers never contem- 
plated a division of Macedonia according to racial spheres, nor 
would any account be taken of the losses and gains of the 
struggle which has been going on so long. 

Workingmen the world over are 
Italy* showing that they can be as dicta* 

torial and selfish as those who are 
at the other end of the social scale. In our own country and 
in Canada they have given proofs of this, and have endangered 
the peace even of nations. An exhibition of the same spirit 
has been given by the State railway servants of Italy. Most 
of the railways are owned and managed by the State, and the 
employees consequently hold a privileged position. They are 
far better paid than the workmen employed by private firms. 
In fact, they make no complaints on their own account; yet, 
because in a strike which was going on in the North of Italy 
the government has used force in a way in which they did not 
approve, they threatened to disorganize the whole industry of 
the country and to inflict the severest penalties on the rest of 
their fellow-citizens. 



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428 Current events [Dec. 

Although our notice must be who]- 
The Hague Conference. \y inadequate, we cannot omit all 

reference to The Hague Confer- 
ence, the sittings of which have lasted four months, and closed 
on the 1 8th of October. Volumes might be written about it, 
and doubtless its proceedings will be published in full ; and by 
those who have time to devote to their consideration, greater 
profit will be derived than has been possible from the very 
condensed accounts which have appeared in the papers. There 
are those who think that it has proved a fiasco, even among 
those who did not expect, like Mr. Stead, that it would result 
in the limitation of armaments. To their opinion we cannot 
agree, for it is impossible for the nations of the whole world 
to have met in open discussion without some good result being 
brought about, even though that result may not be direct and 
immediate. This is true even in spite of the fact that in one 
respect its discussions have been pernicious and may prove 
practically injurious. The result of the rejection of all pro- 
posals for the regulation of submarine mines has left it open to 
nations, if so barbarously disposed, to lay these mines at their 
pleasure, in any and every place, by day or night, to the de- 
struction of not merely the enemies' vessels, but of those of 
neutral powers. Those who argue that what The Hague Con- 
ference did not condemn it sanctioned can thus outdo pirates 
in barbarity. With this exception the results of the Conference 
either have been good or tend towards the good. An Inter- 
national Prize Court has been established which will decide 
impartially questions of loss by capture which have hitherto 
been left to the adjudication of the Courts of the capturer. 
Numerous Conventions have been made, all, with the one ex- 
ception which has been mentioned, being in the right direc- 
tion. Many praiseworthy improvements in the laws and usages 
of land warfare, the adaptation to war at sea of the Geneva 
Convention of 1896, and some useful adjustments in the mechan- 
ism of the Hague Arbitration, are other positive results. Pro- 
vision has been made for the automatic recurrence of the Con- 
ference within eight years. 



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THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 

IN the course of his lecture on ''The Law of Separation: Its Advantages 
and Drawbacks," before the Lowell Institute, Boston, the Abb^ Felix 
Klein, of the Catholic Institute of Paris, showed that the law wiped out the 
burdens of the State, and increased the burdens of the Church, In other 
words : 

The Law of Separation of Church and State in France, passed last De- 
cember, is but an exemplification of the Bible text which bids us to render 
unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and in this case all things were 
Caesar's. 

Still, there are some compensations for the financial loss, however un- 
justly brought about. In the first article of the law is found the great advan- 
tage of freedom of worship, which means freedom to nominate the clergy 
without consulting the government. This freedom from interference will re- 
move a most fertile souice of strife with the State, and will now make possi- 
ble the adaptation of the service to the needs of the people in 1907, and not 
leave the rural districts filled with priests without people and the cities with 
no one to minister to them. There is hope that the future will see a stronger 
Church, that will evangelize France. 

The French government's ruthless exercise of its power was condemned 
as wrong in itself and greatly embittering the situation. 

The Abb^ said the disadvantage of the law that seemed greatest of all, in 
addition to the unjustifiable confiscation of all church property, whether do- 
nated by the State or privately, was the conditions imposed upon the organi- 
zation of the Church associations. 

During his recent trip to the United States, extending over four months, 
the Abb^ Klein lectured at the Catholic Summer-School, Cliff Haven, N. Y. 
From there he went to give lectures at Chautauqua, the Chicago University, 
and other places on his way to California. At Boston he was the guest of the 
Harvard Catholic Club, in company with Archbishop O'Connell. An invita- 
tion came to him to address the students of French literature at Smith Col- 
lege, Northampton, Mass., which he gladly accepted. 

• • • 

The D'Youville Circle is composed largely of the Alumnae of the 
Sacred Heart Convent (Grey Nuns), Rideau St., Ottawa. It is open to all 
who wish to enter, and counts, besides the graduates and other former con- 
vent pupils, representatives of various schools and colleges. The average 
attendance at the fortnightly meetings is between seventy and eighty. 
These meetings are always in the evening, from 7 : 30 to 9 o'clock. The 
course of lectures begins, like the meetings, in October, and ends in May, 
one each month. The lecturers during the past session were : Seumas Mac- 
Manus, twice ; Dr. John Francis Waters, twice ; Edward K. Keiley, twice ; 
Hon. Oliver Bainbridge, once. 

The lines of study were the Italian Renaissance in painting, specializing 
Botticelli in the Early Renaissance; M. An gelo, Raphael, and Da Vinci in 



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430 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION [Dec , 

the high noon time of the movement; and the Great Masters of the Vene- 
tian School as leading to the decline. 

The literary work was kept on the lines of the writers who have dealt 
with this great movement, attention being frequently called to the contem- 
porary notable productions; one book note at least is presented at each 
meeting. 

The musical evenings occur four or five times in the session. These 
afford an opportunity to study the characteristics of some one of the great 
early masters with a comparative study of a recent one. There are selected 
readings on these occasions bearing on the subjects under study. Such as 
Browning's wonderful poem : << Andrea Del Sarto/' and his '' Fra Lippo 
Lippi"; some of Walter Pater's glowing notes on the Renaissance types. 
Two plays of Shakespeare are assigned to be read by the members. Some 
notes on these plays are made at these entertainment meetings. 

The government of the Circle may be called automatic, two or three 
secretaries are named for each session, two librarians. The Circle enjoys 
corporate membership in the International Catholic Truth Society, and finds 
Catholic reading matter to be mailed to i6o addresses. At each meeting 
one-half this number is attended to and packages are made ready for mailing. 
His Grace the Archbishop of Ottawa, presides at each yearly opening on the 

Feast of St. Teresa, October 15. 

• • • 

The manager of the Columbian Reading Union would like to get a re- 
port, similar to the one given from Ottawa, from every Catholic Reading 
Circle now in existence. A helpful pamphlet in Reading Circles will be 
mailed on receipt of ten cents postage. Address letters to the Columbian 

Reading Union, No. 415 Fifty-Ninth Street West, New York City. 

• • t 

Mrs. Mary St. Leger Harrison, better known by her pen name Lucas 
Malet, has given the critics much material for discussion in her recent book. 
The Far Horizon (Dodd, Mead & Co.) It is perhaps the most widely dis- 
cussed book of the year, though the opinions of the reviewers are not har- 
monious. One high authority praises the style of the book, while another de- 
clares that the style *Ms diffuse, artificial, often pretentious; a style which 
would be considered distinctively literary by unliterary persons." Inja recent 
article by Arthur C. Benson, on " The Ethics of Reviewing," he recommends 
authors to read what the critics say about their work, rather than to live se- 
cluded in a fool's paradise. 

We hope that Lucas Malet will see the following notice of her book, 
written by E. M. M., of the D'Youville Catholic Reading Circle: 

In The Far Horizon we get something more than the brilliant novel we 
have every reason to expect from the pen of Lucas Malet. It is undoubtedly 
her best work, in point of style, theme, and entire, almost startling, unusual- 
ness of plot and development. That it is convincingly Catholic in tone, is 
not its least merit. The plot is bold, and will, perhaps, be thought daring 
by some, and is drawn and elaborated with a man's strength rather than a 
woman's gracefulness. It is a story of very few characters, with one tower- 
ing above the others. 

Dominic Iglesias is thoroughly idealistic — a man, as the heroine puts 



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THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

Vol. LXXXVI. JANUARY, 1908. No. 514. 

A CRUSADE OF THE CATECHISM. 

BY EDWARD A. GILLIGAN. 

|N our day and land it is not easy to exaggerate 
the importance of the Sunday-school. It is still 
true that a majority, or at least a very large 
proportion, of our Catholic children depend chiefly 
upon it for their knowledge of religious truth; 
at the same time, it is admitted that the religious education it 
imparts is, in many cases, below the desired standard. The 
great desideratum is a body of competent teachers; and this 
can hardly come as the result of natural growth, but is to be 
obtained by the careful selection and training of teachers. This 
aim is being pursued in various places, conspicuously in New 
York, under the auspices of the Training School for Catechists ; * 
and his Grace, the present Archbishop, has recently issued a 
letter strongly urging the importance of this work upon the 
priests and laity of his diocese. The object of the following 
pages is to trace the history and sketch the organization of a 
successful Sunday-school; to indicate something of the good 
accomplished by it; and thereby, we trust, to show what we 
may hope for from a Sunday*school that is the product of 
true zeal, organization, method, and hard work. 

I. 

Visitors to the great churches of Paris readily find their way 
to St. Sulpice, the principal church of the old Latin Quarter, 

•See The Catholic World. August, 1905, " The Teaching of Christian Doctrine," 
by Rev. John F. Brady. M.D. 

Copyright. X907. Thk Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle 
IN THE State or New York. 
VOL. LXXXVI.— 28 



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434 ^ CRUSADE OF THE CATECHISM [Jan., 

for it ranks in interest and importance, if not in beauty , with 
the celebrated churches of Notre Dame and the Madeleine. 
It is noted as a remarkable centre of religious life and activ- 
ity; in fact, as a model, in this respect, for the churches of 
the whole country. The visitor entering the spacious edifice at 
any hour of the day cannot fail to remark the constant stream 
of people coming to assist at one of the many impressive ser- 
vices, or else to pay their tribute of silent prayer before the 
altar of the Blessed Sacrament. And if the visitor be a Cath- 
olic he cannot but be convinced that he is in a church where 
the faith is properly understood and practised. 

But religion was not always in so prosperous a state at St 
Sulpice. When, in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
Father Olier entered the parish as its pastor, and began the 
erection of his celebrated seminary^ the place was considered 
the rendezvous for the irreligious, immoral, and criminal of all 
Paris. At that time the parish limits were much more exten* 
sive than they are now, embracing the whole Faubourg St. Ger-^ 
main^ a territory which to-day is divided among nine parishes. 
To change the face of this, the most wicked part of Paris, and 
that too in an age of general moral laxity and religious in- 
difference, might seem indeed a hopeless task. But Father 
Olier, animated with the spirit of our divine Savior, the Shep- 
herd of souls, and encouraged by confidence in the assistance 
of the Mother of God, boldly began the work. The sure in- 
stinct of the true pastor led him to the root of the evil — the 
appalling ignorance of saving truth in which the majority of 
his people were living. The duty of religious instruction had 
been so sadly neglected that the great majority of the children 
— yes, and of the parents as well — were quite ignorant of even 
the elements of Christian doctrine. Here then lay the pastor's 
first appointed work; and so well and firmly did he establish 
it, that it has endured through all the vicissitudes of more than 
two centuries and a half, and has been perhaps the most power- 
ful support of that religious life which has ever since character- 
ized the parish of St. Sulpice. 

Father Olier began the work of evangelizing and instructing 
his parish by putting into effect a carefully thought-out plan 
of organization. The district was altogether too populous and 
extensive for one school of catechism to satisfy its needs; so, 
in order to reach all under his care, he established a central 



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I908.] A CRUSADE OF THE CATECHISM 435 

school at the Church of St Sulpice, and twelve subsidiary schools 
at points chosen for the convenience of the children and their 
parents. In equipping these schools with teachers he had an 
advantage with which few pastors are favored. He drew upon 
the resources of the adjoining ecclesiastical seminary, founded 
by himself, and thus obtained a corps of teachers who were 
the mainstay of the school, instead of being the element of 
weakness which, among us, renders so many Sunday-schools 
inefficient. 

These young men, before the time of class, went through 
the streets, bell in hand, gathering the children together; they 
entered homes with an invitation to the parents to accompany 
their children ; some of them even arranged to teach catechism 
at certain hours in the common schools, in order that all might 
be reached. "I begin,'' wrote Father Olier, "to perceive the 
design of God for the reformation of this parish. He wishes 
us, first of all, to secure the youth by imparting to them 
Christian principles and the fundamental maxims of salvation; 
and he will effect this by the ministry of the young students 
of the seminary.'' His confidence was not in vain. The novel 
spectacle of ecclesiastics, most of them of noble birth, going 
through the streets and into houses to gather pupils for their 
catechism classes produced a profound impression ; and they 
soon secured for all the schools a normal attendance of four 
thousand children, besides a goodly number of parents, 

II. 

The organization as first effected has been kept essentially 
the same down to our own day. In certain details, however, 
changes have been made to suit varying circumstances. Thus, 
as new parishes were formed, the need for subsidiary schools at 
different points in the Faubourg diminished. To-day, besides 
the great school gathered in the Church of St. Sulpice, there 
exists only the school attached to the social-settlement house 
of the parish. Moreover, the establishment of the new parishes 
has naturally resulted in a greatly reduced attendance ; yet still 
the school remains an exceptionally large one. Last year 1,740 
names were inscribed on the rolls, while the attendance each 
week averaged 1,400 to 1,500. Yet another change is the 
smaller attendance of adults for instruction, mainly because few 
in the parish are now left uninstructed in youth. However, 



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436 A Crusade of the Catechism [Jan., 

even to-day parents often assist at the sessions of the school 
with their children; and besides, a class for mendicants is still 
kept up and is well attended. 

The aspect of the school to>day presents more variety than 
one would see perhaps in an American Sunday-school. The 
students range in age from six to twenty, even to thirty years. 
A remarkable feature, indeed, at least to an American visitor, 
is the large number of young men and women in attendance. 
A good number of the pupils work during the week in factory, 
store, or office; over 500 come from the state lyceums or col- 
leges, or from the public schools, which are now positively 
irreligious; about 450 are pupils of Catholic schools; while 
nearly 700 are children who are being educated at home in 
good Catholic families or in private boarding schools. The cate- 
chetical school, therefore, must be so arranged, graded, and 
conducted as to meet the needs of these widely different souls. 
The actual result is the division of the entire school into twelve 
principal classes. Each of the classes again is divided into a 
number of groups, according to the needs and best interests of 
each. Six of the twelve principal classes are made up of those 
who have spent two years of preparation in the First Com- 
munion course, have successfully passed the examinations, and 
have made their First Holy Communion and been confirmed. 
Of the six remaining classes, three are devoted to the boys 
and girls who are following the course of two years in prepa- 
ration for the reception of their First Holy Communion and 
Confirmation; while the three other classes take care of the 
younger children. To the large contingent from the state schools 
five of the twelve grand classes are given over: three to the 
post-confirmation course, one in the course of preparation for 
the reception of First Holy Communion, and one in the pri- 
mary course. 

In this school every rank of society is represented. In one 
of my visits a genuine boy of the streets was pointed out to 
me, who had been won over by one of the seminarian teach* 
ers, and who was instrumental in bringing with him to cate- 
chism class every Sunday his formerly wild and unruly com- 
panions from the poorest and most neglected part of the old 
Latin Quarter. Others of the children were from the fashiona- 
ble homes of parents who had themselves, many of them, re- 
ceived the same instruction in the same school, and who are 



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i9o8.] A Crusade of the Catechism 437 

now prominent members of society. Others still are from that 
large middle class of society known in France as the bourgeoisie^ 
Conspicuous in the sea of white, childish faces that I saw, was 
one of the deepest black. It belonged to the little son of an 
African chief whom an agent of the French government had 
visited in his native country, and from whom he had received 
permission to take back with him to France this child of the 
jungle. The little fellow, when I saw him, was a prominent 
member of the First Communion class. 

The large corps of eighty seminarians actively engaged in 
teaching every Sunday permits the organizing of each class into 
so many distinct groups or divisions as to make it possible ior 
the teacher's influence to reach every pupil. The teachers of 
the divisions are subordinate to one of their own number who, 
as head, attends to the general working and welfare of the en- 
tire class ; the head teachers, in turn, are subject to one of the 
reverend Professors of the Seminary, on whom rests the re- 
sponsibility for the entire school. 

The worth of these seminarian- catechists may be inferred 
from their achievements in later life. Thus taking at haphaz- 
ard one particular period : we find among the teachers engaged 
in the work at one and the same time the names of eight who 
later became archbishops or bishops, of three who became fa- 
mous members of different religious orders, of one who died 
with the reputation of a saint, a victim of his devotion to the 
sick, of another who gave his life to the foreign missions, be- 
sides many who became devoted parish priests. And so it runs 
for every period, for to the Seminary of St. Sulpice come a 
goodly proportion of the most promising candidates for the 
priesthood from all France, and it is particularly from among 
these that the teachers for the catechism- classes are chosen. 

The classes are held every Sunday morning in connection 
with Mass, save the post-graduate class for young women, which 
takes place Sunday afternoon. Each session lasts two hours, 
including the time for Mass. Two classes begin at eight o'clock, 
two at nine, and seven at ten. Besides this Sunday session, the 
children preparing for First Holy Communion have class also 
once or twice a week, during a certain period just previous to 
the reception of the Sacrament. Most of the classes are given 
in the basement of the church, but each has a separate small 
chapel there fitted up especially for its use. The great base- 



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438 A CRUSADE OF THE CATECHISM [Jan.. 

ment or crypt of the church is so planned as to represent one 
of the ancient catacombs with its long passageway and lateral 
chapels ; each chapel given over to a class is frescoed in the 
style of the catacombs and dedicated to some early martyr. Thus 
is vividly brought home to the mind of the children an idea of 
the early Church, an illustration of the story of Fabiola which 
many among them have already read, a sense of the reality of 
martyrdom for the faith. 

The exercises open with a short prayer, after which the 
head teacher announces the mystery or the saint commemorated 
in the Mass about to be offered. Each class has its own Mass 
celebrated in its own chapel ; hymns are sung throughout, with 
an interruption for the reading of the Gospel in the vernacular. 
Mass ended, the entire class listens to a recitation of the les- 
son, which is the same for all. This test before a large crowd 
stimulates the children to do their best. It is succeeded by a 
private recitation in each group, the purpose of which is to 
see that every child has learned the lesson. Then comes a 
short instruction by one of the catechists, during which the 
children, or their parents for them, take notes on what is being 
said. These instructions follow a fixed plan, so that in the 
course of three or four years the whole cycle of religious teach* 
ing is completed. The pupils are then interrogated concerning 
the instruction of the previous Sunday, and for each correct 
answer a good point or mark is accorded. It is surprising how 
anxious the children are to obtain these good points and how 
carefully they treasure them. Next comes the recitation of 
several verses from the Gospels by volunteers who have pre- 
viously handed in their names in writing. For each successful 
recitation here also a good point is given. Then there are in- 
terrogations and an explanation of the Gospel read in the Mass 
for that Sunday; this exercise is not obligatory, yet in all the 
classes it is one of the features most liked. 

The teachers now make a report to the class on the writ- 
ten exercises which were handed in the previous Sunday and 
corrected during the week. The aim in these written home 
exercises is to reproduce the last instruction delivered before 
the class by one of the seminarians. To facilitate the children's 
work, however, a written synopsis of what is to be said is given 
to each child before the instruction is delivered. By this means 
the child follows the instruction more easily and intelligently. 



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i9o8.] A Crusade of the Catechism 439 

and can also at home, without great e£fort| reproduce in his 
own words what had been said. 

There is a certain form into which the written task is to be 
thrown, for it is laid down that each theme is to end with a 
short prayer of the child's own wording and a practical resolu- 
tion for the ensuing week which the child must strive to real* 
ize in his own life. This is drawn from the instruction by the 
child itself. If any errors have crept into these written reports 
they are marked with a pencil by the seminarian who examines 
thero, and are, moreover, corrected publicly before the assem- 
bled class. For this written work also, when well done, the 
coveted good points are given. After this there is a short 
moral instruction or advice, generally of a very practical char- 
acter, delivered by the head teacher to the entire class. Fi- 
nally comes the short closing prayer and dismissal. 

Besides this regular Sunday programme, there is another 
series of exercises which recur less frequently: some of these 
are intended to favor a growth in piety, others to keep up and, 
if need be, to increase the pupil's application to the study of 
the catechism. Thus once a month, in the chapels where the 
advanced classes assemble, a Mass is offered, at which it is cus- 
tomary for all the students to receive Holy Communion and to 
listen to a short sermon. 

Then every year, just before the time for the reception of 
First Communion, four separate retreats are given, one to each 
of four different classes of the school. In this way all the 
children are reached at the same time. Confession once a month 
is expected from all preparing in the two-year course for the 
reception of their First Communion, and once every two months 
from the children in the primary classes. There are, of course, 
in order to arouse and keep up the children's efforts in study, 
the inevitable examination from time to time, and at the end 
of the year a general distribution of premiums. 

From a knowledge of the details of the organization of the 
catechetical school of St. Sulpice the reader will readily per* 
ceive that what is aimed at is not simply instruction but the 
Christian education of the child. Education is the end sought; 
instruction is but one of the means to that end. The catechists 
have impressed upon them the fact that instruction simply fur- 
nishes the mind of the child with a certain necessary knowl- 
edge, while education draws out, elevates, and develops all 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



440 A Crusade of the Catechism [Jan., 

the powers of the soul; that while instruction addresses itself 
directly only to the understanding, education at the same time 
forms intellect, will, heart, character, and conscience. They 
seek, therefore, not merely to teach Christian truths to their 
charges, but to imbue their souls with the spirit of Christian- 
ity, to make them grow and develop in innocence and wisdom, 
in the light and grace of the evangelical virtues, in the fear 
and love and service of God. 

III. 

The excellence of the fruits produced by such a system is 
proven by the testimony of many witnesses. Father Olier him- 
self considered his catechetical school one of the greatest agen- 
cies given him by God for the reform of his parish; and how 
well it served him we can conclude from the words of a writer 
contemporary with him. *' I would like," he says, ''to be able 
to represent the state in which the parish of St. Sulpice was 
found fifty years ago, when the seminary was first established, 
and to compare that abominable Babylon, the sewer and cess- 
pool of all moral evil, with that same parish as it appears now 
under the cultivation of the communities of the seminary and 
of the presbytery of St. Sulpice. It will suffice, however, to 
say that in the single church of St. Sulpice there are two hun- 
dred thousand Communions received each year, though there 
are now within the limits of the parish thirty other religious 
communities where the reception of the sacraments is possible 
and frequent." 

Again, on the eve of the great revolution, despite all the 
scandals of the eighteenth century, of which Paris was the cen- 
tre and principal theatre, another writer was able to state : ''It 
is well known in Paris with what order and fruit more than sixty 
ecclesiastics in twelve to fifteen different places labor during ten 
months of the year to instruct the children of the Faubourg St. 
Gertnain. Among all the institutions for which we are indebted 
to Father Olier, there is none better fitted to keep religion in 
honor than his school of catechism. The care with which the 
children are instructed both before and after their First Holy 
Communion is regarded, with reason, as one of the principal 
sources of the blessings showered upon the parish of St, Sul- 
pice, and it is the explanation that is ordinarily given of the 
remarkable piety which is always there manifest." 



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I908.] A CRUSADE OF THE CATECHISM 44I 

And fifty years later, in the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
turyi the biographer of the Comtesse du Pare, who was herself 
a notable example of the good accomplished by the catechism 
classes of St. Sulpice, thus wrote : '' After the foundation of 
the seminaries — the principal object of the mission of this holy 
priest — it may be said that the greatest good he did was the 
establishment of his catechism classes, which are so well fitted 
to renew the spirit of faith and to form the young to solid 
practices of Christian piety." In fact, in the course of its long 
existence, the school has produced good fruit in such abundance^ 
and exercised so happy an influence, that the exceptionally good 
lives of some of its pupils hare not infrequently inspired reli- 
gious writers to relate them to the public in beautiful and edi- 
fying biographies. 

Nor is the good being accomplished to-day less than in the 
past. This is evidenced, for example, by the flourishing pious 
and charitable associations which have grown out of the school. 
In these the children find a field for the easy application of 
the principles in which they are being instructed, and so learn 
from the beginning the practice as well as the doctrine of true 
Catholicism. Thus in the advanced classes for young men and 
boys two associations are existing and thriving: the Confrater- 
nity of the Blessed Sacrament and the Sodality of the Blessed 
Virgin; to be admitted to these as members is considered by 
the young men and boys no small honor. Moreover, there is 
also, in connection with these classes, a Conference of the So- 
ciety of St. Vincent de Paul. Its object is to initiate the young 
men into the practice of works of charity. The conference is 
closely united with the catechism-class, its president being the 
head teacher, and its members the students and graduates. The 
members visit and help the poor, and to carry on their good 
work they also provide each year, through their own efforts, the 
sum of five hundred dollars. 

The girls and young women of the advanced course have 
likewise an association to promote piety and the exercise of 
charity. In their Blessed Sacrament Society a two- fold end is 
proposed: adoration before the tabernacle and the preparation 
of children from the state schools for the reception of First 
Holy Communion. At present there are a hundred and thirty 
faithful adorers in this sodality, of whom eighty are also com- 
petent and zealous catechists. They too are active in collect- 



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442 A CRUSADE OF THE CATECHISM [Jan. 

ing money for charitable purposes. Each year, by their own 
efforts and through donations from friends and relatives, they 
collect over four hundred dollars, which they use in the work 
of the parish settlement and in defraying the expenses of the 
catechetical school. 

The influence of work like this could not be confined to a 
single parish ; it has gone forth and brought f ruitfulness to 
many a neglected corner of France and to widely separated 
lands. The teachers of the school who come from different 
countries to prepare themselves at St. Sulpice for the priest- 
hood, are there formed to the work of catechizing, and on their 
return home they imitate as priests the model which they had 
under their eyes while in the seminary. They understand, of 
course, that the organization of the work cannot be the same 
everywhere ; that as Sunday^-school directors they scarcely dare 
hope for assistants equal in ability and training to the select 
corps of teachers at St. Sulpice. But they have become fa- 
miliar with an almost ideal school of catechism ; they have 
learned the necessity of thorough organization ; they have seen 
the value of method and been convinced that a slipshod system 
will produce indifferent results; they have experienced the 
need of preparation for class-work, and put aside the notion 
that catechetical instruction demands little or no care. To them 
the necessity of training teachers for this work is an elementary 
idea, and they do not understand those who can, with no de- 
sire of changing conditions, look upon a school where the en- 
tire religious education of hundreds of children is entrusted to 
untrained and incompetent teachers. Their hope and their en- 
deavor is to inspire the best and most intelligent young men 
and women of the parishes into which they are sent with the 
idea that they can hardly devote themselves to a work more 
noble and fruitful than that of forming young souls to the 
doctrines and spirit of Christ. 



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ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.* 
BY FRANCIS AVELING. D.D. 

Chapter IX. 
fOOM!" 

In the far distance a deep-toned bell rang 
out through the keen autumn air, striking upon 
the ears of a little band of travelers. 
" Boom 1 " 

It was the great tenor of Notre Dame that echoed and re- 
verberated in the still afternoon, the long brazen note poured 
forth from the quivering metal dying in melancholy cadences 
over the low, marshy land that sloped towards the river. 

'' Boom ! Boom ! Boom ! '' 

Every instant the pulsing sound grew closer and more in- 
sistent as the journeyers made their way towards the ramparts 
that Philip Augustus, King of the Franks, had raised about the 
heart of his capital. 

They were riding through the green fields now — fields inter- 
spersed with the houses that peeped through the circling trees ; 
fields radiating from the tower- broken circuit of the enclosing 
wall ; fields eloquent, in their green cultivation and care, of the 
near presence of a place where men toiled and labored, city- 
wise, without thought of that grateful nature about them that 
made it possible for them to live at all. 

The Abbot was deep in thought. At his side rode his 
counsellor, silent too, as was fitting, since his superior did not 
address him. Riding behind were the two monks destined for 
the Paris schools, and Arnoul. Their journey, as far as he at 
any rate was concerned, was drawing to an end. His goal was 
almost within sight. In an hour he would find himself within 
the walls of Paris, across the Seiqjs, on the other side of the 
towering, soaring mass of the cathedral that sent its full- 
throated brazen voice thundering and pulsing and booming 

* Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Soeiety of St. 
Paul the Apostle in the State of New York. 



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444 ARNOUL the ENGLISHMAN [Jau.# 

across the closely packed roofs of the town, and out over the 
green sea of fields encircling it He was all excitement and 
animation as he drew his steed up to the Abbot's side. 

"Your blessing, Father I" 

" Benediciu!^ replied Abbot Benet abstractedly, scarce noting 
that he was opening the flood-gates of questioning to an eager 
boy. The consultor pricked up his ears. He was wearying of 
the long silence. 

" Father Abbot,'' began the lad, " are those the bells of 
Paris that we hear? And what is that — and that — and that?" 
He pointed to the right and left of the straight road at build- 
ings peeping through the trees. Here the spire of a church or 
monastic establishment lifted itself above the clustering dwell- 
ings that nestled around its base. There a vast mass of solid 
masonry rose, solitary and forbidding in its conscious strength, 
battlement and tower and bastion, keep and frowning gateway, 
wall and moat complete, out of the green plain. 

The Abbot looked up from the roadway, upon which he 
had for some time been gazing in moody abstraction, and took 
a sweeping glance round. He drew a long breath of satisfac- 
tion as he perceived that they were at length nearing the city 
from which he would turn his steps again towards the great 
mother-house at Citeaux, beloved by all the members of the 
Cistercian order. For the sons of St. Bernard were always 
more happy in their monastery homes than abroad ; and Citeaux 
was their home above all others. His eyes fell first upon St. 
Lazare and the chapel of St. Laurent, lying in their isolation 
before them towards the right of the route they were following. 

''There," he said, indicating with his hand the group of 
buildings lying in the boskage on the left," are St. Lazare and 
St. Laurent. We shall soon sight the Temple. Look for the 
towers over yonder I " With his left hand he pointed towards 
the south, where the towers and frowning walls of the military 
brotherhood began to rise stolidly from the sea of green. They 
passed close to the two churches, keeping to the left of the wall 
along which the highroad ran, and came to the fork where it 
splits into two and then three, north of the Abbey of St. Martin. 
There was no mistaking St. Martin's. It stood high up upon a 
swelling eminence looking down upon the fertile fields and the 
limpid streams that watered them. There were gnarled oak trees 
straggling up the side of the hill that it crowned ; and the great 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 445 

sails of windmills turned ceaselessly beside its cloistered en- 
closure. 

The party followed the westernmost road, leaving the frown- 
ing Temple, with its gray masses of hewn stone, well upon the 
left. Before long they found themselves at Bourg TAbbe, and 
drawing within actual sight of the encircling wall of the town. 

All along the way the Abbot pointed out to the lad the 
houses and the smiling fields that he knew, naming the branch- 
ing roads and the bourgs and religious houses or civil estab- 
lishments to which they led. Behind them, miles to the right, 
lay the convent of the Filles Dieu, beside the little stream that 
ran through the valley; and before them were the clusters of 
houses that had broken through the bounds of the wall and al- 
ready pushed and jostled each other out into the fields. Then 
there was the wall itself, through a gateway in which they en- 
tered the jumble of dwellings. It was massively built, this wall, 
with its moat or fosse at the base, of squared and dressed blocks 
of stone; and it bad, moreover, been built double, the interval 
between the two faces being filled with rubble and cement which 
bound it all together into one solid block of concrete. At regu- 
lar intervals between the gates towers and projecting buttresses 
were set, that frowned down upon the fields without and, like 
a line of sentinels posted round the town, gave a sense of se- 
curity to the burghers within. When they passed through this 
stone cincture of forts and buttresses and towers there was St. 
Magloire, again on the left hand, regnant in its crowd of emu- 
lous suitors, and the older wall, of which little now remained, 
that had restrained the advances of the former town. 

The Abbot again stretched out bis hand to the right, point- 
ing out a cluster of towers and turrets soaring, one against the 
other, into the sky. 

''That,'' be said, 'Ms the Louvre; and nearer, the tower 
you can just see, is that of St. Germain TAuxerrois. 

" But look ! •' he continued. " There are the twin towers of 
Notre Dame; and we are almost come to the Pont au Change. 
There it is! The Grand Chatelet guarding the riverside and 
the rights and privileges of the town!'' 

They passed slowly through the crowded streets, under the 
beetling fronts of the houses that seemed to fall towards each 
other on either side and become closer and thicker as they pro- 
ceeded. Houses jammed and wedged together in prolific con- 



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446 Arnoul the Englishman [Jan., 

fusion; houses of plaster or gypsum, with great, projecting, 
carved beams of wood ; houses of three and of four stories, 
mounting and climbing with every variety of angle and indi- 
vidual architecture, above the paved streets that Philip Augus- 
tus in his wisdom had seen fit to provide for the burghers of 
Paris. There were houses substantial and proud, wedged in be- 
tween narrow buildings, upstart and arrogant ; houses of dressed 
stone that jogged elbows with plebeian structures of lesser pre- 
tensions and greater ornament. Dark ends of beams carved and 
chiselled, projected above the roadway; and from the over- 
hanging windows and in the narrow, crowded streets the vast 
collection of the people stood and gazed or moved and circu- 
lated, without concern for the Lord Abbot of Buckfast and his 
little train. 

From the encircling wall inward, the houses ever thickened 
and pressed upon each other, growing higher and lifting their 
pointed roofs further up towards the sky as the ground space 
became more meagre and their jostling together more pro- 
nounced. It was a maze of irregular, narrow streets, crossing 
and intersecting each other at all angles, but cut sheer through 
by the straight road which our travelers were following. This 
led, with hardly an angle or a bend, from the chapel of St. 
Laurent to the Grand Chatelet, standing guard over the ap- 
proaches to the city proper. 

Here were the dwelling houses of the merchants and burgh- 
ers of Paris, their shops and stores, their oflSces and public 
buildings, their chapels and hospitals and churches, running to- 
gether in picturesque confusion, like the masses of color upon 
a painter's palette. To the north and east — within the wall 
that stretched in an irregularly drawn semicircle from the Tour 
de Billi, on the one hand, to the Louvre, upon the other — the 
cultivated fields that had been enclosed within the precincts of 
the town were fast being encroached upon by new buildings sim- 
ilar to those that had already burst out into the surrounding 
country beyond St. Magloire. From the ten openings in the 
ramparts highroads that began somewhere near the Grand Chat- 
elet radiated east, west, and northwards — running out like the 
tentacles of some monstrous creature, dividing, crossing, and 
coming together again. Scattered houses, abbeys, and farms 
along their length here and there grouped themselves together 
in little clusters and villages. To the* east there was the Bourg 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman aai 

St. Eloy, with its culture, closer to the wall than Rully and St. 
Antoine des Champs. Ville r£v6que lay on the west, strag- 
gling out along the intersecting roads that met just above the 
westernmost extremity of the gardens of the Louvre. Between 
these two points the solitary Grange Batelier, the Monastere 
des Filles, St. Lazare; St. Nicholas in the fields, King Rob- 
ert's Palace, the Temple — to go from west to east — were the 
outposts of the seething life gathered together and pent up 
within the wall towards which all these roads converged. And 
to the south lay the Seine, cutting across from east to west 
like a bar of silver, forming the natural protection of the town. 
Five islands lay upon its bosom — three within the walls, two 
without, near the Tour de Billi. As it was the southernmost 
boundary of the town, so it was the northernmost of the Uni- 
versity, which stretched away^ in its turn, with its wall and 
gates and excrescences and roads, into the country towards the 
south. 

But it is time to get back to the travelers whom we left 
standing before the frowning arch of the Grand Chatelet that 
guards the bridge joining town and city. Arnoul, making good 
use of his license, was pouring out question after question. 
His eyes sparkled. He was excited and animated. The crowded 
streets, full of people hurrying hither and thither, fascinated 
him; the strange medley of nationalities, the strange dresses, 
the bustle and movement of the great town. There were mer- 
chants of all kinds of merchandise at their shop fronts; and 
merchants crying their wares up and down the streets — sellers 
of cutlery and vegetables, silks and velvets and fish. There 
were the makers of headgear, with their bonnets and aumusses 
and coifs, felt hats round and low, with their brims turned up, 
or high in the crown and boasting of no brims at all. There 
were the bakers disposing of their wheaten bread, their bread 
of rye and oats, of barley, and even of bran ; and there were 
butchers with their joints and pieces of flesh — for they did not 
sell by weight in those days — beef and mutton and pork. There 
were purse- makers with wallets and leather breeches exposed 
for sale, leather and horsehide and pigskin; and the manufac* 
turers of dice of every conceivable material, ivory, metal, leather, 
and wood. 

And there were taverns, taverns everywhere, among all this 
medley of shops and merchandise ; taverns where wine was sold 



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448 ARNOUL the ENGLISHMAN LJan., 

''by the plate'' — since only those who ate could drink; and 
taverns where it was sold "by the jug/' so that the buyer could 
carry it away. Apothecaries, in whose dark shops that sov- 
ereign remedy for all the ills of man, the golden water that we 
now call brandy, could be found — known to Albert the Great 
himself; grocer, apothecaries and vinegar makers, and Jews 
hawking their wares from the six streets of Jewry up by the 
Halles all through the city, and even over the two bridges to 
the University on the other side of the river. 

Jews and Christians, Frenchmen and Italians and Germans, 
Arabians and Spanish Arabs, too, with their serious faces and 
pensive eyes, their great tomes and commentaries under their 
arms. But these were for the most part on the other side of 
the river, where the University was, and where the parchment 
sellers and straw merchants sold their bundles of straw to the 
students and scholars to sit on, and where the book vendors 
plied a lively trade. Masters of their crafts, with their one or 
two apprentices — the cloth weavers and the cutlers; the silk 
spinners, whose widows could take their places in the guild 
when they died; the fish merchants; the hereditary butchers 
and the carpenters who built houses and boats and carriages as 
well as made tables and benches ; they were all there, together 
with a goodly sprinkling of clerks and canons, monks and schol- 
ars, friars and the riff-raff of the populace at large. Above the 
rush and roar of the crowd, piercing high and shrill above the 
cries of the vendors and the tread of feet upon the narrow 
stone-paved streets, rose the voice of a woman, old and puck- 
ered and drawn, stoopmg under a load of cast-off clothes and 
rags: ^^ Cote it sorcot rafeteroie! Cote et sorcot rafeteroie / ** 
Coats and overcoats to mend 1 — periodic, insistent, harsh, me- 
tallic. It was like the menace of an impersonal fate hovering 
over the tangle of human lives and the huckstering barter and 
banter of the merchant crowd. Querulous, piercing, regular, 
reiterative, like a creaking gate or a bough grinding in a wind, 
it rose and fell. Menacing, cringing, monotonous, the voice 
rang forth : " Coats and surcoats to mend I Rents and tears 
and rags ! Frayed cloth and stained I Tatters and shreds I They 
all come to that at last! Clothes and merchants, monks and 
courtiers, scholars and teachers, bishops and kings I Wear and 
tear, and rags and rents ! Coats and surcoats to mend I To 
mend I " The voice passed on slowly, losing itself in the gen- 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 449 

eral hum; and the decrepit forrn^ bent under the bundle of 
rags and tatters, tottered round a corner on its way to the six 
streets of Jewry. 

Through it all Arnoul, drinking in the unfamiliar details of 
the scene, kept up bis battery of questions. Who was this? 
and. What was that? and. Where were the schools of the ca- 
thedral? The little group was still — they had been standing 
there perhaps five minutes in all — before the Chatelet, the Ab- 
bot doing his best to keep pace with the lad's changing play of 
questions and giving him all the information he could. When 
he asked of Notre Dame, the good monk turned, and passing 
through the arches of the Chatelet, led the way across the stone 
bridge, between the rows of goldsmiths' and money-changers' 
shops that lined it, and gained for it the name of Pont au 
Change. Passing by the parish church of St. Barthelemi and the 
Priory of St. Eloy, and skirting the public square that opened 
before the Palace, they turned sharply towards the left and found 
themselves in front of that great pile of masonry that comprised 
Notre Dame itself and the £vech^, St. Denis du Pas, the School 
of Theology, and the Hotel Dieu. 

''There is the cathedral," said the Abbot, pointing with his 
hand and naming one after another the buildings that rose be- 
fore them. " We are in the city now ; for you must know, Ar- 
noul, that the city and the island are the same thing. We en- 
tered the city when we crossed the stone bridge where the gold- 
smiths were. But you will see Notre Dame again, lad. Turn 
to the right hand here. So ! We must cross yonder wooden 
structure. That is the bridge joining the city to the University. 
See 1 There is the little Chatelet ; and yonder the great high- 
road that leads straight from the bridge head to the papal gate 
in the southern wall." 

They crossed the second bridge. 

"Now," continued the Abbot, "you are in the University, 
There, on the right, is St. Severin; and before you lies the 
Hospital of the Almoners of St. Benet. And there, on the left, 
is St. Julien le Pauvre and St. John Lateran— -named after the 
mother and mistress of all the churches, the cathedral at Rome. 
You cannot see many of the buildings from here, but you will 
soon have time to explore them all for yourself. And down 
near the gate to your left is the abbey and school of St. Gene- 
vieve, the rival of Notre Dame itself." He continued speaking 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 29 



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450 Arnoul the Englishman [Jan., 

and replying to the lad's questioning. But the questions grew 
rarer and shorter, as Arnoul felt himself at length within the 
University proper; and at last he was silent altogether. It was 
all new and strange ; but he was there at last. Perhaps his ex- 
citement in town and city had left him a little stale and flat. 

But he was still gazing about him, if he was not plying the 
Abbot with questions, and thinking hard. The University pre- 
sented an aspect that differed in many respects from both city 
and town. There were colleges here, rather than shops; reli- 
gious establishments in place of parish churches. And the crowd 
— for it was no less crowded than on the northern bank of the 
river — was not the same. There were fewer merchants, aud those 
of several definite and limited classes: parchment sellers and 
straw mongers, with a book shop here and there: and, as he 
discovered later, in the Rue St. Victor, there was the only place 
where one could purchase ink in all Paris. That was the shop 
of Asceline de Roye. 

Here the principal wares were of such a kind and nature as 
to betoken the presence of a place of learning, rather than an 
ordinary town, and the sort of customers one would expect to 
find there. 

And the clerks ! There was a representation, it seemed, from 
every nation under heaven. Most of them were young men — 
youth, in fact predominating, in the narrow streets — youth buoy- 
ant, studious, careless, sober, rollicking, staid ; youth well cared 
for and well to do, in foppish silks and furs ; and youth poor 
and out at elbows, sallow- faced and pinched with over much 
study and want. One conceited young fellow was mincing up 
the street to the class of the particular master he patronized 
with a self-satisfied smirk. His servant walked before him car- 
rying several huge volumes bound in leather dyed a vivid red. 
No doubt of it, he fancied himself immensely and considered 
himself the most profound philosopher in the whole University I 
And on the other side of the street, a bent and sallow man, 
verging on forty years of age, crept round a corner, ragged and 
threadbare, and hurried off in the opposite direction to the 
school at which he slaved and studied, sitting on the straw and 
drinking in open- eyed and open-mouthed the learning that he 
sat up all the night to master. Arnoul noted the hungry look 
in his eyes, as he crept hurriedly down the street. He stuck 
close to the walls of the houses and flitted past like a shadow. 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 451 

There was hunger for knowledge speaking from those sad, deep 
eyes; and hunger for bread spoke eloquent in his emaciated 
cheeks. 

Then as they passed on one side, to avoid a collision with 
a band of downcast-eyed friars, they almost ran into the midst of 
a crowd of a very different type. A tavern door gaped, and like 
a great mouth sent forth a torrent of ribald song and drunken 
clamor, as a handful of scholars reeled over the threshold into 
the street. Arnoul caught a glimpse of the interior and a whiff 
of the reek that streamed through the opening. There were 
still students within drinking. It was a low sort of place and 
the frequenters looked poor. But the drink had made them for- 
get their poverty and become quarrelsome or amorous. What 
looked like valets or servants, better clad than they, were in the 
tavern too; and women, flushed and heated with wine, talked 
loudly and sang, or shouted tags of scurrilous verse, out-doing 
even the men in their shamelessness and clamor. One man lay 
stretched on the floor in sodden unconsciousness — the butt of 
lewd jest. A woman was kicking at him with her foot ; but he 
did not stir. It was a disgusting sight; and Arnoul^ who had 
not seen drunkenness and coarseness before, drew back with a 
shiver. 

They avoided the reeling and stumbling rabble and passed 
on. The scholars had by this time come to blows among them- 
selves where they were not occupied in mocking and shrieking 
vile epithets after the religious. A functionary of the Univer- 
sity, gorgeous in his robes of office, came into sight, making 
his way through the press at the heels of his beadle ; and then 
two or three black robed monks and canons. 

The whole scene was perpetually shifting and changing, the 
human figures — black and red and white and gray and green — 
weaving themselves in and out like the warp and woof of some 
strange tapestry. " It was the tapestry of life," thought Arnoul, 
'' vivid and brilliant and sparkling. This was the University I A 
web of human lives woven together into one great and myster- 
ious picture I '' And the cry of the old woman, under her burden 
of rags in the town came back to him. " Cote et sorcot rafeteroie! 
Coats to mend ! Rents and rags ! " Here was the tapestry of 
life. It would wear and fray and tear! Already the fringes 
were ragged ! 

And it wove and unwove, and raveled and unraveled, before 



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452 ARNOUL the englishman [Jan., 

his eyes. And he was one of those moving figures now. And — 
The Abbot's voice broke upon the train of his meditations: 
'' Wake up, Arnoul ! Here we are at last 1 Your voyage, at 
any rate, is done I " 

They turned a corner into a quiet street, a backwater off 
the main stream, and found themselves at their destination. 

Chapter X. 

When Abbot Benet had left Paris for Citeaux, in company 
with many other Cistercian prelates, going to the chapter from 
the north of France, it was not many days before Arnoul was 
quite at home in his new surroundings. The two young monks, 
his companions, had settled down quietly in the cloister to a 
life differing in nothing, save in the hours of class and study, 
from that of their Devon home. But he found all things very 
different. The Abbot had taken him to the Abbey of St Victor, 
and placed him under the care of the Canons, who were so 
famous for their generous hospitality towards students from the 
provinces and abroad. Here, while he did not follow the strict 
rule of the religious, he was obliged to some extent to a regu- 
lar life of study and routine. He found himself in the com- 
pany of scholars rich and poor, gathered together from all di« 
rections, and all impelled by the same desire for knowledge 
that animated him. 

The first morning, after Mass and school, he chose his 
friends. The students were walking to and fro in the Abbey 
gardens, discussing the lesson that they had just heard, argu-» 
ing and disputing as students will ; and he was walking with 
them, not daring to lift his voice or join in the discussion, for 
fear of betraying his ignorance. One handsome young fellow, 
three or four years his senior, was arguing in a loud tone of 
voice. He was evidently a favorite, for he had quite a little 
group of the scholars listening to him. His voice, despite its 
loudness, was melodious and his speech of a strong southern 
accent. This, together with his curling hair and dark com- 
plexion, proclaimed him what he was — a student from the north 
of Italy or else from the southeastern corner of France. 

Arnoul liked his face ; though perhaps the lips were a trifle 
full and the eyes too close set, while his voice was liquid and 
flowing. 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 453 

" And Maitre Jehan remembers/' he was saying, '' how that 
same Maitre Amaury was adjudged guilty of heresy after he 
had lain buried for full four years. The synod decreed that 
he should be dug up again and buried in unconsecrated ground. 
Nor is that all. Maitre Jehan remembers seeing ten of his 
disciples burned at the stake, because they refused to recant 
and deny their teaching; and a great number were imprisoned 
for life as an example for the rest. Now I find/' he went on, 
frowning judicially, '* that our good Giles holds those same doc- 
trines; and, of a certainty, be ought to recant or taste the 
fire." 

''Nay, my good Maitre Louis" — it must have been Giles 
who spoke — "I never said that all was one; nor would I hold 
that God and bis creatures were the same and identical. What 
I maintained was that all things are in him." 

'' Oh, oh I " broke in the group in chorus. '' And what did 
Amaury make of that ? " 

They continued disputing and bantering, walking up and 
down the garden paths, until Louis the Gascon tired of his 
dialectical fencing. Catching sight of Arnoul, who already 
looked upon him as a being altogether superior, he beckoned 
him to his side. 

''And who are you?" he asked. "A newcomer evidently; 
and by your dress and color, an Englishman. Do you belong 
to the English nation? Are you inscribed? Have you made 
the acquaintance of the Dean of the English ? " 

He poured out a string of questions, of which Arnoul only 
succeeded in answering two. 

He was certainly an Englishman ; and he had done nothing 
as yet, since he had only that morning come to St. Victor's. 

Louis the Gascon immediately took him under his own 
especial protection and patronage. 

"I shall take you to the Dean myself, and you shall be 
inscribed at once. Moreover, I must show you our beautiful 
city. It is the most beautiful and wonderful in the world. I 
have been here for the past four years, and there is very little 
of Paris I do not know. I shall show you all there is to see." 

The group surrounding him nodded in confirmation of what 
he said. They were admirers of Maitre Louis, even in his con- 
ceit. Only Maitre Giles pursed his lips together and shook his 
head when no one was looking. Maitre Louis might be bril* 



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454 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Jan., 

liant in logic and know his didaskalia; but he, Giles, knew of 
another side to his character that did not come out in the 
class rooms. It might have been pique, it might be jealousy, 
but there was a frowning look in the eyes of Maitre Giles as 
the Gascon spoke of his four years' acquaintance with Paris. 
Maitre Louis, however, had forgotten Giles and Amaury of 
Bena altogether; and continued his self-imposed task of im- 
parting information to his newly- found Englishman. 

''You are a clerk, remember, and enjoy the benefit of clergy. 
Thank God, the king handed us over to the church courts! 
We are all Maitres and Messires on this side of the Seine 1 
The civil power has no hold on us. Yes; you are certainly a 
clerk and enjoy benefit. Holal you fellows I I shall not dis- 
pute any more. I have a novice to instruct in the manners 
and customs of our University." 

He moved off with Arnoul along one of the quieter paths 
of the garden. He was certainly a very fine fellow, thought 
the boy, as he replied to questions of England, of himself, his 
parentage and achievements, and listened to an account of 
Gascony and the family and doings of Maitre Louis. A very 
fine fellow indeed, and one that he ought to be proud to have 
as a friend and mentor 1 He was handsome and debonnaire^ quick 
of mind and of a ready tongue. Who better could he have to 
introduce him to the life and studies of Paris ? 

They arranged to go together to the Dean of the English 
nation that afternoon after the school of decretals ; and Maitre 
Louis had added one more to his circle of admirers and found 
a ready hero -worshipper in Arnoul before they entered the 
Abbey again for the midday meal. 

And be it said to the credit or discredit of the Gascon that 
he was always ready to put himself out for a newcomer, pro- 
vided he saw any chance of adding to his own little group. 
Admiration and praise were as the breath of life to him; and 
whatever there was in his character that could claim neither he 
kept carefully in the background. He was, in truth, for all his 
physical beauty and keen wit, a weak man ; but he took pains 
to cover his weakness with a show of learning and an imper- 
turbable calmness of feature. 

While Arnoul, for all the tissue of factors that were woven 
into his boyishness, and showed many-hued and complex, on 
the surface, was at heart perfectly simple, the apparently guile- 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 455 

less Louis was in reality both crafty and subtle. But then he 
was careful to show nothing but the best ; and no one would 
have dreamed for an instant, that under his charming smile and 
brilliant speech, there was anything but singleness of intention.- 
Probably he himself did not realize that there was. 

The two young fellows were a contrast physically as well as 
morally. Of the two, Arnoul stood some inches the taller, but 
Maitre Louis was the stouter. The Englishman was sun-browned 
and open; the Gascon's natural swarthiness was toned down 
and paled somewhat by his studies and his city life — his fea- 
tures insensibly moulding to a student type. Both were young 
and handsome ; as fine a pair as you could find in all the Uni- 
versity, brimming over with life, bent on getting on, two mag- 
nificent young animals, clean-cut, and as well set up as race 
horses. 

Decretals over they set out, passing into the University 
through the Porte St. Victor and leaving Place M'Albert upon 
their right as they bent their way towards the lodging of the 
elected Dean of the English. 

Their conversation ranged through all the subjects that would 
be of interest to a newly- come member of the schools. 

'* Can you tell me," Arnoul was saying, **why there were so 
many more scholars at this afternoon's lecture than in the morn- 
ing ? I suppose that there must be more chance of getting on 
in law than in science or theology. But the hall was quite full 
this afternoon. There must have been twice as many there. 
If th^t is the branch of study that offers most chance of ad- 
vancement, I suppose I must go in for it. My brother would 
have me do my best; and I'm sure I want to get on just as 
much as he wants me to." 

Maitre Louis began to laugh — a dry, expressionless laugh, 
that neither increased nor diminished his habitual smile. "It's 
well you have fallen into my hands," he answered. "You might 
have acted on the strength of your observation and tied your- 
self at the beginning to a mouldy and stupid career. ' Most of 
the scholars come to the decretals class. Therefore the law 
offers the best chance of success,' you argue. That shows you 
are new to the game. You have an enthymeme that carries no 
weight. Now I can tell you — but then I know the University 
by experience — that the real reason is this: The decretals are 
in the afternoon. The scholars love to be abed of a morning. 



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456 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Jan., 

Ergo 1 Or I can cast it for you into one of the approved syl- 
logisms, if you wjll. 

** But wait a moment 1 Look at yonder modest building ris- 
ing in the Coupegueule. And by the Holy Mass I it is a street 
of cut- throats I That is the new college founded by the king's 
confessor, Maitre Robert of Sorbon. The house and stable were 
given him by Louis himself. Cardinal Godfrey de Bar, the 
Dean of Paris and the Archdeacon of Rheims, gave him money. 
And he's got Lawrence the Englishman — ^your compatriot, by 
the way — and Godfrey des Fontaines, and, above all, the great 
William of St. Amour himself, to help him. If I make no mis- 
take — and I'm not likely to, since I'm so long in the Univer- 
sity — that college is going to outrival all the schools. The 
queen's physician is interested in it; and King Louis is doing 
his best to make it prosper. 

''But you were talking of the decretists. Now, if I were 
you — if you will take the advice of a friend — I should advise 
you to go in for logic and natural philosophy. That's the real 
thing that pays nowadays. There's that absurd young friar, 
now, just begun to teach at St. Jacques'. He made his studies 
here a few years ago. He is all for Aristotle and logic ! Why, 
Albert himself, his own master, is almost forgotten; and he's 
only been here a few months. William hates him. He hates 
them both — this Dominican upstart and Brother Bonaventure 
over at the Cordeliers. But you could never take the Francis- 
can's line. It is all mystical and speculative ; whereas, Thomas 
is practical. You don't want to make his mistake — you must 
stand by the seculars, since you are a secular yourself — but you 
can't be wrong in learning logic and getting all the practice at 
dialectic you can. Look at me, now," and for the first time 
Arnoul noticed a smirk of conscious pride on the Gascon's vis- 
age, '' I am a rationalist ; and just see how it has advanced me 
and gained me friends." 

** Who are these men you speak of ? " asked his companion. 
''Who is this upstart Thomas; and the Franciscan friar Bona- 
venture ? And who is this William who so hates them both ? " 

"You must know," explained Maitre Louis, "that here in 
Paris there are three kinds of scholars. There are the monks 
and friars, first of all, who profess poverty and walk about with 
bare feet and beg. They wish to be thought great saints ! One 
of these days you may hear the poet Ruteboeuf, or even St. 



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I908.J Arnoul the Englishman 457 

Amour, expound what their humility and poverty really mean. 
Then there are the students who live in religious houses, like 
you and me, with the canons at St. Victor. And lastly, there 
are those who live in lodgings. They are fine fellows I One 
of these days I shall live in lodgings myself ! They do just as 
they please — are their own masters and are quite uninfluenced 
by the prejudice of an Alma Mater. They choose their own 
professors and arrange their own classes. They follow no rule, 
for they are free men; and, generally speaking, they really 
represent the University.'' 

*'But Abbot Benet told me—" began the lad. 

His companion broke in upon him. '* I know what you are 
going to say. Abbot Benet is a Cistercian monk, and does not 
understand the life of a University. You are quite old enough 
and quite wise enough to judge for yourself. Wait till you 
have beard the greatest doctor in Paris ! Wait until you have 
seen William of St. Amour I You are a sensible fellow. I saw 
that at once, or I should not have taken you up and offered 
to show you Paris. You are an Englishman. I am a Gascon. 
We do not even belong to the same nation I But I saw that 
you were a brave chap, with a good spirit of your own. You 
must not tie yourself to the Abbot's word in everything. You 
must judge for yourself I " 

Arnoul said nothing. This was a new doctrine; but the 
glaring flattery was subtle for him and he rather liked it. It 
seemed a great thing to be able to dispense with the advice 
he had always had and to act for himself — freely and without 
influence. But there was a suggestion of insubordination in it 
that he shied at ; so he turned the conversation into a new 
channel with his next question. 

'' What shall I do when we see the Dean ? " he asked. 
'' And what does it mean to be enrolled a member of one of 
the nations?" 

'' It means," answered his instructor, '' that you take the 
place assigned to you in the ranks of your nation. The Eng- 
lish nation comprises the Germans, as well as scholars from 
Hungary, Scandinavia, and Poland. You will have your Dean 
to take your part, if you get into trouble, and your own attorney 
to defend you. Besides, you will have a legal place in the 
University; and that's a great thing. You must be very civil 
to the Dean when you see him, and answer all his questions. 



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458 Arnoul the Englishman [Jan., 

He is an Englishman himself — that is to say, he is really a 
German, but it's all the same thing — and of course he will do 
his best to make you feel quite at home. There is a small fee 
to pay for enrollment. You will give him a little more for 
himself, to get a good place. He has a certain discretion. 
But you need fear nothing. I know him personally ; and, even 
if I am a Gascon, I will speak to him for you." 

They continued conversing and making their way towards 
the chapel of St. Andeol, near to which the Dean had his lodg- 
ing, passing between the parish church of St. Cosmas and the 
Hotel de Clugny. There was always the same throng of peo- 
ple crowding the streets; and Maitre Louis apparently knew 
many of them, for he continually nodded and smiled and bowed, 
and sometimes even interrupted his speech with Arnoul to ex- 
change a word or so with some passing student or layman. 
Once he left Arnoul's side, near St. Andeol, and kept him 
waiting while he conversed with a Jew. Arnoul knew that he 
was a Jew, not only by his strongly marked features, but by 
his garments as well, for he wore the usual fringes at the four 
corners of his dress. Had the lad heard what passed between 
them, he might not have been so enthusiastic over his new 
friend. But he did not hear ; and when Maitre Louis rejoined 
him, saying : '' Old Ben Israel has a pretty daughter and sells 
valuable parchments," he lost the first part of the apology in 
his interest in the second. At length they reached the Dean's. 
He was in, and Arnoul was properly inscribed as a student of 
Paris, living at St. Victor's, and a member of the English na- 
tion. The Dean spoke with him at some length of himself and 
England, and expatiated upon the significance of his member- 
ship in the corps. He was a pompous man and heavy in his 
conversation, speaking his Latin with an accent and in meas- 
ured words. But he took the offering Arnoul laid upon the 
table and carefully stowed it away in the purse hanging by 
a double thong from his cincture. He bowed the two out at the 
head of the stairs. The interview was over. 

''I think we may have a cup of wine now," said Maitre 
Louis as they regained the street; and Arnoul, nothing loath, 
assented. ''The Dean might have offered us some refreshment," 
he grumbled, '' especially as you gave him so good a fee. 
But you can get nothing from some people. Here is a good 
wine house I know. It will do at a pinch, at any rate." 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 459 

They entered the public room, and drank wine to the suc- 
cess of the newly enrolled Englishman. Maitre Louis — he 
seemed to have friends everywhere — knew half the people in 
the tavern, and introduced his prot^g^ to them. They were 
jolly fellows, most of them clerks and evidently hail fellow with 
his companion, whom they accosted heartily. They were speak- 
ing of the friction between the regulars and the seculars — a 
topic of which Arnoul knew little; but he liked to listen to 
them and their brilliant and caustic clash of words. One or 
two were Englishmen like himself; and leaving the others they 
came over to him and spoke of England and London and the 
King Henry who was then over in Gascony. 

By the time he had drunk his wine and paid for both him- 
self and Maitre Louis, he was on good terms with the company, 
and they voted him a good recruit and prophesied great things 
for him. 

On the way back to St. Victor's he could get his compan- 
ion to talk of little but St. Amour. It seemed that the dis- 
pute was fast rising to an acute crisis between the astonish- 
ingly brilliant, if self- constituted, representatives of the secular 
professors in the University and the friars they so hated and 
contemned. Louis was full of it. What he had just heard he 
retailed, with considerable embellishment, to Arnoul, pouring 
into his ears an unstinted panegyric of St. Amour, and run- 
ning the regulars down on every count. St. Amour, without 
doubt, must be a wonderful personage, if all Maitre Louis said 
of him was true; and the friars were obviously a disagreeable 
and meddling crowd. He would take his stand with Maitre 
Louis and the great William. He would study dialectic. He 
would throw in his lot with the stronger party, and thus make 
a name for himself. And how could he do it better than un- 
der the tutelage of Maitre Louis ? It was settled in his mind 
— at the end of his first day at the University. No decretals, 
but logic, science, and dialectic I And he would certainly sit 
under the chair of St. Amour. He thought of the Abbot on 
his way to the chapter at Citeaux. He thought of his brother, 
in his priest's uneventful little Devon parish. He thought of 
Vipont and Sibilla, and his hand went mechanically to his 
throat and traveled down to the reliquary hidden in his bosom. 

But he said nothing of what was passing in his mind. 
Only, from time to time, he asked questions of his companion 



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46o Arnoul the Englishman [Jan. 

as they returned to St. Victor's by the cloister of the Car- 
melites and the old Palace of Clovis. 

And, in the answers, he learned much of the new life he 
was to lead, much of Maitre William, much of the long- 
standing conflict between the two contending schools. He did 
not recognize it as yet, as it came home to him later on, that 
those same two parties, struggling in the University for mas- 
tery, were as old as human nature itself. How could he see 
in Plato and Aristotle the two drifts of human intelligence and 
piece them on, through the fathers and the old monks, to the 
two currents flowing strong in Paris, and carrying the minds 
of men away with them in their flow ? He only heard the two 
sides roughly delineated by a partisan; and, boy- like, ranged 
himself with the one. 

When the two scholars reached St. Victor's he was, without 
knowing it, already more than half a disciple of St. Amour, 
and had drunk in, in the poison of Maitre Louis' words, an un- 
reasoning dislike of the mendicants. 

(to be continued.) 



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A LEGENDARY LIFE OF SAINT PATRICK. 

BY JOSEPH DUNN, Ph.D. 

^T was doubtless owing to the motive of connecting 

the Apostle of Ireland with Armorica that at least 

three ancient lives of the saint laid the scene of 

his capture by pirates in Brittany. 

According to later Breton traditions, St. Patrick 

was born near Font-Aven, in the garden land of Brittany, whose 

fame as the " Millers' town " par excellence has given rise to 

the couplet 

Pont-Aven^ ville de renonty 

Quatorze moulinSy quinze maisons ; 

a chapel is dedicated to him at Lannion, at the opposite side 
of the peninsula, and, according to the popular almanacs, he is 
invoked for the relief of the dead. 

St. Patrick figures as one of the dramatis personce in at 
least two Breton mystery plays. In the older, the '' Life of St. 
Nonne,'' mother St. David, which, by the way, is one of the 
earliest Breton texts extant, dating from the fifteenth century, 
he plays a strange r6le. God the Father despatches an angel 
to Patrick to tell him that, in obedience to a design of Provi- 
dence, he shall leave the place in which he is and that, in thirty 
years, David will be bom. Patrick demurs to this plan: 
"Whatl'' he exclaims, ''I to fast for some one that will not 
be born for thirty years, expose myself to dangers in foreign 
lands and go with bent-down head like a blind man? What 
does God, the true King of the world, wish ? I have always 
served him as his liege-man the best I could, but, now that he 
intends to exile me from this land, I will serve him no more/' 
Again the angel is despatched and, on the assurance that he 
will be made apostle of the island to which he is to be sent 
and that no harm will happen to him, Patrick gives his consent 
to go. He then hires a ship and sailors to take him to Ireland 
to preach there the faith of Christ. 

In the other mystery play, still inedited and existing in only 
one manuscript copy dating from something more than a century 
ago, Patrick is the chief personage. In fact, the title of the 
play is the ^^Buez^ or Life of St Patrick, Archbishop of Ireland." 



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462 A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK [Jan., 

Neither the name of the author nor of the copyist of this cur- 
ious piece is known, but this much is sure, that it was com- 
posed by a young clerk, a native of one of the cantons of 
Tr^guier, as the dialect in which the play is written makes 
clear. Although the author had had some education, it was not 
enough to prevent him from falling into all kinds of errors in 
history and chronology, in spite of the fact that he had the as- 
sistance in its composition, as he himself tells us, of a '' Father 
of the order of St. Francis, a learned man and prudent, and full 
of wisdom." But, after all, the poor poet is frank enough in 
confessing that his work is "without study or style." 

Like all the Breton mysteries, the " Life of St. Patrick " is 
in verse, the favorite meter being the French Alexandrine ; but 
occasionally other meters are employed, and the verses rhyme 
in pairs. It is not uncommon to find whole phrases repeated in 
the course of the work, and mere stop- gaps are found on every 
page. In a word, the style of the piece is as mediocre and 
as prosaic as most of the Breton works of the same kind. 
Yet, in spite of all that, it is valuable from the point of view 
of language, and for the light it throws on the life at the time 
it was written, for, it may not be out of place to remark, the 
authors* of the Breton mystery plays represent the characters 
of their dramas as contemporaries, no matter when or where 
they lived. Consequently, we should be asking too much if we 
looked for historical truth in these nai've productions, whose pri- 
mary purpose was to edify the audience before whom they were to 
be given. Therein lay the greatest value of the Breton theatre. 

Long after the mystery plays had disappeared from the rest 
of France, to give way to the comedy and drama, this mediaeval 
genre lived on in Brittany and afforded the Breton peasantry 
their best diversion and their only information, even if some- 
what distorted, on sacred and profane history. The author of a 
mystery did not bother himself much, and his auditors bothered 
themselves even less, about the historicity of the subjects and 
characters of the play. For this reason he chose, it made no 
difference whence, the subject, taking care, however, to hit up- 
on one that would draw and hold the people. The author of 
the "Life of St. Patrick" excuses himself for not having intro- 
duced farces and pleasantries into his play, which, he admits^ 
would have delighted the playgoers. And yet, he had not 
acted niggardly in this respect, one would think, for he meta- 
morphosed the druids or pagan priests of the cruel king of 

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I908.] A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK 463 

Ireland who persecuted Patrick into devils, who speak big oaths 
and thump and pummel each other to the great amusement of 
the audience. 

There must have been a great many versions of this legend- 
ary life of the Apostle of Ireland, of which the Breton Buez is 
but one. It will be sufficient to mention here one in French, 
bearing close resemblances to the play we are discussing, one 
in Spanish, due to the arch-priest Montalvan, and another in 
Spanish, based on this last, by the dramatist Calderon de la 
Barca. There is every reason to believe that the Breton mys- 
tery was written to explain the origin of the Purgatory of St. 
Patrick, and serve as introduction or prelude to one of the 
numerous plays of that name. There could be no subject that 
would appeal more to the imagination of the Breton of two 
hundred years or more ago, as it would to the imagination of 
the Breton of to-day, than that wonderful Purgatory which en- 
joyed such popularity towards the close of the Middle Ages, 
and the marvelous adventures with which the converted soldier, 
Louis Eunius, met in it. 

The four versions mentioned do not agree on all points in 
what they tell us of the life and works of Patrick. It will be 
worth while, perhaps, to point out some of the most striking 
passages in which they agree or disagree, taking the Breton 
text as the basis. 

The first Prologue asks pardon of the audience for the faults 
and rudeness of the work and the slips of the actors : '' Excuse 
us, I pray, if we make mistakes, and we will pray Jesus to par- 
don you, too.'' As was the practice on such occasions, the 
players and audience kneel and join in singing the Vent Creator^ 
and thereafter, before entering upon the argument of the play, 
the Prologue pays his respects to the clergy and nobility who 
are present, requesting their attention : ** On you, priests and 
nobles, depends the attention of all present. Following your good 
example, they will give us audience and all will remain silent." 

Now, says the legend, in that part of Ireland that lies op- 
posite England and is near the sea is a small, sparsely peopled 
village called Emothor or Emptor. This is Nemthur, where, 
according to the Old- Irish Hymn by Fiacc of Sletty, one of 
the oldest Lives of Patrick, Patrick was born. At a time that 
is not more definitely stated in the legend there lived in that 
place a knight and, not far away, a lady whose name was Con- 
ch^se, or Conquesa, who is the Concess of the oldest Irish 

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464 A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK [Jan., 

Lives. Both this young man and woman had made vows of 
celibacy, but God the Father announced to them through his 
angel Gabriel that their vows were not pleasing to him, lor he 
had chosen them for each other. The Breton play alone informs 
us that the knight was at that time sixteen years of age and the 
lady fourteen. Moreover, his name was Timandre, a name un- 
known to the other versions. From more reliable sources, how- 
ever, we know that his name was Calpurnius, that he was a 
Briton and a Roman citizen, and that his home was at Banna- 
venta, which was probably in what is now southwest Wales. 
The Breton Buez differs further from all the other versions in 
calling the maiden Mari Jana. She, says the Breton poet, was 
sister of St. Germain (of Auxerre), but the others have it that 
she was sister of St. Martin of Tours. In any case, they agree 
in affirming that she was of French blood, and Calderon con- 
tents himself with informing us that Patrick, for he it is who 
was afterwards their son, was born 

De un caballero irlandes 
Y de una dama francesa. 

The proposals of marriage of Timandre and Mari Jana are 
carried out with much formality in the presence of the young 
lady and her brother, the count. Timandre is supported by his 
adviser, the vicar, who does most of the parleying for his client. 
The next scene takes place in the church. The vicar asks the 
names of the young couple: 

''My name is Timandre, at your service; in that name I 
was baptized into the faith and into the Church." 

''And mine," answered his betrothed, "is Mari Jana, also 
at your service." 

The Vicar: "Well, Timandre, are you willing to take this 
Mari Jana who is here present ? " 

Timandre: "Yes." 

" And you, Mari Jana, do you also promise to take for your 
husband Sir Timandre ? " 

" Yes." 

The vicar then addresses them a short homily on the mean- 
ing of the Sacrament of Matrimony, and, at the conclusion of 
the ceremony, the entire company go to the wedding feast. 

In general, the Breton author is better informed and more 
precise than the other writers I have quoted. It was five years, 
he tells us, before the prayers of this virtuous couple were an- 



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I908.] A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK 465 

swered ; '' a thing/' he adds, '' of rare occurrence in that land/' 
The visitation of the angels at the birth of the child, and the 
scene of his baptism, take up considerable time in the action of 
the play, for the questions of the priest and the responses of 
the page and governess, who act as sponsors, are given in full, 
just as those of the priest and the child's parents on the oc- 
casion of their marriage. At the command of the angel Gabriel, 
the name Patrick is given to the boy. One might suppose, 
from the silence of the Breton author on the subject, that Pat- 
rick was the only child of this marriage; but we learn from 
the other accounts that he had three sisters (or even five, ac- 
cording to a note in the Franciscan copy of Place's Hymn in 
Honor of St. Patrick) namely: Lupina, Ligrina, and Dorche — 
the two last are called Tygridia and Dorchea by Montalvan; 
of whom the first mentioned remained single, but the others 
married, and the second had twenty-three children, nephews of 
Patrick. 

These popular versions agree in saying that Patrick's par- 
ents ended their days in a cloister ; and the Breton author, pre- 
sumably to flatter some local community and without regard to 
the violent wrenching of the chronology, says that Timandre 
entered the order of St. Francis and that the mother of Patrick 
became a religious of the order of St. Clare. They had left 
the boy, a mere child, in the care and guardianship of the 
count, his mother's brother, says the Breton author; but, say 
the others, it was to a lady, who according to the French ver- 
sion was his aunt, to whom he was entrusted. In any case, he 
was afterwards put to school with the faithful vicar, who, for a 
certain stipend, engaged to teach him reading, writing, and the 
catechism, the boy having expressed his preference for learning 
rather than for a martial career. He was only a lad of six when 
he performed miracles : he restored sight to the eyes of a man 
who had been blind from birth ; and he could not have been 
much older, ten, eleven, or twelve years of age, according to 
the French version and Montalvan, when, by his prayers, he 
caused a deluge, which had come from the melted snow and 
threathened to destroy all the land, to subside. 

Meanwhile the devils have heard of the miraculous deeds of 
the child, and of the spread of the faith which he preaches, and, 
filled with alarm, they convene a council. As these scenes of 
deviltry are those in which the Breton playwrights and actors 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 30 



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466 A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK [Jan., 

made their master-stroke^ and as the one before us is typical 
of the class, it will, perhaps, be well to translate word for word 
a portion of it We can imagine the mirth of the spectators 
when some well-known local figure was held up to ridicule. 

Lucifer summons the princes of hell '' to stretch their legs/' 
and calls upon each to give an account of himself. '' It's a long 
time/' he cries, *' since any one has come to the fire," and he 
gnashes his teeth with rage. 

Beelzebub speaks : '' Prince, here's a draper I've brought 
down. I pretended to be a simpleton and he gave false meas- 
ure. He measured his laces and ribbons too short and then 
sold them at twice what they were worth." 

Asteroth speaks : '' I've trapped an inn- keeper that kept false 
accounts. He stole from his customers when their bellies were 
full, put water in the wine and vinegar, sold for eighteen sous 
an article worth fifteen, gave nine or ten eggs for a dozen, and 
charged five sous for an omelet fried in a sauce of watery cider 
and dishwater." 

Satan, to whom had been entrusted the surveillance of Ire- 
land, reports : " There is a brat there who does more harm than 
a dozen of us. So I advise you to send some one else, if you 
wish, but I sha'n't go there again/' The upshot of the wran- 
gle is that Asteroth proposes that some one seize Patrick and 
denounce him to the emperor, and Beelzebub volunteers to un- 
dertake the task, disguised as a laborer. 

The French version is the only one of the four that gives 
details of the well-known story of the capture of Patrick by pi- 
rates. The Breton simply mentions that Patrick was only eight 
years old at the time; but the French legend, which is nearer 
the facts in the case, has it that he was sixteen, and that his 
capture happened in this way: Patrick was walking along the 
seashore with a few companions, reciting the psalms, when he 
was taken prisoner and brought to the far end of the island, 
where he was sold to a prince of that land. This was the '* Em- 
peror" before whom Beelzebub led and accused Patrick; but, 
because of the boy's tender age, he was punished by being sent 
away to a solitary place to watch his master's sheep, which are 
substituted for the herds of swine of the native versions. 

Then follows a droll scene in the Breton Buez. Patrick is 
in the wilderness in prayer. God the Father sends the angel 
Victor to comfort him. But Victor, who, of course, is unknown 
to Patrick, first tries his patience : '' Good-day, young shepherd ; 

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i9o8.] A Legendary Life of St. Patrick 467 

what is new? You are quite lost to the world in this lonely 
place. Have done with your melancholy ; enjoy yourself. I 
have cards; let us play a game and dance the steps I have 
learned at the academy.'' 

Patrick protests that he knows no games, and, besides he has 
no money. 

" What sort of a man are you, anyway ? " exclaims Victor, 
" A man lively and gay is worth the woods full of such bigots. 
Come, without ceremony, let us make ourselves at ease. Let 
us dance a little without more ado." 

Finally, since Patrick does not yield to the temptation, the 
angel makes himself known. 

The germ of the story of the conversion of the two daugh- 
ters of the High King Loegaire by Patrick, Ethne the White 
and Fedelm the Red, is well known even in some of the ear- 
liest accounts of the saint's life, but the Breton dramatist has 
taken the mere mention of the princesses in its source and 
made a story of his own out of their meeting with Patrick. 
The older sister accosts Patrick: ''Good-day, shepherd. Come 
here. Tell me, are you content in this place? Two young 
ladies have come to see you, having heard that you are beau- 
tiful." 

Patrick makes a move to escape their advances. '* Listen,'* 
he says, " I am not used to talk to young ladies. That be- 
longs to people like you, not to a poor unfortunate so poorly 
dressed as I am." 

He even loses his temper: ''It would be better for you 
to go home and not have them looking for you for dinner. 
Hurry to your soup." 

As might be expected, the young ladies are greatly morti- 
fied at having their charms and blandishments so ruthlessly re- 
buffed, and they threaten to report him to their father. But, 
it is hardly necessary to add, they are finally converted to the 
doctrine professed by Patrick. 

The following scene represents the emperor asleep. An 
angel stands at his right side, at his left stands Lucifer, who 
says : " Courage, courage, my son. Have no fear in the world. 
I will protect you when you are oppressed." 

The Angel: "What, do you believe in the idols f' 

Asteroth : " It's a great pity if he doesn't believe in them, 
old imbecile." 

The Angel: " Alas, whoever does not believe will be lost." 

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468 A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK [Jan., 

The Devil: "You lie in your face. In this way they will 
be saved." 

The Angel: " It will be a misfortune if they believe in them." 

Asteroth: "Away from here, or I will close your beak. 
For he is ours, have no doubt in the world." 

Patrick's life with the cruel emperor has become so unen- 
durable that the angel buys his release for 20,000 crowns, and 
the second act concludes with another scene of devilry. 

Lucifer: " Good-day, companions, I've come back to see you. 
Don't be surprised if I'm late, for, without exaggeration, I've been 
traveling all over the parishes of the diocese of Tr^guier. Well, 
Asteroth, have you succeeded in putting Patrick under your law?" 
Asteroth: "AH the devils together are no match for him. 
/ have tried hard enough to tempt him — " 

" The deuce. You're a fine fellow, when a little chap causes 
you such embarrassment. If / were at his heels, I'd have him 
in the net — " 

Asteroth : " All the nets in the whole of hell are not enough, 
I tell you, old stinkard, to catch a man who is in the grace of 
God. You fool yourself, if you think so." 

Lucifer: "What, wretch 1 I'll teach you to speak here- 
after in more proper terms. There, take that on your side, 
old heedless ingrate. One like you doesn't earn his bread." 

The different versions do not agree as to what happened to 
Patrick on the journey to France, which followed his release 
from the tyrant in Ireland. Some of them say it was St. Mar- 
tin at Tours, others that it was St. Germain at Auxerre whom 
he visited, and by whom he was ordained to the priesthood. 
Having expressed a desire to visit "the house of Monsieur 
St. Peter," he set out for Rome. On the way, he was inspired 
to visit a hermit named Justus who, says the French version, 
lived on an island in the Tyrrhenian sea, by which we know 
from reliable documents that the island of Lerins is meant, or, 
according to the Breton mystery, in the heart of a great for- 
est which we may suppose was on the Alps or Apennines. 

When Patrick came up to the hermitage he called to the 
hermit : " Holy father, open your door to me, I pray you, for 
the night has come and I do not know where to go." 

"Who is it wishes to enter?" asked the hermit. "I can- 
not give lodging in any way." 

"I am a priest on my way to Rome, and I pray you to 
support me this night" 



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I908.] A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK 469 

'' Tell me your name, and we will see. If you are that 
Patrick, surely I will take you in." For it had been revealed 
to Justus that Patrick would pass that way, and he had re- 
ceived from heaven a scepter or crosier which he was to de- 
liver to Patrick on his coming. One form of this story dates 
from as early as the ninth century. 

By confusion with his predecessor, Palladius, Patrick is said 
to have arrived in Rome in the pontificate of Celestine I., who 
conferred upon him the benefice and archbishopric of Ireland. 
The Breton mystery brings us to the Eternal City, where we 
find Patrick conversing with the Pontiff and the cardinals. On 
his return home, Patrick crosses France and again visits his 
uncle, who provides him with '' chalice, missal, and ornaments," 
for, as he says, in the land to which Patrick is about to go 
there are no furnishings. 

Patrick, the legend continues, landed on the coast of Lein- 
ster, where he remained some time, and then embarked for 
Ulster in the northern part of the island, where Leogarius, who 
is the Loegaire of Irish history, reigned. Now this king, whom 
the Breton mystery calls Garius, had planned, at the instiga- 
tion of the devils, to destroy the apostle, and at the sugges- 
tion of Beelzebub, he sent his chief prince to the church where 
Patrick was saying Mass, with a pistol in his hand to shoot 
him; but, as he is about to fire, a thunderbolt hurls him to 
the ground. This incident is also a reworking of one of Pat- 
rick's adventures with the Druids told of in some of the early 
accounts of his life, how the chief Druid tried to kill Patrick, 
but the saint raised his hand and cursed him, and he fell dead, 
burned up before the eyes of all. From here on, event follows 
event in quick succession. St. Brigit, who, by the way, is as- 
sociated with Patrick only in the more recent lives, appears 
and announces to Patrick the secrets which God has to reveal 
to him. A stage direction follows: Here a light will be made 
in the sky. One of the inhabitants of Ireland cries out : '' Look, 
look, in the air, a great light full of brightness. I dare not 
venture; I will wait no longer to understand it. I am going 
to call people. I find here a miracle." (Recalls at the door): 
''James, James. Come out quickly. I am greatly perplexed at 
what I see. Look, in the air is a light like a triumphant sun." 

James in turn calls another: ''William, come, my friend. 
We are in fear here. There is a burning torch in the air 
above our house." They fall on their knees. Brigit explains 

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470 A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK [Jan., 

that it is a sign of the joys prepared for Patrick in heaven. 
God descends, a crosier in his hand, and leads Patrick to the 
mouth of a cavern which serves as entrance to the miraculous 
Purgatory. God promises Patrick that he will suffer no tor- 
ment at the hour of death, for He will come promptly with 
his angels to receive him. 

Patrick speaks to the bystanders: ''My vicar- general, and 
you my people, the time has come that has been fixed to pay 
tribute to Jesus, my Savior. All that receive life must some- 
time die. It is not the fear of death that is my greatest re- 
gret. My greatest sorrow is to leave behind the Irish. I have 
always remembered them in my prayers, and in my sacrifices 
I prayed for them. This much has been accomplished : I have 
obtained from Jesus, our Messias, a new Purgatory, created in 
my name, and, because of me, it has been privileged: Who- 
ever passes twenty-four hours within it will efface whatever 
offences he has committed in this world. Yonder it is, near 
the valley. Come with me, we will visit it together." 

A host of angels appear in the air singing Gloria in excels 
sis Deo, Patrick, from within the Purgatory, addresses his fare- 
well to the pains and torments of the world, and the mystery 
concludes with another scene of diablerie. Lucifer and Beel- 
zebub had promised Satan, when we saw them last, that they 
would act diligently on their mission, and not come back empty- 
handed. And now we find them condoling with each other, 
for they have got no game, and they are afraid they will be 
struck and beaten. A happy thought occurs to Beelzebub: 
'' There is no chance of success in this land. Come, let us go 
to Toulouse to get Louis Ennius. I saw him less than a week 
ago living riotiously and quarrelsome and cuddling the pretty 
girls. Come, we sha'n't have any trouble in taking him." 

The vulgar versions of the life of St. Patrick reckon that 
he lived to the age of 120 or even 130 or 132 years. Accord- 
ing to the equally unsubstantiated statements of the French 
version we are considering here, and the Spanish of Montalvan, 
he was 1 13 years of age when he died. His burial place was the 
city of Dun, or Dunio as the word stands in Montalvan, which 
represents the historical Diin Lethglasse, which contests with 
Saul the honor of containing the bones of the Irish apostle. The 
true year of his death was 461, on the 17th of March. The 
legendary accounts disagree with this, and also with each other. 
The French version offers the 20th of April, in the year 463; 

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I908.] A LEGENDARY LIFE OF ST. PATRICK 47 1 

Montalvaa the i6th of that month, in the year 493, and in the 
pontificate of Pope Felix. These and other attempts at syn- 
chronizing are overlooked by the Breton poet. It was suffi- 
cient for him to have produced a preface to and an explanation 
of that other play which, in his eye, was of greater importance, 
and to the performance of which he invites his audience to re- 
turn on the morrow. 

I cannot bring this short analysis of the ** Buee or Life of St. 
Patrick " to a better close than by giving a translation of the 
Epilogue which followed it. It offers considerable information 
concerning the spectators, the author, and the actors, and the 
obstacles and encouragement which they might expect to meet 
with in the course of the play. The Epilogue was the capital 
piece of a mystery and was technically known as the bouquet 
It must be remembered that these dramas were given on a tem- 
porary stage in the open air and that it required several days 
to play one mystery entire. As the reciter of the Epilogue, 
who was always the best actor of the troupe, declaimed in 
flowery terms, the assistants passed among the audience taking 
up the collection with which to defray the expenses of the 
production. 

EPILOGUE. 

Good people, generous people, people of every noble qual- 
ity, your favorable attention towards us to-day puts us under 
deep obligations, if we had the capacity, to thank you from 
the centre of our hearts. 

But, good people, relying on the patience which you have 
continued to show to-day in our favor, I make bold to thank 
you, so far as I am able, on the part of the actors. 

Monsieur the pastor and all the priests have favored us in 
every way, and, in recompense, I thank them and the joy of 
Paradise I wish them. 

Then the nobles, the people of quality, who have shown us 
every civility, in return we pray for them and I wish them the 
glory of Paradise. 

Next, the young clerics and the people of the pen, as well 
as the citizens, I thank, and in turn I wish them, too, the glory 
of Paradise. 

Besides, the heiresses, as many as are present, I thank warm- 
heartedly for having shown us perfect attention, and I ask for 
them joy in heaven. 



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472 A Legendary Life of St. Patrick [Jan. 

I thank you from my heart, young people, and I wish you 
a thousand good fortunes, the wealth of the world, many chil- 
dren, and the happiness of Paradise afterwards. 

And I ask excuse of all, and once more I invite you all to 
come to-morrow, if it be your pleasure. I hope that there will 
be three times as many as there are to-day. 

If we have displeased anybody to-day, we promise to sat- 
isfy you to-morrow. We will spend our time and will take 
every pains that we may be able to satisfy every one. 

I do not doubt that there will be some hanger-on who, on 
the way home or while eating his bowl full, will find a thorn 
to attach to each of us ; I see mine already dragging behind me. 

But those that are wise and well-intentioned will let them 
have their say and invite them, if they know their business, to 
come to-morrow and to give a lesson. 

The mystery which you will see is that of Louis Ennius, 
which we will play, by the grace of Jesus, with the best per- 
sons who are able to give it Then, come all in bands, let n% 
one remain at home. 

Now, I have another thing to ask of you: Let every one 
bring, without fail, a six-real piece; fifteen-sous piece, rolls of 
farthings, and four-sous pieces will not be refused. 

It is to help pay for our supper. And you, company, if 
you wish to join us in drinking a drop, we will do it most 
willingly before we leave. 

Finally, company, this is your duty. But, those who may 
not have a sou^ come just the same and we will strive, all of 
us, to do our part and satisfy you before you leave for home. 

O glorious St. Patrick, you who are in heaven, be our ad- 
vocate now before God. With true heart, I make our request 
and that of all who have come to hear us. 

Our end and our design and inclination is to imitate you 
in every way, in order that, by your example, we may over- 
come sin and be victorious over our enemies. 

Glorious St. Patrick, crowned with glory, cause us to imi- 
tate your life in this world, that, having followed your example^ 
we may share in the glory and the joy. 

In this way I began, in this way I end. I pray you, com- 
pany, excuse us. To-morrow, by the grace of God, we promise 
to do better. I am, with true heart, your faithful servant. 



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A NATIVE SING-SONG. 

BY M. F. QUINLAN. 

" They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less 

Of sound than of words, 
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless 

And songless bright birds ; 
Where with fire and fierce drought on her tresses 
Insatiable summer oppresses 
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses 

And faint flocks and herds. 

"; Where in dreariest days, when all dews end 
And all winds are warm, 
Wild winter's large flood-gates are loosen'd 

And floods, freed by storm, 
From brolcen-up fountain heads, dash on 
Dry deserts with long pent-up passion — 
Here rhyme was first framed without fashion 
Song shaped without form." 

— Adam Lindstty Gordon, 

|T was after the rains. The distant river was a rush- 
ing torrent; in the by- wash the bull-frogs made 
merry; and from the creek close by came the 
joyful swish and swirl of running water, that 
slipped along between wet, muddy banks. 
In the group of trees gray 'possums swung from bough to 
bough. Higher up, on the withered limb of a dead gum, a 
row of laughing jackasses made the air ring with their mirth. 
Sometimes it was just a faint schoolgirl titter. Sometimes it 
was a manly guffaw, suggestive of a deep chest and good lung 
power. Then while one listened the loud laugh gradually sub- 
sided into a husky, worn-out chuckle — a comfortable sort of 
chuckle that one might expect from an elderly gentleman with 
a good digestion and a double chin. 

But before the chuckle has quite died out, the solemn-look- 
ing bird at the end of the branch, gives a last feeble splutter. 
It seems as if he didn't want to laugh, but that he couldn't 
help it; as if the surrounding country, viewed from the bare 
arm of a gum-tree, was about the funniest thing in creation. 




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474 ^ Native Sing-Song [Jan., 

Accordingly he relapsed into another peal of exquisite enjoy- 
ment. This appears to tickle the fancy of his companions, and 
again the row of gray-brown birds go off into fresh roars of 
laughter, until the wonder is that they do not roll off their 
eerie perch; or develop permanent hysterics. As it is — if one 
may subscribe to a belief to the transmigration of souls — they 
look like a row of departed humorists who are cracking jokes 
in the loneliness of the scrub. 

For the rest, it is a faint heart that never rejoices, and the 
advent of the rains in the back-country is enough to freshen 
up the most confirmed pessimist. 

For thirteen long months not a drop had fallen ; before that 
again but little; and with each successive month, the land had 
been getting more and more parched and dry. First the grass 
withered and died ; then the stock drooped and lost flesh ; final- 
ly the patient earth cried out in bitterness because of her in- 
ability to succor these things of the wild. 

It almost seemed as if the spirit of the Bushland lay under 
a curse. For instead of the beautiful syren whose voice was 
like some strange new music heard from afar, and whose call 
was potent to lure the strong and the young of heart from 
across the seas to worship at her lonely shrine, here, through- 
out the dry season, she sat huddled up on the withered plains 
like some evil witch, haggard and brown, watching, with cruel, 
gleaming eyes, the death -throes of the Northwest. 

But even in the dry season the sky would give promise of 
rain: just a tiny cloud at dawn that floated over the edge of 
the horizon. Then the sun would get up and peremptorily order 
the cloud back whence it came; seeing which, the station au- 
thorities would use language that is not adapted to cold print, 
nor at all kind to the back country. 

A drought is one of those things that has no age limit. It 
may last thirteen months, or thirteen years, or — But to the 
pastoralist, whose money lies in stock, it matters little to him, 
after that, how long it lasts. Thirteen years is his age limit 
anyhow. Before that, he is probably in the hands of the banks. 
After that, if he's not ''broke,'' he is lucky. 

In the Australian capitals no one wants rain; in spite of 
which it comes. Out back men pray for it without ceasing — 
and it stays away. Why this should be is not for any man to 



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I9o8.] A NATIVE SING-SONG 475 

say, but it seems likely that the prayers of the Northwest get 
hung up in transit ; or else the petitions melt before they have 
time to mount — out there on the red hot plains. 

But, however it is, when the rains come, the entire world 
of the Northwest gives thanks. 

To the native camp on every sheep and cattle run it is a 
time of festival ; the breaking up of the dry season being cele- 
brated in a big corroboree or native sing-song. At such times 
a fat bullock and a sack of flour, are sent down from the home- 
stead, in testimony of the white man's good will. 

But of course the advent of the rain was a foregone conclu- 
sion to the native catnp. The rain was bound to come up at 
that particular time, for did not the native rain-bringer promise 
it would come on that very day ? Did he not go forth alone 
to have speech with it, far away in the scrub, where no eye 
might see the magic that he wrought? and where none might 
give ear to his spell ? For the rain-bringer is a mighty man, 
and his ways are enveloped in power and mystery. At his bid- 
ding the clouds join hands. He speaks, and the rain falls. Ver- 
ily his cunning is like to that of the white man, in whose hands 
are the secrets of the earth. 

To discuss the methods of the rain-bringer is likely to bring 
evil in its wake ; a possibility which no man of the tribe would 
voluntarily incur. Consequently, it is difficult to glean accurate 
information on the subject. But in the absence of direct inspi- 
ration, and forming deductions by the light of nature alone, the 
procedure appears to be somewhat as follows : 

A coolamon, or wooden vessel, is borrowed from a mia-mia. 
The coolamon is then filled with crystalline stones, which are 
broken up and well pounded, to the accompaniment of muttered 
incantations. This done, the rain-bringer severs a vein in his 
left arm, allowing the warm blood to flow upon the crushed 
stones, which he then mixes with great care. Finally, his wordy 
spell being ended, he buries the coolamon in the dry bed of the 
creek. 

After that it rains — or it does not, as the case may be. If 
it does not, the rain-bringer knows that some malign influence 
is at work. Perhaps some one has watched while he cast the 
spell. And as Adam said in the garden : '' Lord ! it was the 
woman,'' so here in the Australian wilderness the rain-bringer 



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476 A Native Sing^Song [Jan., 

seeks out a native gin and belabors her with a heavy stick. If 
the gin is innocent, so much the worse for the gin. Anyhow 
the rain-bringer has done his part; besides which, when he 
beats a gin his arm is strengthened by a million and one pre- 
cedents. Has any one sinned ? says the world of men. CJur^ 
chez la femnu. Thus the primeval curse works itself out, even 
to the end. 

On the other hand, should a peeping gin have flouted the 
sacred mysteries, and should the rain come down in spite of 
feminine iniquity — then her baneful influence is ignored. While 
the tribe give themselves up to rejoicing in anticipation of the 
rain corroboree which is to be. 

At the station camp at Ulladulla, the word had gone round 
that the manager was to start at daybreak for the Mudgee 
homestead, forty miles away across the plain. This seemed a 
good opportunity for the Ulladulla blacks to send a letter to 
the rest of the tribe who were encamped on the adjoining run. 

Now the black man's letter differs considerably from the 
white man's letter. To begin with, it boasts of no writing, nor 
signature, nor address. It is just a notched stick, of which ev- 
ery notch represents a separate item of news. Then, too, it 
does not matter whether the native letter ever reaches its des- 
tination, because no one can read it when it gets there. In- 
deed, the charm of the native letter lies in its infinite possi- 
bilities. It may mean anything, or it may mean nothing, ac- 
cording to the co-operation and good will of the messenger who 
undertakes its safe delivery. 

And since the letter, to be effectual, needs to be explained 
to, and understood by, the appointed carrier, it follows that the 
said messenger must possess certain gifts of mind and heart if 
he is to acquit himself of his trust. The meaning of the let- 
ter, in fact, depends upon him. If he is silent, then the stick 
is dumb. If he will not speak to the men of the tribe, neither 
will the stick. 

So the old black boy, in his fluttering cotton shirt, stands 
outside the homestead, and reads aloud his letter to the ''big 
feller boss," who has consented to act as intermediary between 
the two camps. The reading takes time; for the black fellow 
feels the importance of the occasion. Therefore he begins very 
slowly: First notch — and the old man puts his finger upon it 



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iQoS.J A Native Sing- Song 477 

impressively — ''piccaninny come up"; Second notch — here the 
brown, shrivelled finger moves slowly up the stick — ''one-eyed 
gin sick"; Third notch, "plenty game on the flats"; Fourth 
notch — and the old bent figure gesticulates with emphasis — 
** rain corroboree down the creek, big feller moon." 

That is the sum total of the letter ; in all, four notches. In 
reality, it is only the last item that counts. It means that the 
tribe will gather when the moon is at the full ; and that, at the 
point where the two runs meet, they will celebrate the coming 
of the rains. 

When the appointed night comes, all the scattered members 
of the tribe have arrived at the trysting place: black boys» 
gins, piccaninnies — all are there for the native sing-song. And 
because it is their gala night, the black boys revert to the cos- 
tume which was customary among their fathers before the com- 
ing of the white man. To-night they are men of the tribe 
once more ; hunters in the waste places ; trackers in the wild • 
warriors of the old native stock, whose territory of old was the 
entire island continent. To-night every blanket is shed; every 
cotton shirt discarded. Such things belong to the limitations of 
life in a station camp. Save for a loin cloth, each man is now 
nude. His chest and back are painted in bars of alternate scarlet 
and white. His hair is stiffened up with yellow clay, and round 
his neck is a string of smooth round stones gathered in the bed 
of the creek. 

In the foreground sit the warriors in a semi-circle, each 
armed with a shield and a spear, or other native implement. 
Behind them the camp-fires flare and blaze in the white light 
of the moon, the flames casting their ruddy reflection across the 
running water of the creek. Ranged alongside are a dozen black 
gins in a row. 

The voices of the black fellows float out intermittently across 
the night in muffled murmurs, as if the time and place were 
sacred. They are waiting for the given signal. Presently the 
sound of subdued voices is broken by a long low wail. Very 
softly it steals out at first, like a whisper that creeps through 
the lonely places in the scrub. Then, little by little, it grows 
louder and stronger, until it opens out into a wild cry of deso- 
lation. It fills the air with its note of intense, unutterable sor- 
row. Like a spirit that knows no hope it seems to moan aloud. 



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478 A NATIVE SING-SONG [Jan., 

beating its wings against the bosom of the night. Now the 
sound dies down in a temporary lull, and again it breaks forth 
in bitter wailing, suggestive of the cry that sounded of old over 
the doomed cities of the plain. Ebbing and flowing, rising and 
falling, the voices of the gins float out across the moonlight in 
sobbing waves of sound, until the echoes reach out into the 
far distance and are lost in the boree scrub. 

This is the customary prelude to every corroboree. Nay, 
more, the chorus of the gins forms the musical background to 
the entire sing-song; their dirge-like chant being the accom- 
paniment to the war- dances throughout the night. 

Backwards and forwards they bend, this row of wailing wo- 
men, while all the time, without ceasing, they beat together 
two pieces of wood. 

Presently a warrior rises to his feet and brandishes a boom- 
erang, preparatory to beginning his story. The voices of the 
gins are now silent. Each is straining her ears for the recital 
of the hunter. 

Perhaps it is a story of a pompoo murra — i. ^., a handful of 
eggs. This artificial nest is carefully filled with stones, the sight 
of which is supposed to arouse the envy of the wild ducks, who, 
not to be outdone, straightway begin to lay in similar nests, 
of their own making. So the hunter launches out into a con- 
centrated account of the pompoo murra that he made in the 
swamps where the wild duck were in plenty. Smooth and white 
were the stones that he had gathered. And the nest was like 
that which the birds themselves made — so cunningly was it con- 
trived among the reeds in the river bed. And the wild ducka 
came and built them a nest close beside the pompoo murra 
where the creek swirls along through the flats. . . . 

It is a long drawn-out tale, but the semi-circle of black 
figures remains immovable ; each pair of eyes is fixed on 
the speaker ; every mind is intent in the development of the 
story. 

At the end of the tale, the warrior steps out into the fore- 
ground and again waves aloft his boomerang, whereupon three 
or more men of the tribe step out from the ranks and together 
they begin a slow, solemn dance. Meanwhile the row of gins, 
like a Greek chorus, take up the weird chant once more. 

The dancers now retire, and for the next ten minutes there 



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i9o8.] A Native Sing-Song 479 

is a subdued jabber-jabber among the dark groups as they 
squat around in their original semi- circle. 

Then another figure stands up, his shield on one arm, while 
in his right hand he grasps his spear. This time it may be a 
tale of the taldra, i. e.^ kangaroo ; or else it concerns the cool- 
burri — otherwise the emu, of the flying feet — which he has 
hunted in the silent places of the back country. Or perhaps it 
is a story of the goonery (wood duck), for which he has lain in 
wait, while the shadows lengthened and the moon came up. 

Another speaker perchance will relate his prowess in spear- 
ing fish, quia murra, in the withered creek. Each time it is 
the recital of some hunting episode — some incident in the life 

of the open; and with rapt attention is each tale drunk in by 

the members of the tribe as they sit rigid and motionless in the 

white light of the moon. 

But now the corroboree nears its end. The dancers have 

grown weary; the story-tellers have relapsed into silence. It is 

time for the feast. 

And while the native groups gather round their camp-fires, 

intent on cooking their meat, the moon pales at the approach 

of the dawn. 



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FRANCIS THOMPSON. 

BY FATHER CUTHBERT. O.S.F.C. 

VER wistful, ever detached, Francis Thompson 
has passed out of the shadows into the truth. 
The world has lost a great poet — great in the 
searching quality of his vision and in the constant 
I sublimity of his most passionate conviction ; and 
we Catholics have lost most of all. For no English poet has 
voiced the Catholic spirit, whether in sorrow or delight, more 
nobly than he; and none with such intimate freedom and as- 
surance. 

The instinct of the Faith was in him and it breathes in all 
his utterance. And yet he was not a '* religious " poet, in the 
narrow sense in which the term is commonly used; he seldom 
sang the praises of the saints, though when he did it was with 
a neighborly understanding and ecstatic adoration of the faith 
which formed the saint. He seldom sang about Catholicism, 
but he took an even better way — he carried the spirit of Cath- 
olicism with him into the highways and byways of the world's 
life, and whatever he found true and noble in this life, the 
Catholic spirit within him appropriated to itself, purifying 
earthly things of mere earthliness and investing them with a 
Catholic immortality. In this he was akin to his sainted name- 
sake of Assisi. He himself might not be a saint, but the bur- 
den of his poetry is the enduring beauty of sanctity in mortal 
life. In all his poems he has uttered no word which has not 
made the Catholic spirit richer in its consciousness of itself; 
he has touched no human emotion but in the spirit of the 
faith of the saints; and yet, how enduringly, elementally hu- 
man his spirit is! He came very near in his poetry to the 
realization of his desire: 

Ah I let the sweet birds of the Lord 
With earth's waters make accord : 
Teach how the crucifix may be 
Carven from the laurel tree. 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON 48 1 

Fruit of the Hespe rides 
Burnish take on Eden-trees, 
The Muses' sacred grove be wet 
With the red dew of Olivet, 
And Sappho lay her burning brows 
In white Cecilia's lap of snows I 

To him the solution of all earth's mysteries was to be found 
in the mysteries of the faith, and in his own thought the law- 
lessness of undisciplined nature found a higher freedom and an 
ultimate peace in the redemptive law of Christ. And he was 
so rightly fitted to utter this harmony of nature and grace, 
because in him the emotion of nature and the wisdom of faith 
came so spontaneously and surely and blended so easily. He 
had not to reason out the essential harmonies of human emo- 
tion with the law of Christ; his very instinct was too entirely 
Catholic; and so he struck the chords of emotion freely and 
there came forth Catholic melody. 

Perhaps the moral quality which dominates most evidently 
his poetry is its sensitive purity ; a purity not of negation or ef- 
fort, but a positive quality of soul which purified whatever of earth 
it touched. Not since Dante has poet so transfigured the passion 
of human love with the purity of Catholic thought, and at the 
same time left it so convincingly human. Beatrice might accept 
the homage of '' Love in Dian's Lap" and yet remain the inviolate 
mistress of spiritualized passion. Was ever homage at once so 
passionate and chaste as that conveyed in the following lines: 

Lady who hold'st on me dominion I 
Within your spirit's arms I stay me fast 

Against the fell 
Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell ; 
And claim my right in you, most hardly won. 
Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste: 
Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall 
(O in high escalade high companion I ) 
Even in the breach of Heaven's assaulted wall. 
Like to a wind-sown sapling grow I from 
The clift. Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul, — 
Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome 
By all its clouds incumbent: O be true 
To your soul, dearest, as my life to you I 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 31 



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482 FRANCIS THOMPSON [Jan., 

For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole 
Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot 
Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through. 
Dry down and perish to the foodless root. 

■ . . . . . 

O therefore you who are 
What words, being to such mysteries 
As raiment to the body is. 

Should rather hide than tell; 
Chaste and intelligential love: 

Whose form is as a grove 
Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove; 
Whose spirit to my touch thrills purer far 
Than is the tingling of a silver bell; 
Whose body other ladies well might bear 
As soul, — yea, which it profanation were 
For all but you to take as fleshly woof. 

Being spirit truest proof; 
Whose spirit sure is lineal to that 
Which sang Magnificat: 

Chastest, since such you are. 

Take this curbed spirit of mine. 
Which your own eyes invest with light divine. 
For lofty love and high auxiliar 

In daily exalt emprise 

Which outsoars mortal eyes; 
This soul which on your soul is laid. 
As maid's breast against the breast oi maid; 
Beholding how your own I have engraved 
On it, and with what purging thoughts have laved 
This love of mine from all mortality. 
Indeed the copy is a painful one, 

And with long labour done I 
O if you doubt the thing you are, lady, 

Come then, and look in me; 
Your beauty, Dian, dress and contemplate 
Within a pool to Dian consecrate 1 
Unveil this spirit, lady, when you will, 
For unto all but you 'tis veiled still: 
Unveil, and fearless gaze there, you alone. 
And if you love the image — 'tis your own! 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON 483 

I have quoted this passage at some length because it so 
well illustrates the high spiritual quality of his most passionate 
utterance. How far removed is passion such as is here ex- 
pressed from the passion of the Elizabethan poets 1 One might, 
perhaps, profitably contrast the one with the other; and note 
on the one hand the mere earthliness of passion, which at its 
best would draw heaven down to earth, and on the other, the 
spiritual sensitiveness which lifts the earth heavenwards and 
catches in the present emotion something of an eternal aspira- 
tion. The comparison would be illustrative of the spirit of 
Catholicism as opposed to the spirit of secularism. In the one 
case the spirit in man is made to subserve earthly passion ; in the 
other earthly passion is made to subserve the life of the spirit 
of faith. Purity in the best of the Elizabethan poetry means 
hardly more than fidelity to the one in the delight of the flesh; 
with the Catholic poet the delight is poised in the higher re- 
gion of the soul, not violently, but as taken up there by pas- 
sion itself. With him there is no effort in piercing the out- 
ward form to arrive at the inward spirit; to the spirituality of 
his own thought the outward form is hardly a barrier; he is 
in truth but at intervals conscious of the material lodgment in 
which the spirit dwells : 

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole. 
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul; 
As birds see not the casement for the sky? 
And as 'tis check they prove its presence by, 
I know not of her body till I find 
My flight debarred the heaven of her mind. 

Was it not thus that St. Francis of Assisi regarded all 
creation? and that Dante gazed on Beatrice? But with what 
impatience an Elizabethan poet would have thrown the senti- 
ment aside I 

It is good in these days, when the emotion of human love 
is taken so cheaply and debased so easily, that a Catholic poet 
should have once again invested it with a sacramental glory 
and given it a regal grace ; and it would be well for the world 
could its sons and daughters be brought to gaze upon it as it 
reigns transfigured in the verse of Francis Thompson. 

But the purity and spirituality of his emotion was bought 



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484 FRANCIS THOMPSON [Jan., 

at a price. It imposed upon him a certain reverential aloof- 
ness even in intimacy. However beloved, there is an inner 
sanctuary in the life of the creature which cannot admit any 
earthly lover, but only the Divine Creator. Undisciplined pas- 
sion is impatient of the mystery of life; it would tear away the 
veils that it might gain an entire property in the object de- 
sired. Not so the chaste passion of the poet; he bows in awe 
before the mystery of each individual soul, and recognizes in 
the mystery the higher claim of God. That inner sanctuary he 
will not dare to touch lest the judgment of Ozias befall him : 

The sweetest wife on sweetest marriage- day, — 
Their souls at grapple in mid*way, 
Sweet to her sweet may say: 

" I take you to my inmost heart, my true ! " 
Ah, fool 1 but there is one heart you 
Shall never take him to I 

The hold that falls not when the town is got, 
The heart's heart, whose immured plot 
Hath keys yourself keep not 
• • • • • • 

Its keys are at the cincture hung of God ; 
Its gates are trepidant to His nod; 
By Him its floors are trod. 

The intimate sense of each creature's individuality, as ex- 
pressed in these lines, and of the direct relation between this 
individuality and the exclusive property of God in his creature, 
is of the essence of purity as the Catholic conceives it. 

We do not wonder that emotion tempered in this wise should 

have led him to the very portals of a love higher than the 

creaturely, or that his sensitive soul should not at times feel 

the inadequacy of any creature to satisfy a heart attuned to so 

high an aspiration, pulsating with so refined a passion. When 

all the house seems filled with the desired presence, there is 

yet 

The hold that falls not when the town is got, 

into which no creature can enter but God only ; and where only 
the presence of God can bring peace and joy. And when the 
outer chambers of the heart have their tenant, but the inner 
remains untenanted, then to the clean of heart comes that poign- 



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i9o8.] FRANCIS Thompson 485 

ant loneliness, that tumultuous sense of want amidst plenty, 
which of all aches is the keenest. And so we pass, not unex- 
pectedly, from the elevated passion in ''Love in Dian's Lap" 
into the mystical torrent of ** The Hound of Heaven " — of which 
poem it has been well said that it alone *' should suffice to give 
the author his rightful place among' the immortals." ''The 
Hound of Heaven" is the outpouring of a passionate emotion 
which has reached out to the very Infinite and, aghast at its own 
venture, turns back and flees, thinking to find its heaven in less 
intense height For it is afraid lest finding God it must lose its 
neighborly fellow creature and become in some way alien to itself: 
and not for all infinite delight can it endure this alienation. 

For, though I knew His love Who followed. 

Yet was I sore adread 
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside. 



9* 



Fearful, the soul flees, yet ever the Divine Love follows, claim 
ing the soul for itself. It seeks shelter " in face of man or maid, 
but these only show him his " own betrayal in their constancy " ; 
he turns to little children, but their angels pluck them from him ; 
then does he approach nature, and for a while in her " delicate 
fellowship " he thinks he has found peace, yet. 

With unperturbed pace. 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 

the Divine Love hunts him down, and at last he lay smitten 
utterly. Let it be noted how the soul has fled for refuge from 
its Divine pursuivant, only to those who are constant to him, 
not to his betrayers. For the soul is in real need of him ; only 
it does not know him in his transcendence; it would have him 
come down amongst his creatures and enjoy him there; it has 
yet to learn that it may find the creature in him. And this it 
learns in the moment of its surrender. It is a great poem ; yet 
to be understood aright, it must be read in relation to its com- 
panion poems. 

Disease had laid its hand early in life upon Francis Thomp- 
son, perhaps it helped to keep him to the end in that simple, 
detached spirit which was a fitting raiment for a mind so pure ; 
perhaps, too, it was the cause of certain external habits which 
seemed so incongruous with a soul so refined. He himself was 



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4*6 FRANCIS THOMPSON [Jan., 

content that the world should take him simply as the singer or 
dreamer of dreams, and he was jealous that no song or dream 
of his should be false to the ideal which he worshipped. But 
with himself he was not content. 

There were times when he felt the stirring of something 
more than a singer; when the aspiration of the saint flitted 
across his soul, creating there a deep discontent with himself- 
Very humble did such moments leave him, gently, enduringly 
humble. In the back courts of the Temple would he stand, with 
his eyes piercingly gazing into the sanctity beyond, not envious 
of the saints who had reached there, but thankful that they 
were there; and thankful, too« that his dreaming was true to the 
sanctity he adored. Because of this fidelity he claimed in his 
inmost desire — humbly indeed yet insistently — some fellowship 
with them. It was his hope in life; let us believe it was his 
peace in death. This hope gave to his unworldliness of soul 
something more than the unknowing unworldliness of the child, 
even a glow of otherworldliness. Fondly does this hope appear 
in the poem entitled '' A Judgment in Heaven." It begins, 
expressing the spiritual attitude of a life-time: 

Athwart the sod which is treading for God the poet paced 
with his splendid eyes. 

And what he sees is his own judgment The singer in him is 
there, " where God's light lay large " ; but 

. . . clasping the singer's glories clings 
A dingy creature, even to laughter cloaked and clad in 
patchwork things: 

The singer's earthly form. 

Better thou wov'st thy woof of life than thou didst weave 
thy woof of song ! 

is the judgment of the sacred crowd. But there are two there 
who understand the poet better. 

"Turn yon robe," spake Magdalen, "of torn bright song, 

and see and feel." 
They turned the raiment, saw and felt what their turning 

did reveal — 
All the inner surface piled with bloodied hairs, like hairs 

of steel. 



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i9o8,] Francis Thompson 487 

And the poet is saved by suffering which his song has 
brought him — suffering patiently borne as the price of song. 
Those who knew Francis Thompson will feel the pathos of these 
verses, burdened with so personal a note ; but they will be glad 
that in his judgment of himself the rhymer as well as the singer 
would not be found unworthy: 

Take, Princess Mary, of thy good grace, two spirits greater 
than they know. 

Yet to appreciate the dead poet aright, one must turn from 
these poems of deeper burden to his poems on children. In 
some respects these latter poems exhibit him in the character 
in which he more easily revealed himself to his friends; the 
deeper burden being kept with a delicate reticence more exclu- 
sively for his song. The simple gaiety breaking easily through 
the subdued pain of his life, like a child's laughter through its 
tears, the somewhat wayward fun which would come as a sigh 
of relief into his most serious moods, and the moan which would 
come in spite of himself at the end of an hour's quiet merri- 
ment — all this is reflected in his poems when he wandered into 
''the nurseries of heaven." In truth he was at home there 
where the spirit of childhood lives ; happy, perhaps, for him if 
he could always have abided there; and yet no, for he would 
then have missed the bliss and the wisdom which grow only 
in the midst of pain. 

But it was as with a sense of native freedom that he came 
into the city of the child, and felt the cool breath of childhood 
upon his brow. His spirit would then relax into smiles and 
quaint frolic, as witness ''The Making of Viola," and "The 
Daisy," and the lilt in the verse and thought of " Ex Ore In- 
fantium." Yet ever at the end there comes the moan of one 
who has drunk too deeply of the sorrow of life ever- to forget 
the pain which is latent in the cradle of the child. For a while 
he will play at the sweet make-believes of childhood, only to 
remember that life is not a make believe. 

A child and a man paced side by side, 
Treading the skirts of eventide; 
But between the clasp of his hand and hers 
Lay, felt not, twenty withered years. 



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488 FRANCIS Thompson [Jan. 

And the man is happy as the child as long as the withered 
years are not felt ; but felt they will shortly be, brought to re- 
membrance **\n swift child's whim/' 

Peace be to his soul who, in his earthly life, knew so little 
of the soul's peace, but whose message has brought calm strength 
and ennobling thought to many a fellow- mortal. But so it is 
most commonly with the poet and the seer: the peace they 
bring on earth is bom of their own travail. 

I have written of the spiritual quality of Francis Thompson's 
poetry. Of its literary quality it has been said that it was too 
exuberant to be artistically perfect. This is true of some of his 
work, but not of all; it is least true of his earlier work, where 
the seemingly riotous flow of his imagery is but the counter- 
part of glorious spontaneity. In his later work he was less 
spontaneous, less vital; here it is as though he were recalling 
experience rather than being compelled by a present experience ; 
and the exuberance is, therefore, less artistically correct. The 
similarity of quality and style between Francis Thompson and 
that other Catholic poet, Crashaw, has often been pointed out ; 
but it is a similarity with a difiFerence. In both the poet's style 
is as a rich red wine, or as the flow of hot embers; words blaze 
with color, and the emotion is charged, almost over-charged, 
with fancy. But in Francis Thompson there is a wider range 
of emotion; a more piercing vision of life. Crashaw wanders 
across the surface of mystery, whereas Francis Thompson dives 
down into the deep waters. It is in some respects the differ- 
ence between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth. Cra- 
shaw could never have written ''The Daisy," could never have 
enshrined in verse the invigorating breezes of the South Downs ; 
he would have been hopelessly lost in the tumultuous crash of 
human experience of "The Hound of Heaven." 

Francis Thompson is dead, yet in his death he will assur- 
edly live in the mind and heart of coming generations. For to 
the sublimely true, death ever brings a resurrection even amidst 
mortality; his message will search out the true and sublime in 
many who live after him, and remain for them a witness to the 
Catholic faith from which he drew his inspiration. So he will 
remain with us, he whose splendid eyes paced ever faithfully 

Athwart the sod which is treading for God. 



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LISHEEN; OR, THE TEST OF THE SPIRITS/ 

BY CANON P. A. SHEEHAN. D.D.. 
Autk9r o/"My New CunUt** ; " Luki Dtlme^e** : " GUtumaar" iU, 

Chapter XV. 

•• QUASI PER IGNEM." 

[UGH HAMBERTON was not killed by his fall 
from the cliff. But when the fishermen, who had 
pulled in furiously to save the children, had 
leaped from their boat and placed the girls in 
safety, they found much trouble in raising him 
from the waters that now were seething around him. He was 
quite unconscious ; and all that they could do was to raise him 
up and take him beyond the reach of the waves, until his car- 
riage would arrive from Brandon Hall. But they lifted him 
tenderly and reverentially, as a hero who had probably given 
his life to save little children from a terrible death. 

And when the news of the event had reached the village, 
all hands struck work, and hastened to assist in every way 
the brave man who was now and forevermore enshrined in 
their hearts. Around the cottage firesides for many a night 
the tale was told, and every circumstance gone over again and 
again, as the custom is amongst this story-loving people — the call 
of the child to come down and play, the cheery response of 
the grave Englishman, whom no adult dare approach or ad- 
dress without deference, the cry of the fishermen, the screams 
of the girls, the gallant manner in which Hamberton had at- 
tempted to rescue them, his fall, etc., all were narrated with 
some poetical exaggeration that only enhanced his reputation, 
and sent it far and wide. 

Claire Maxwell was terribly shocked and grieved ; but kept 
her feelings to herself under an appearance of calm compos- 
ure. She would have written or wired to her husband; but 
waited to obtain the doctor's verdict. That was soon ascer- 
tained. No danger to life, but probably hopeless paralysis from 

* Copyright. Z906. Longmans, Green & Co. 



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490 LISHEEN [Jan-, 

spinal injury. It was terrible, but it might be worse; and then 
— it was noble, as of wounds taken in battle in some glorious, 
if impossible, enterprise. 

After some days Maxwell returned, and Hamberton recov* 
ered consciousness. For some time his recollection of things 
was hazy ; then the whole succession of ideas and events ranged 
themselves solemnly before him, and gave him much food for 
thought during the weary hours that dragged themselves along 
through the sick man's chamber. 

Father Cosgrove was one of the first to call and offer his 
sympathies. He was elated at the idea that his friend, who 
was always denying and protesting against Father Cosgrove's 
estimate of him, had betrayed his own better self in this glo- 
rious manner. Father Cosgrove had preached to his congrega-. 
tion a sermon on the event, taking for his text: ''Greater proof 
of love no man can give, than that a man should lay down 
his life for his friend." 

And he drew tears from the eyes of his people by his pic- 
ture of the glorious unselfishness of this man, rich, powerful, 
and with all the accessories of happiness at his disposal, sacri- 
ficing all freely to save the lives of little children. And a 
mighty torrent of love and admiration surged around the lonely 
couch in Brandon Hall, where the invalid was now and for 
many a long day to be imprisoned. 

The interview between Father Cosgrove and his friend was 
very touching. They silently grasped each other's hands, and 
said but little; the little on Hamberton 's part being a depre- 
cation of all this popular applause and tumult about nothing. 

"Look here," he feebly stammered, holding up the many 
newspaper notices that had been written about him, " see what 
fools men can make of themselves. Now, there is how repu- 
tations are made. It is the entirely hopeless imbecility of men — 
the eternal tomfoolery of the world." 

But Father Cosgrove would only shake his head. 

'' I'm sure now," Hamberton would continue, '' if all the 
great names and great deeds of the world were examined, it 
would be as easy to prick the air bubbles as this. No one 
knows a man but himself; and, unless he is a fool, no one has 
such a poor opinion of a man as himself." 

"That is quite right," Father Cosgrove would say. "That 
is what all our saints are never tired of repeating. 



»f 



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1 908. ] LISHEEN 49 1 

" Pah I I don't want your saints, with their fastings and 
haircloth and nonsense 1 It is common sense I The confessional 
of every honest man is his own bedroom and his looking-glass. 
There he admits everything to himself; and a sorry estimate 
he makes of his little godhead." 

"You are incorrigible!" his friend would say. "But you 
are a hero 1 Nothing now can change that." 

"Even you do not know me/' Hamberton would reply in 
a kind of despair. " Look, some day Til command you to tell 
the truth to the world. I can't stand this horrible mask of hy- 
pocrisy." 

But one day, after he had railed at everything and every- 
body in this way, just as Father Cosgrove was leaving the 
room, he called him back and said : 

" Don't be too proud at what I'm going to say." 

Then, after a pause, he added : "After all, there is a 
God!" 

When the first shock was over, and all that medical skill 
could effect was done for Hamberton, Maxwell thought the time 
had come when he might visit his old friends at Lisheen. He 
was safe now. The report of his munificence and generosity 
towards these poor people had been wafted far and wide ; and, 
by degrees, the imagination of the people, so slow to disen- 
tangle itself from its preconceived ideas, began to revolve 
around, and finally settle down on the fact that, verily and in- 
deed and without doubt, Robert Maxwell, Esq., was the man 
who had served as swineherd and laborer among them; and 
this for the noble and humane purpose of ascertaining their 
condition, with a view to its betterment. It was like a fresh 
dawn of hope in the growing dusk of a nation's despair; for 
as yet the many acts of the legislature that have revolution- 
ized the condition of the tenant farmers of Ireland had not 
been placed on the statute book. 

If Maxwell were one of those dwarfed souls that loved pop- 
ular applause and the sound of futile drums and still more fu- 
tile cheering, he could have had an ovation that would have 
made any of the leading politicians green with envy. But he 
shrank from such things as indelicate and somewhat absurd; 
and he felt even a kind of shyness at the thought that he 
would have to face these poor people and receive their honest 
thanks. 



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492 LISHEEN [Jan., 

They had seen that everything that could conduce to the 
comfort, and ease the loneliness of the poor invalid, had been 
done; and in a quiet hour of a still, autumn afternoon, Claire 
and Maxwell drove over after luncheon to Lisheen. 

They chose the road which Maxwell had traveled the night 
that he quitted, in shame and remorse, the humble roof that had 
given him shelter; and as they went. Maxwell pointed out to 
his wife the places where he had stopped, the thoughts that 
passed through his mind, the very spot where he was going to 
throw all up in despair, and creep in amidst the bracken and 
lie down and die, the lake that glinted in the starlight, the 
river that murmured on his right hand, and directed his course, 
the laborer's cottage where he had obtained a little food. It 
is a pleasant thing in prosperity to retrace the footsteps of ad- 
versity, and recall, with all the delight of the contrast, the 
mournful thoughts that seemed to mark these footsteps in 
blood. 

It was five o'clock when they turned in from the main road, 
and drove slowly up along the boreen that led to the dwelling 
house. Maxwell still pointing out each spot with its own asso- 
ciation. 

'' I can tell you I was footsore and weary and hungry enough 
the evening I came along here/' he said ; '' and I had received 
so many rebuffs that I thought the dog would be let loose on 
me here. Look, there I lay down to gather myself together, 
and pluck up a little courage." 

They reached the yard; and a great brown collie came out 
to challenge them and demand their business. 

Maxwell whistled, and the angry dog came whining and 
whimpering and fawning upon him. 

'' You remain here a moment, Claire," he said, dismounting. 
'' I should like to enter alone." 

Claire remained in the trap, holding the reins loosely; and 
Maxwell entered with the old salutation : ^* God save all here 1 " 

Exactly the same as twelve months ago, there was no one 
there but the old vanithee; and she was crouching half-asleep 
over the wood and turf fire, that was now dying down into 
white ashes, although the pungent fragrance of it filled the en- 
tire kitchen. 

<< God save you kindly 1 " she said, rising up, with that air 
and tone of respectful welcome that belong to these Irish homes. 



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I908.] LISHEEN 493 

"Where's Owen and Pierry and Debbie?" he asked coming 
near. 

"Wisha, then, yer 'anner, I suppose they're up among the 
praties still. The days are drawin' in, an' they must hurry." 

" You don't know me ? " he said, anxious to break the spell 
of mystery that hung around him. 

"Wisha, thin, yer 'anner," she replied, peering closely at 
him through the dusk of the kitchen, ^* you have the advantage 
of me. But, sure, you're welcome, whoever you are I " 

"You said the same word twelve months ago to a poor 
tramp that came to your door?" he said. 

" I did thin ; an' sure 'twas God brought him our way ; and 
sure 'twas well he repaid us I " 

" 'Tis a quare thing," he replied, dropping into the country 
patois, "that a man could be six months under your roof ; and 
that you don't recognize him I " 

" Oh, Holy Mother o' God I An' is't yer 'anner that's shpak- 
in' to me ? Oh, wisha, thin, a thousand welcomes I And 'tis 
well you desarve it, for shure all we have is yours." 

And rubbing her hand in her check apron, she timidly held 
it out to him. 

He grasped it in his own; and something like a sob came 
into his voice as he said : 

"You were more than a mother to me! And how could I 
forget it for you ? But run out and call in Owen and Debbie 
and Pierry. My wife is here in the yard." 

She went out, set the great dog a- barking, and shouted with 
her feeble voice to the workers. One by one they dropped in, 
Debbie first. 

The girl drew back the moment she saw Claire in the trap ; 
and would have run away, but it was too late. When she entered 
the cottage she flushed crimson, and then turned deadly pale 
when Maxwell held out his hand. She barely touched it with 
her fingers, holding her head aside; but he grasped her hand 
firmly, and said: 

"Now, Debbie, we must be friends again. I am not going 
to forget so easily all that you did for me when I needed it 
most." 

The strong, fierce pride of the girl kept her silent. She 
found it impossible to conquer her rage at the thought that 
they should be under such supreme obligations to him. She 



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494 LISHEEN [Jan., 

disengaged her hand and went and hid herself in her bedroom. 

When Owen and Pierry came in, the former greeted Max- 
well with that air of humble deference that showed how wide 
he deemed the gulf that separated them. And the remem- 
brance of his rude words the evening of the eviction was a 
perpetual source of remorse. 

'' I suppose/' he said, in the tone of exaggeration that seemed 
to him most fit to express his feelings, 'Mf we lived forever and 
ever, we could never thank yer 'anner enough for what you done 
for us I" 

'* Don't speak of it now," said Maxwell. '' But, look here, 
Mrs. McAuliffe, will you put down the kettle, and let us have 
a cup of tea after our long drive ? And Pierry, run out and 
put up the pony, and let Mrs. Maxwell come in." 

This broke the ice completely. The appeal to the old 
woman's hospitality touched her deeply, and she said, bustling 
about : 

''Yerra, thin, yer 'anner, with a heart an' a half. I'll get 
you the tay; an' if the missus 'ud come in — " 

''She's coming," Maxwell said. "And, look here, get some 
slices of your own home-made bread — no one can make bread 
like you, I often told my wife so — and some of your salt butter. 
We are as hungry as wolves; and we have a long drive be- 
fore us." 

And Pierry went out, and handed down, like a gentleman, 
the lady from her trap ; and, when the tea was ready, the two. 
Maxwell and his wife, sat down and talked and talked and 
talked ; and asked questions all about the farm and the crops 
and the cattle, and wanted to know what else could be done ? 

'' Done ? O Lord, what else would we want, if we didn't want 
the wurrld?" said Owen. ''Sure, sometimes we say 'tis all a 
dhrame; an' somebody has put the comether on us. An thin, we 
haves to go out an' see everythin' agin all over — the new house, 
the barns, the shtock, the crops, the walls an' hedges an' ditches ; 
an' thin we comes back to go on our knees and thank the Lord, 
and ax him to pour down blessings on yer 'anner and on yer 
'anner's wife all the days of yere lives." 

And so, with all mute and spoken deference and gratitude, 
these poor people poured out their souls to their benefactor; 
and Maxwell felt that he had been more than amply recom- 
pensed for his outlay, just as he felt as he had grown in all 



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I908.] Lis HE EN 495 

mental and moral stature by reason of the sharp experience he 
had passed through there in that humble home. 

^' I suppose I could hardly keep it up/' he thought, '' nor 
ivould I care to repeat it. But it was a gift of the gods. I 
feel that I am moving on higher levels now." 

The one drawback was Debbie's stubborn refusal to make 
friends. And yet Maxwell was not sorry. He pitied the girl; 
but he knew well that far down beneath her rustic rudeness 
and apparent dislike was the misplaced love for himself. 

*' Only one thing is wanting now to your happiness/' said 
Maxwell, as they rose to go, '' you must get Pierry here mar- 
ried as soon as possible. No house is rightly blessed, unless 
the faces of little children are there. Isn't that true, Owen?'* 
'"Tis thrue, yer 'anner; and I begs and prays the Almighty 
to bless our old age with the sight of young faces. But" — he 
dropped his voice to a whisper, and pointed with his thumb to 
the room where Debbie was hiding — ** she's thinkin' of goin' 
over to her sister's in America in the spring; and thin — " 

''I don't like the American business at all," said Maxwell 
angrily. "Why can't Debbie come over to us, and we'll settle 
her there for life ? " 

The old people shook their heads. They knew better. 
Pierry had got out the trap, and was stroking down the 
pony and handling the fresh brown harness with all an Irish 
boy's love for such things. And they were instantly under 
way. 

The old man came out to say good-bye ; but drew Maxwell 
aside. Then, gulping down his emotion and nervousness, he 
said: 

" I said a hasty word to yer 'anner the day of the eviction. 
God knows it is breakin' me heart, night an' day, since; and 
sometimes I can't shut me eyes on account of it. Av yer 'an- 
ner could manage to forget — " 

" Now, look here, Owen," said Maxwell, grasping the rough, 
horny hand, " if I hear any more of that nonsense, I'll recall all 
that I have done for you. Don't I know what a hasty word is 
as well as any man ? and to tell the truth I gave reason enough 
for it 1 Here, come and say good-bye to my wife. Pierry, my 
boy, I have some one in my eye for you. It must not go be- 
yond Shrove at any cost 1 " 

" All right, yer 'anner. God bless you I " said Pierry. Then, 



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496 LISHEEN [Jan., 

in his unbounded admiration of the trap and harness and pony 
he subjoined: ''Isn't she a beauty?'' 

They drove merrily homewards, chatting gaily about the 
people, their ways, their gratitude, their trials. Their hearts 
were light, because they had the consciousness of having done 
noble work. Every sacrifice for humanity reaps its reward even 
in this world. 

** What utter and unforgivable idiots we Irish landlords have 
been I " said Maxwell. '' Here, at our feet, were the most loyal, 
generous, faithful people on earth, who would follow us to death 
with joy. And we have trampled them into sullen and disloyal 
slaves, with hate and vengeance storming their hearts against us. 
Talk of ' lost opportunities,' we have flung to the winds our 
dearest interests— our country, our race, our happiness I " 

'' Is it too late ? " asked Claire. 

''Yes"; her husband said, "in a sense that things never 
now can be what they might have been. But there may be a 
chance of redress as yet. The people are forgiving and gener- 
ous. But, can the leopard change his spots ? " 

They had mounted the hill, beneath which the lake shone 
in the starlight and the river ran down to the sea, when Claire 
suddenly started, and pointing to the horizon, said: 

"That cannot be the rising moon, down there in the south- 
west. I have been watching it for a few minutes, and it seems 
not to change." 

"'Tis a big blaze," said Maxwell alarmed, pushing on the 
pony. 

" It seems in the direction of Cahercon," she said. 

" No, it is more southward," he said, though he did not be« 
lieve it. " I expect some farmer's rick is on fire. Those thresh- 
ing machines sometimes throw out sparks, and are dangerous." 

But he whipped the pony onward; and with eyes fixed on 
the far-off blaze, which showed so terribly against the darkness 
of the night, they both fell into silence. When they dipped in- 
to the valley, the hills shut out the view of the fire. But in a 
quarter of an hour, they reached the level plain again; and 
soon perceived, to their horror, that it was not a rick of hay or 
straw but houses, perhaps the whole village of Cahercon, that 
was being wiped out by the terrible element. 



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I908.] LISHEEN 497 

Chapter XVI. 

"ONE OF US." 

When Maxwell and his wife turned the corner of the road 
leading to the village, the full horror burst upon them. Bran- 
don Hall was in flames. The roof had fallen in ; and the fierce 
flames were leaping up amidst the vast clouds of lurid smoke, 
which they turned into blood- red shadows that came and went, 
as the wind shifted the dense, black volumes that poured fierce* 
\y as from the mouth of a furnace. With aching hearts and 
darkest forebodings of evil, they tore madly through the village 
street; and when Maxwell pulled up, and threw back his pony 
on its haunches, the animal was covered with the white foam 
of its sweat. He flung the reins carelessly aside, jumped down, 
and tore his way through the helpless and wondering peasantry. 
He was afraid to ask the question that was on his lips, as he 
came in front of the mansion, and saw that it was gutted from 
roof to cellar, and that only the walls were standing. But he 
was swiftly answered: 

'^ He's all right, sir I The masther is all right I He's up at 
Donegan's cottage 1 Ned Galway saved him I" 

Thus reassured he ran back to his wife, but she had already 
heard the news; and when Maxwell entered his laborer's cot- 
tage, he found her there. 

Hamberton was badly shaken and unnerved; but otherwise 
had suffered but little. It appears that after Maxwell and Claire 
had left for Lisheen, he had sunk into a doze in his armchair, 
from which he was rudely awakened by the cry of: "Firel" 
Unable to help himself or to rise, he was thinking of the dread 
possibilities before him, when one of his servants entered his 
room, and said, in his calm, English way: 

''The'ouse is afire, sir 1 I think we 'ad better be a moving 
hout I " 

** Certainly. Get some help," said Hamberton. 

The man vanished and did not return. 

Hamberton, now thoroughly dismayed, made an effort to 
save himself; but fell back helplessly. He was now face to face 
with the Fate he had so often wooed. 

As yet no trace of the fire was visible in his room ; but he 
heard that deep, distant rumbling of the terrible element, and 

VOL. LXXXVI,— 32 



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498 LISHEEN [Jan., 

the cries of the frightened servants, and the crash of furniture 
and heavy timbers, and the gathering of the crowd outside, and 
their awe- stricken exclamations. And then, a tiny brown cloud 
gathered in beneath his door, and soon the room was filled with 
the choking vapor; but he lay helpless, as if bound with chains^ 
awaiting the final stroke, that would come, he thought, at any 
moment. 

Presently, a frightened maid burst in, and cried: 

" Fly, sir, fly for your life I The whole house is in flames. 
Nothing can save it 1 " 

Hamberton smiled sardonically. He could only sit still and 
listen to the ravages made by the conflagration; and wonder 
would the floor where he sat fall in, and cast him into a furnace 
of fire; or would the smoke, ever growing thicker and thicker, 
suffocate him. He hoped so. He had read that this was al- 
ways the case in death by fire. The victim was always uncon- 
scious before the flames actually reached him. And then, it 
was only cremation of his corpse ; and surely this was only his 
own last instructions to his executors. 

'' Not thus though," he thought, whilst the thickening fumes 
choked him, and made him cough. '' Clearly, there is a God 
guiding things; but not always in our way. And he is a mock- 
ing God, who plays with us like puppets. I wonder what would 
he do if I spoke to him ? " 

He bent his head, and spoke strange things, that are not to 
be found in any ordinary prayer book. And then he laughed, 
whilst his cough grew painful; and there was a growing con- 
striction in his chest, that seemed to make breathing impossible, 
and to set his heart wildly throbbing. And ever and ever came 
that terrible rumbling, as of a great earth- upheaval, and crash 
after crash, as the heavy timbers of the house seemed to rip 
asunder, and to fall into the sea of fire. Then, he became con- 
scious of the carpet smoking beneath his chair, and, presently, 
little jets became visible between the boards. 

'' It- is the end 1 " he said, closing his eyes ; when the door 
was burst violently open, and a great, gaunt figure, its head 
wrapped in a sheet, broke into the room. 

" Where are ye ? Where are ye, yer 'anner ? " it cried. 
" Quick, quick, for the love of God I " 

*^ Here 1 " said Hamberton faintly, whilst he felt his eyes 
painfully throbbing, and he could hardly breathe. 



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I908.] LISHEEN 499 

In an instant a strong band had wheeled his bath- chair to- 
wards the great window that faced the west. There was a crash 
of glass, where Ned Galway, leaping on the sill, drove his foot 
again and again through the framework of the window; and, 
whilst the smoke broke through the aperture, Hamberton felt 
a delicious breath of cool night air on his forehead ; and he 
braced himself to make one last fight for life with his brave 
rescuer. 

But the terrible problem now confronted them — how could 
Hamberton, heavy and helpless, be removed ? Galway had 
shouted down through the smoke to bring the ladders around ; 
and this was speedily done. But the window was fifteen or 
twenty feet from the ground, Hamberton was a helpless log, the 
fire had gained from beneath, and the floor and carpets were 
smouldering in some places, blazing in others. It was only a 
matter of a few minutes for that floor to fall in and bury them 
both in the furnace beneath. Hamberton saw it all; and, re- 
vived to consciousness and a sense of sight by the night-wind 
that sometimes conquered the fierce volumes of smoke, and 
made a pleasant draught in the burning room, he shouted : 

'' Jump down, Galway I Jump down, and save yourself I You 
have a wife and family, remember 1" 

Galway pulled, by main strength, the helpless form on to 
the broad window-sill, and there for a moment they both rested. 
They could see, sometimes, as the smoke lifted or cleared, the 
faces of the crowd, reddened by the light that shone from the 
burning room beneath them. There was a great cheer when, 
the ladder having been placed against the window-sill, the faces 
and forms of the two helpless men were seen ; and, as is usual 
in an Irish crowd, there were sundry suggestions, uttered in all 
keys of excitement, none of which was really practicable. 

Again Hamberton ordered Galway to leave him to his fate 
and save himself. 

'' There's no use, Galway," he .cried, with a choked voice, 
'' we cannot both go down. Quick, while there's time, and save 
yourself." 

" You wance did me a wrong, yer 'anner," said Ned. " I 
want to show you now how I can repay it." 

A terrible suspicion crossed Hamberton's mind. All the old 
prejudices against these truculent Irish seemed to flash up in an 
instant. ** He is going to take a terrible revenge," he thought. 



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500 LISHEEN [Jan., 

But the next instant he dismissed the base suspicion. And 
Galway, coolly taking off the wet towel that had already shielded 
his eyes and face from the flames, threw it around Hamberton's 
head. Then, slowly creeping out, he planted one foot on the 
first rung of each ladder, shouting to the people beneath: 

^* Hould hard for yere lives, there below, and throw all yere 
weight against the ladders." There were plenty volunteers to 
do the work. 

Then he drew the helpless form of Hamberton, head fore- 
most, through the window; and never lost nerve, although they 
shouted from beneath: 

'' Hurry, Ned, the fire is breaking through the window, and 
will ketch the ladders." 

It was a moment of supreme anxiety, when the whole dead 
weight of Hamberton's body, freed from the support of the win- 
dow, fell on the devoted fellow. But, accustomed to great 
emergencies and trials of muscular strength, in his daily avoca- 
tion as laborer and fisherman, he was equal to the call. And, 
bracing himself carefully against the two ladders, he bore the 
first shock with safety. Then, carefully feeling downwards with 
his feet, he held the helpless burden safe with his strong shoul- 
ders and arms. The flames, breaking from the room beneath 
through the shattered window, caught both sometimes, and 
burned their hands and clothing. But at length they reached 
the ground, and, within the help of friendly hands, fell into the 
arms of an exultant and triumphant crowd. 

When Maxwell, therefore, entered Donegan's cottage, and 
after a few inquiries had been made, Hamberton ordered him 
to go at once and see after the condition of his brave deliverer. 
This was worse than was supposed. Ned had been badly burned 
before he had reached Hamberton's room. The left sleeve of 
his coat had been completely destroyed in his fight with the 
flames, as he tore blindly, and with covered head, through the 
hall and up along the stairs; and the flesh from shoulder to 
arm was badly scorched Yet he made nothing of it. 

Maxwell was dumb before such heroism. He could say 
nothing but: ''Keep it well covered; and, above all, let no 
water touch it until my wife comes up ! " 

" Is the masther all right ? " asked Ned, heedless of himself. 

''He is, my poor fellow, except for some slight bruises. 
This night won't be forgotten, you may be sure ! " 



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I9o8.] LISHEEN 501 

" He done good to the people/' said Ned. " He desarved 
a good return." 

"And he has got it," said Maxwell. "You'll have no rea- 
son to regret what you have done." 

" I want nothing/' said Ned. " But, maybe, yer 'anner — " 

He stopped suddenly. 

"Well?" said Maxwell. 

'* Maybe yer 'anner would ax the masther not to say anay 
more about the *ghosht' or the ^praties'?" 

For this was the eternal jest of Hamberton, who, in the boat, 
on the road, everywhere, never ceased nagging poor Ned about 
the famous adventure ; quite unconscious, we may presume, how 
his words galled and burned into the heart of his victim. 

" All right, Ned 1 " said Maxwell. " I promise you you'll 
never hear of them again I " 

" God bless yer 'anner I " said Ned. 

They talked over the matter, Claire and Hamberton and 
Maxwell, during these days, when the destruction of Brandon 
Hall and all its treasures gave them plenty of leisure to think. 
They came to the conclusion that, just as in the army, the Irish 
soldiers may break the hearts of their officers in barrack, and 
the heads of their enemies in the field, so in civil life, if their 
little ways are tantalizing, quite opposed to English ways and 
methods, they can always be depended on in a great crisis, 
where their loyalty and fidelity are in question. 

" I'll never have an English servant in my house again I " 
said Hamberton. " You saw how they ran that night 1 " 

And when Father Cosgrove, proud of his people, called to 
offer his condolence to his friend, he was at once silenced. 

" I don't want to make you too conceited," said Hamberton, 
"but I must make another admission. You remember I said 
there was a God ? " 

" Yes " ; said the priest. 

" I wish to add something else I " 

The priest waited. 

" Men are not all bad 1 " 

Slowly, but majestically, a beautiful chateau, in the Louis 
Quatorze style, faced with red and white brick, arose from the 
ruins of the burned house, and fronted the ever-heaving and 
tossing and restless sea. Slowly, but surely, new works were 
erected, new cottages built, larger enterprises opened. Slowly, 



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502 LISHEEN [Jan,^ 

but surely, a happy and thriving and industrious population 
grew up around the ^* Great House " ; a population knitted in 
the firmest bonds of loyalty to those who were protecting and 
helping them. 

And any one of these fine days you may see a bath- chair, 
in which is an invalid gentleman, rolled slowly along the beach 
by a one-armed man. "A soldier?" "Well, yes I" "Had 
been under fire?" "Yes, again." "And wounded?" "Yes, 
once more 1 " It is our friend, Ned. The arm had to be am- 
putated in Cork. But no matter. He need work no more. 
And the old man is very gentle and patient; and has never 
again even whispered to Ned about the "ghosht" nor the 
" praties." 

But Darby Leary ? Have we forgotten Darby ? By no man- 
ner of means. Darby is all right. Down there in the lodge, 
built also in Louis Quatorze style, I suppose to suit Darby's 
tastes, is the neatest little snuggery of a home within the four 
seas of Ireland. Red and white brick facings, diamond window- 
panes, riotous and voluptuous creepers without; and within, 
such neatness and comfort and snugness that sometimes Noney 
says it is all a "dhrame," an Arabian Night's entertainment, 
from which some day she will wake up to see the old thatched 
roof over her head, and the pit of green and yellow slime be- 
fore her door. 

But this cannot be. Because, that lovely brick fireplace is 
a reality ; and that tiled floor is a reality ; and those white beds 
there in the little recess are realities; and — here is a young 
Noney, her father's treasure and delight, a reality in yellow 
curls and blue eyes and pink cheeks; and, greatest reality of 
all, here in the cradle are the Immoftal Twins. They are the 
torment of Darby's life. Noney is all right ; and, when hoisted 
in Darby's arms, she plucks acant et Mangenet 
will be found amply sufficient. Professor Kattenbusch, of Tiibingen, has written an exhaustive 
work in two volume^, Das AposUlische Symbol (B. I. Leipsig, 1894; B. II., Leipsig, Z900), 
which is rich in patristic references. His views on the particular point of the present discus- 
sion, though challenged by Professor McGiffert, are more in harmony, we think, with the in- 
clusive idea which seems to have prevailed for so long a period in the Western Church. See 
also the The Apostles Creed by H. B. Swete, D.D., Cambridge University Press, 1894. 



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5o8 THE Obediences of Catholicism [Jan.^ 

sciousness of Latin Christianity at this important and by no 
means undefined stage of its history, a deeper sense of the con- 
tinuity of God's working under both Covenants. It was as if 
the scattered and unknown framers of both liturgy and creed, 
incorrigibly mystical as they surely were (perhaps because they 
were so incorrigibly and indefeasibly Catholic and practical), had 
realized explicitly, at last, that the sacraments were, indeed, the 
Church's secret pathways to the Reality which was Christ To 
achieve some such economy as that had the Father worked 
through all the types and shadows of the Old Testament; to 
that same purpose had the Son worked through the obediences 
and scandalous self- emptyings of .his brief human day; and to 
no different goal had the Church been working ever since. 

So might Catholicism be conceived to argue in the fourth 
and fifth century ; and, in spite of the tremendous changes that 
have taken place in its mental and moral environment in the 
interval, its present unhesitating attitude towards the sacramen- 
tal treasures of its inheritance proves that it argues in identical- 
ly the same spirit to-day. The Father worketh hitherto and T 
also work is as true of the twentieth century Church as it is 
of Jesus Christ. Its mysteries are the soul's charted pathways 
to the city of its strength. Its sacraments are the instruments 
of a renewal of which it is impossible to reckon the cost. 

Like the Incarnation which they recall, as the tool recalls 
the master that first fashioned it, not merely in their definite 
outward presentation, but in their inward capacity for transform- 
ing, it might almost be said, the original warp of human nature 
itself, they are the hourly continuation to mankind of those 
mercies which Scripture speaks of as planned, like Wisdom's 
House of the Seven Pillars, before the foundation of the world. 
Within their narrow room spirit and matter meet, it is felt, in 
obedience to that self-same voice which of old commanded order 
out of chaos and life out of the great deeps. 

Here are junctures, we say, too cunning and recondite for 
the theologian to define. He only knows they are not less won- 
derful for being efficient, even in his case, merely to the eye 
of faith. Human philosophy can neither explain them nor an- 
nul them, for they are essences bought at great price from be- 
yond the barriers of time and space. When they effect any- 
thing at all, they do so infallibly and in deference to a will for 
which patience and loving kindness are a species of constrain- 



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i9o8.] THE Obediences of Catholicism 509 

ing law in a sense that no psalmist could adequately have real- 
ized. 

As often as the conditions of minister and recipient are veri- 
fied, the divine effects invariably follow, rite for rite, and way 
for way. Though the intention of the minister be indeed, in- 
dispensable, and the faith and radical good-will of the recipient 
be as obedientially needful, it is neither the faith of the one, 
nor the dispositions of the same good-will in the other, that can 
accomplish the unseen result; but the baffling and unique in- 
strumentality — physical or moral, let the metaphysician that has 
really sounded the mystery say * — the divinely ingested and ex^ 
opere- operate efficacy, so to call it, of the ordered ceremony, that, 
under Christ and the Holy Spirit, must be accounted the true 
explanation of what takes place supematurally in the soul and 
mind of the believer. 

No wonder that such a process has been compared to the 
wonders evoked in the morning of the world. It is both like 
and unlike that first display of overflowing ad-extra power on 
the part of God. For if the planes and spheres of action are 
different, if the spiritual forces employed have no analogies in 
nature to which they can be likened, the matter surely is the 
same. Those elementary gifts — elementary, at least, in our 
wonted use of them, in spite of the hidden complexity they 
may reveal to the after-inquiry of the more philosophic mind 
— the common, homely gifts, as they have always been regarded, 
of water, the fruits of the olive, of the earth's yearly increase 
of corn and the vine, are endued with a potency that is beyond 
the scope of nature or of magic, because it is a part of that 
every-day quasi-theandric energy by which our Lord victori- 
ously, though not exclusively, makes good his promise to vivify 
a faithful Church. The Father worketh hitherto and 1 also work / 
The entire cycle of mediaeval speculation that runs so tenuously, 
yet so suggestively, from Gilbert of Poictiers to Gabriel Biel, 
until it is ended by the emphatic pronouncements of Trent; 
the whole unhappy stretch of subsequent misunderstanding that 
spreads like the desolate waters of a winter-choked stream from 
Luther and Chemnitz and seventeenth- century Puritanism to 
Harnack and Dobschtitz in our own day; the movement, now 

* See the remarkably suggestive series of CtroUaria to Thesu V. in Fr. Billots' able treatise 
on the Sacraments: Dt EccUsia SacrcufunHs, EditiojaRoma^ MDCCCC ; and also pp. 51-79, 
Fr. Billots' discussion of this vexed problem of causality is probably the most genuinely scho. 
lastic, while it is, at the same time, the most original in the whole range of latter-day theologf. 



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Sio The Obediences of Catholicism [Jan., 

active atnoag better Anglican scholars, to face the philosophic 
problem that lies behind the Scriptural presentation of the 
sacramental idea — all this but serves to emphasize the unalter- 
able Catholic aspect of a truth which seems to be addressed to 
the heart rather than to the speculative understanding of man- 
kind. That truth — and it is as unmistakably insisted upon in 
St. Paul and the Synoptic narrative, as it is in the more avowed 
mysticism of the Johannine teaching — must be described as 
nothing more or less than the architectonic* tendency of the 
Incarnation. 

Neither in theory nor in practice has the true Catholic con- 
science ever shown any feeling but one of resentment towards 
the essentially heretical view that the Word was made flesh 
for a definite and local crisis only in the history of mankind. 
To assert this is not to run counter to the Apostolic statement 
that^CAm/, being risen from the dead^ dieth now no more. On 
the contrary, it is rather to reaffirm that inspiring prophecy by 
interpreting it in one ascertainable sense, at least, in accord- 
ance with Catholic instincts. The whole of the Church's atti- 
tude towards the Mass, which is invariably described as the 
mystical, yet true, if unbloody, re-enactment of the all-atoning, 
Sacrifice of the Cross ; the entire drift of orthodox teaching on 
the efficacy of the sacraments, in the sense we essayed to out- 
line above ; the prayers of the liturgy ; the ideas and symbolisms 
current in popular devotion, furnish an abundant illustration — if 
illustration, indeed, be needed— of the profound insight of the 
Catholic heart into the dogma of the Incarnation viewed both 
as a fact in history and as a far-reaching, ever-present, ever- 
operative mystery of faith. 

A counter- prejudice in one form or another seems to lie at 
the root of every system of religious thought that has attempted 
to explain Christ in other terms alien to the prepossessions of 
traditional orthodoxy. Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram 
salutem descendit de coelis et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex 
Maria Virgine^ we say; and the words have more than a bald 
historical meaning for the Catholic, learned or unlearned, who 
recites them with a heart stirred by the inarticulate thoughts 

* If the phrase be objected to as sounding needlessly and pompously uncouth, we would re- 
mark that uo other will serve our purpose quite so well. The English equivalent ttpbtdJdhug 
will hardly do in the context ; and edifyimg, which is a fine old Vulgate homonym, has, by a 
series of accidents which furnish an instructive commentary on the graceless phenomenon 
known as pietism, gradually come in our day to have a somewhat sinister connotation. 



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i9o8,] THE Obediences of Catholicism 511 

of all their neo-cosmic connotation. The miracle of the solitary 
conception and birth from Mary's womb thus finds its counter- 
part in the not less striking wonder of the conception and birth 
of an idealized humanity from the womb of the sacramentally 
nurtured Church. Both conceptions are inevitably virginal ; for 
the fruit of both is God ; or, more determinately still, the Word 
in Christ. As the hereditary taint was stayed in Mary's case 
for the sake of the Child that was to be, so is it stayed in the 
Church's case for the sake of the Man that is to be. 

By baptism each one of us is made a new creature^ molded 
to a new Likeness, in justice and the holiness of truth. The Son 
of God did not become Man and die and rise again merely to 
leave a unique memorial of himself in the shape of an inspiring 
example, or even of an authoritative, but purely dogmatic, 
Church. He died for our sins^ says St. Paul in a well-known 
passage, and rose again for our justification. It is the risen 
Christ that is felt to be the secret of the Church's unalterable 
and ever actual Sacramentalism. If our Lord had planned to 
found a teaching Church and nothing more, what is known to- 
day as historic Catholicism would have appeared as historic 
Puritanism; whereas Catholicism has been from the beginning, 
both in intention and achievement, surely something more than 
that. If, on the other hand, the Church was to be an adequate 
presentation of the mysteriously diffusive Life which became 
visible and enanthropic^ as the Greek Fathers put it, in the 
unity of our Lord's divine Person, then Catholicism becomes 
the most obvious and deifically human thing in history, and 
worth as such a serious man's study. A phenomenon so splendid, 
and yet at the same time so inward and mystical and race- 
pervading, is, in spite of its unyielding externalisms, something 
even more than human and seldom less than kind. 

These considerations, it is almost a truism to say, have been 
pathetically obscured, where they have not been altogether 
overlooked by two distinct classes of minds. We speak of those 
in whom the natural mystic has been starved or devoutly 
stifled by the undue conceit, the sustained self-assertiveness, 
and the rationalities of successful Protestantism ; and those, 
again, who have warped their religious natures by a too ab- 
sorbing pre- occupation with the prejudices of certain popular, but 
essentially anti- Christian, schools of thought. That Protestant- 
ism has, even in its less arid aspects, tended, on the whole, to 



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512 The Obediences of Catholicism [Jan., 

create an atmosphere unfavorable to the spread of sacramental 
ideas, will be evident to all who have had living and tactual 
experience, so to call it, of its habitual mode of viewing things. 

Even in those historically more important divisions of non- 
Catholic Christianity, which, like Lutheranism and Scotch Pres- 
byterianism, have made a sincere effort to retain some vestiges 
of the sacramental leaven as an inseparable part of the religion 
of the Incarnation, the same tendency may be detected every- 
where at work. In the case of Scotch Presbyterianism it has 
betrayed itself of recent years as a curious and most uncanny 
propensity to derive the staple of its ''confessional science*' 
from the extreme left wing of the more erudite exponents of 
German Evangelical opinion. Berlin would seem to have dis- 
placed Geneva as the City of its hopes; and that most un- 
profitable form of theological activity, the indiscriminate spread 
of translated works, may be said to represent the prevailing 
activities of a school of divines which, only a century, or, in- 
deed, a half century ago, was profoundly original, if somewhat 
unlovely and of dour report, in its scholastic knowledge and ap- 
plied ideas. Ritschlianism, as illustrated by the historical pre- 
possessions of such writers as Herrmann, Kaftan, and Hamack, 
is the burden of its pulpit teaching and the inspiration of its 
austere pieties. Surely, it is a kirk that has wandered far from 
the mitigated sacramentarianism of John Knox ! 

And the leaven that has made it all but impossible for a 
Scotch Protestant to be mystical and sign-learned, in spite of 
the Catholic strain of his mingled Keltic and Norse blood, has 
worked a still more significant change in the religious conscious- 
ness of latter-day Lutheranism. The Neo-Kantian cult, which is 
at best but notionally apprehended at Edinburgh and at Glas- 
gow, is fervently accepted as a living creed throughout aca- 
demic Germany ; and Hegel and Lotze have had to submit to 
the restored primacy of the Sage of Konigsberg within the past 
score of years. The change has made itself felt in a variety of 
ways ; but chiefly in the '' historic '' treatment, as it is called, 
of the science of theology. A very mythical initiatory rite and 
a purely commemorative Eucharist, which is in no true sense 
of the word a '' Supper of the Lord " at all, are administered 
by clergymen who are supposed to profess their belief in Chris- 
tian baptism and in consubstantiation. Can such a Germany 
be called Lutheran ? 



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i9o8.] The Obediences of Catholicism 513 

We hare selected this phase of continental Protestantism of 
set purpose; because, while it has a definite historical symbol 
or creed by which it may be tested, it is known at the same 
time to be, like its Scotch shadow, important enough in num- 
bers, as well as in clerical prestige, to have attracted to its 
support a really able body of scholarly apologists. These men, 
significantly enough, are all strongly tinged with the philo- 
sophic ideas which lend themselves so plausibly to the justifi- 
cation of the hereditary and somewhat confining prejudices of 
anti-sacramental, anti- ritualistic Christianity. Nor is the par- 
ticular body of believers known diversely as Protestant- Episco- 
palians in this country and as *' Churchmen '' throughout the 
English dominions, in any happier case. The few advocates of 
the old-fashioned '' branch " theory of ecclesiasticism that re- 
main to them, as well as the more aggressive exponents of the 
new theory of ''inclusiveness'' that are slowly supplanting 
these, are, in spite of their evident sincerity and the prestige of 
their really unique scholarship, a negligible factor in such a sur- 
vey as the present stage of the argument compels us to make. 

For of Protestant- Episcopalians, as a whole, it is hardly too 
strong a thing to say, that, they are neither mystical in temper, 
nor to any notable degree sacramentally inclined, even in the 
extremely attenuated sense that their Articles enjoin. In spite 
of the moral awakening, which began far back in the last cen- 
tury with the spread of Tract arian ideas, and which has con- 
tinued ever since under the influence of a movement very un- 
fairly and very inadequately described as mere ritualism, it is 
still true to afErm, after all these years, that they represent 
too comfortable a standard of worldliness in religious matters 
to give serious-minded men pause. They have outlook, we 
should say, without insight; and they are lacking in depth. 
Their Nonconformist brethren, over whose absurdities and limi- 
tations they wasted so much laughter for nearly half a cen- 
tury after the Tractarian crisis was passed, and whom they are 
endeavoring just as vainly to conciliate now, are, if the truth 
must be told without bitterness, and as an American Catholic 
sees it, inconceivably nearer, in the technical and theological 
sense at least, to the true kingdom of God. Even if it be 
granted that a handful among them are performing an evan- 
gelical mission in familiarizing a ritualistically inaccessible Prot- 
estant world with the surface poetry of Catholic worship and 
vol.. LxxxYi.— 33 



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514 THE OBEDIENCES OF CATHOLICISM [Jan., 

the historical significance of Catholic ideas, it will have to be 
admitted, too, that their influence in this country is largely so- 
cial, in the narrower usage of that term, and derives its prestige 
from the distinctively American cult of plutocracy and mode. 

Surely it is a disquieting fact for the religious observer in 
the United States to be obliged to note that the soul's ascent 
in these regions should so invariably mark a corresponding 
progress from moneyless obscurity to social recognition and 
polite newspaper fame. This suggestion, be it remarked, is not 
offered to the reader by way of ironic comment on a symptom 
in our American life to which many a devout Episcopalian 
has before now adverted with misgiving, if not with genuine 
alarm. That partial, but disinterested, modifications of religious 
conviction take place among our new- world Protestants without 
passing on to what some adherents of the old creed would de» 
mand as evidence of a complete conversion from their point of 
view, no student of the anomalies of religious human nature 
will deny. But that these changes of heart may be, and often 
are, supernatural in principle, what Catholic theologian that 
has ever had experience of the ways of the Holy Ghost with 
a troubled spirit would dare to impugn ? God's covenanted 
ways, his modes of procedure, so to style them, we should seem 
to know ; precisely because they are ways and because they 
are covenanted. They are not always logical, as Scripture and 
the Fathers remind us; perhaps because they are so conde- 
scendingly human and easy for the voyaging heart to recog- 
nize. Facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam^ is a great 
Catholic saying. God is ever more than generous to our good 
will. But who would arrogate to himself the right to predict 
what must be or what must not be in those unmapped skies 
across which the divine light flits from dark to dawn in merci- 
ful self- adaptation to the alien soul? 

All that, we believe, is true in the invisible realm of the 
Spirit where the Soul of the great Church Catholic and the 
graces of which she is, under Christ, the guarantor move vie- 
toriously to their term. But does that imply that they must 
be equally true of the world of sense and phenomena and of 
divinely enjoined symbols and formularies, as in the instance of 
the visible Church, as well ? We may admit, then, frankly and 
without any suggestion of theological reserve, that there are 
genuine '' conversions " from ultra forms of Protestantism to 



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i9o8.] THE Obediences of Catholicism 515 

the more mitigated types ; and we cheerfully bear testimony to 
the illuminating fact that American Episcopalians, in common 
with their religious kinsfolk across the sea, have not a few of 
these inscrutable achievements to show to their spiritual credit. 
Our contention is, however, that they are not entirely convinc- 
ing from the surer Catholic standpoint; and they certainly are 
too rare in number to affect the sinister significance of the more 
worldly changes of creed to which we referred above. 

And so our original assertion that Protestantism has, on the 
whole, tended, and instinctively tended, to obscure the sacra- 
mental idea by its too absorbing pre- occupation with the actual- 
ities of this life, whether in the guise of fashion or philosophy, 
would seem to be above intelligible debate. By flinging aside 
the ancient Catholic tradition of a divinely instituted and seven- 
fold source of grace, producing its separate and distinct results 
at every turn and crisis of the Christian life by an instrumental, 
and ex^opere-operato kind of causality, it prepared the way for 
that quasi-naturalistic attitude of soul in the presence of the 
Gospel mysteries, which seems to have become a specific note 
or property of its general belief. Whether it was really driven 
to take up this radical position by the sheer momentum, so to 
call it, of its earlier protest against certain pre-tridentine mis- 
conceptions that no Catholic scholar would wish to defend to- 
day, or whether its present bias must be set down to some 
deeper psychological defect, such as its ill-tempered rejection of 
the principle of obedience to spiritual authority which, up to 
the Reformation period, had been recognized as part of the very 
substance and fibre of faith, and a necessary ingredient of the 
soul's habitual loyalty to Christ, is of little consequence now. 
The step was taken. The profound mysteriousness of the sac- 
ramental idea was reduced to a mere question of evangelical 
rites, beautifully symbolic, it is true, but reminiscential, rather 
than operative or life-giving, and making little or no appeal to 
the will in its after-encounters with temptation. So many sure 
ways of health and strength were thus sealed up for future gen- 
erations that were never to be permitted to hear of them save 
as dangerous deceits; superstitions of which a spiritual Chris- 
tianity was well rid. 

The process, extending through at least three centuries, by 
which so stupendous a change in the psychology of Christen- 
dom was finally effected, becomes all the more instructive to 



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Si6 The Obediences of Catholicism [Jan., 

the present-day believer in the religion of the New Testament, 
when it is studied in connection with another change to which 
it seems to be related both in its subtler causes and in its more 
remote effects. In the eyes of the hereditary Catholic it was a 
slow draining of the springs of grace and character ; a phenom- 
enon entirely without parallel in the previous history of religious 
dissidence. Earlier anti-sacramental movements, like English 
Lollardism, for instance, had flourished here and there for a 
while and then died. But the outlook was graver now. For, 
in spite of Luther's somewhat inconsistent attacks upon Heuss- 
gen and the Zwinglian party, in spite, too, of the not less con- 
servative, but equally illogical, instincts at work among a sec- 
tion of the English reformers, as revealed in the studied vague- 
nesses of the Thirty- Nine Articles, here was a novelty that gave 
promise of a many-sided but perverted life. 

It needs little historic insight to enable the present-day stu- 
dent of religious phenomena to point out how various and yet 
how fatal that first rejection of the fuller Catholic idea was to 
prove in the course of the centuries. The slow, draining process 
whereof we have spoken above was accompanied by another and 
more terrible emptying-out; a kenosis, one might fairly call it, 
which no optimism of Neo- Kantian faith will enable the candid 
and plain-minded observer to view with any feeling short of 
dismay. We speak, of course, of that strange, increasingly cold 
and challenging attitude of criticism towards the Christ of the 
Gospels which is maintained by a distinguished body of Uni- 
versity scholars throughout Teutonic Europe to-day, and which 
bids fair to make its influence felt not less disastrously in Eng- 
lish-speaking lands also. Under a speciously scientific plea 
(which we hope to show is only a pseudo- scientific plea at best) 
of helping the religious student to disengage the historic from 
the legendary Christ, and setting him before one in his habit 
as he lived, the Gospel narrative is subjected to a piece-meal 
process of rejection and emendation that common sense would 
cry out against in the case of the least authentic biography 
known to readers of classical literature. The results obtained 
by this method are many and curious. 

Yet, in spite of grave contradictions in detail, as in the prob- 
lem of our Lord's Messianic consciousness, for instance, there is 
a remarkable consensus of discovery on one vital point. The 
Jesus of history can no longer be accepted as the Jesus of the 



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i9o8.] THE Obediences of Catholicism 517 

Four Gospels of Catholicism. Faith may still account him dii* 
vine in some sense that philosophy may justify ; but science re- 
duces him to a pathetically human, if yet solitary and unique, 
figure. This is the Jesus of Schmiedel, of Van Manen, of Bous* 
set, of the two Holtzmanns — the shadowy Personality lurking be- 
hind the theories of Jtilicher, of Wrede, of Baron von Soden. 
And the essays and studies put forth with such indefatigable it- 
eration by the several less widely known, but not less widely 
learned PrivaUdocenten in the various universities of Germany 
and Holland, are further illustrations of the kind of Christ that 
history, reconstructed along such new lines, will hereafter afford. 

And what a scientifically inadequate Christ it is to have in- 
spired such a movement as culminated, we will not say in Cath- 
olicism, but in the Christianity of the Acts and the enthusiasms 
of the various Pauline communities. It is not so far a cry to 
the discredited Strauss of the earlier nineteenth century; yet 
surely the thing of shreds and patches that he gave us is a 
more intelligible figure than this pale ghost of the Neo-Teutonic 
Gospel! It can hardly be said that we have as yet seen the 
end of the movement. Conjecture follows upon conjecture and 
theory upon theory with most widely divergent results ; and all 
the while the exoteric lay intellect is assured that it is being fed 
upon a fortifying diet of facts — essential facts ; by which is meant, 
it would seem, the author's temperamental transcript of them. 

And it is thought that the faith once delivered sacramentally 
to the saints — Lutheran or Catholic or Dutch Reformed can 
hardly matter in such a scientific contingency now — will be re- 
newed by such inverted Gnosticism. The pedantry of special- 
ism might conceivably go further; but it could hardly move 
with more stupefying results. For not the least significant thing 
about this portentous outburst of religious intellectualism is the 
apparent sincerity of it all. What is more significant still, is 
the readiness of Scotch Presbyterians and Broad Church Angli- 
cans to accept it at its own valuation, and retail it in turn, 
either in popular epitomes, or in translations for a supposedly 
pietistic, but always very Protestant, world. 

We have been at some pains to describe at length this cu- 
rious saturnalia of the German university intellect, because its 
present excesses will help the discerning reader to grasp the 
point of our suggestion, that Protestantism lost more than its 
leaders realized, when it deliberately sealed up the ancient 



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518 THE Obediences of Catholicism [Jan. 

paths to an ordered mysticism^ by rejecting the Catholic idea 
of the sacraments, endeavoring thenceforth to feed its hunger 
for an always indwelling Lord by philosophic pietism, supple- 
mented by unrestrained speculation on an always outdwelling 
or historic Christ. 

The present welter can only redound in the long event to 
the true glory of the unchanging Catholic cause. It enables 
one to see that even facts need to be arranged with some sense 
of their proportions before they can be made to convey a mes- 
sage to the soul. The Catholic Church is no more afraid of 
facts than it is of mysteries, natural or supernatural. As a liv- 
ing institution she is compact of both, and has categories for 
a true interpretation of both, just in so fat as religious human 
nature — which is not quite the same thing as scholastic human 
nature — needs to have them expounded. In spite of the poignant 
misunderstandings, the confusions and hesitations pathetically 
incident to her secular career, we think it no exaggeration to 
say that the more comprehensive verdict of history will, on 
the whole, bear out that contention. For what, after all, is 
history, even in its most pitiless and scandalously scientific 
form, but a gradual manifestation of the designs of God in 
Christ ? 

Framework that waits for a picture to frame ! 

It is to the same verdict of history that we have appealed 
in the assertion, made frankly in the earlier pages of this arti* 
cle, that the religious reformers of the sixteenth century made 
a lamentable mistake when they broke with the old Catholic 
notion of a sacramental system of grace. For it is to that in- 
itial error, more appreciably than to anything else, that their 
hereditary hardness of temper to the principle of authority in 
religion and their gradual estrangement from the fuller and 
Catholic Christ of the Gospels, as the source of that authority, 
is ultimately due. They departed from the obediences by which 
man's ineradicable instinct for mysticism was, in the designs of 
God, to be kept healthy and alive. What wonder, therefore, 
that, being starved of such authentic helps to true inwardness 
of vision, the divine lineaments of the Christ of the Gospels 
should have become, in spite of all their questioning, somewhat 
unscientifically blurred ? 

Setim Hall, South Orange, N, J, 



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THE ENCYCLICAL ON MODERNISM. 

Ths following article is the first of the Advent (1907) course of 
sermons delivered in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, at 
the instance of his Grace, the Most Reverend Archbishop. The 
object of the course was to explain the content and application 
of the Encyclical on ''Modernism." The second sermon of the 
course follows in this number of Th9 Cathoi^ic Wori^d. The 
others will be published in the February number. — Editor C. W. 

THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF. 

" I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE." 
BY JOSEPH F. MOONEY. V.G. 

fO one, brethren, I think, will deny that the Church 
in our day is undergoing a severe ordeal. The 
assertion holds true if the term Christianity be 
taken even in a loose sense. But it holds still 
more true, and you can well bear witness to the 
fact, if Christianity be understood as identical with the religion 
which you and I profess and with the Church to which you and 
I belong. It may indeed be a question whether that ordeal is 
severer than at any other time in the history of the past, but 
this much is at least certain : it has now some features that are 
distinctly its own, and that do not lessen its pain and its bit« 
terness for those of the household of the faith. Heretofore, as 
now^ the Church has had her open and avowed enemies, those 
who made no concealment of their purpose, and who, with mo- 
tives as varied as the range of human passion could suggest, 
and with weapons as deadly as human ingenuity could devise, 
sought to encompass the Church's failure and the Church's ruin. 
No great amount of knowledge is required to tell us this, 
and, as a consequence, our deepest sympathies went out, and 
are still going out in abundant flow, to the tried and harassed 
mother of us all. Realizing, then, the greatness and the soreness 
of her present afflictions, it was hard indeed for us, who live in 
this favored land of ours, to imagine whence new ones could 
arise, new dangers come, or new perils threaten. Rumors, it is 




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520 The Rights of the Supreme Pontiff [Jan., 

true, of such there may have been ; symptoms, too, may have 
in a measure manifested themselves, but they were so vague and 
faint that they passed us by well-nigh unheeded ; until a Voice 
from the heights of its own clear vision, and with the weight 
of its infallible authority, was raised to warn us and to arouse 
us, to teach us and to tell us that the most prominent of the 
adversaries of the Church to-day, are to be found in her own 
bosom. The revelation was assuredly startling to the most of 
us, but it was a revelation fully substantiated by the solemn 
words of our Holy Father Pius X., in his latest Encyclical on 
" Modernism." 

Brethren, what do you, as intelligent and, at least, as ordinar- 
ily instructed Catholics, think of a system which holds that the 
proof that there is a God at all, resolves itself in its last analysis 
into a mere sentiment of the soul ; that God's communication with 
his creatures was not made in the sense or the way in which 
you have been taught to believe it was made ; that the Sacred 
Scriptures are but a collection of human experiences that may 
have happened in any religion ? A system which holds that 
our Lord was limited in his knowledge, that perhaps there was 
a time when he was not conscious of his own Divine mission ; 
a system thus destructive, as the Holy Father says, of his Di- 
vine personality ? A system which holds that the Church is 
but the product of the collective consciences of her members, 
to which collective conscience, her teaching authority, her sac- 
raments, her liturgy, and her whole action must be subject ? 
A system which holds that religious truth may vary ; so that what 
seems to be true at one time, may cease to be so at another; 
that thus dogma and doctrine may convey very different mean- 
ings to the passing generations of progressive mankind ? 

Ponder, brethren, for an instant, if you will, upon the im- 
port of that teaching. Consider the philosophy of it, its theology. 
Would he who is the Supreme Head of the Church, would he 
be true to himself or to his sacred trust, if be did not rise up 
and in words, aye, of blasting force, repudiate, reprobate, and 
condemn it? Would he who is the Watchman supreme on the 
towers of Israel, placed there to guard the citadel of truth, 
placed there to guard the deposit of faith, would he be mind- 
ful of his high office, did he not unmask the foes from within 
as well as without, expose their designs and put upon them the 
mark of their treachery and their guile ? Would he, in fine, to 



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I908.] THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF 52 1 

whom were said — in the person of the first occupant of that 
office, the successor in that apostolic princedom — the words : " I 
give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven"; the words: 
''Feed my lambs and feed my sheep''; the words: "Simon, 
Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you so that he may 
sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for thee that thy faith 
fail not, and thou once being converted, confirm thy brethren " ; 
would he not have proved himself a recreant and unfaithful ser- 
vant if he could forget them, in the hour of need or of peril, 
for the charge committed to his care ? Ah, brethren, he did 
not forget them, as none from Peter to Pius forgot them, and 
as the history of Christendom for nineteen hundred years pro- 
claims on its every page. For, go through that history as cur- 
sorily as you will, and then say what is the one simple, pre- 
dominating fact from which you never can get away in the 
lives of the holders of the papacy. Is it not simply and pure- 
ly the conciousness of the right which these words of our Divine 
Lord imparted, and of the duty which they imposed, and the 
consequent exercise of that right and that duty in every crisis 
and in every emergency that called for such exercise on their 
part ? Why, brethren, what else after all in one sense does the 
history of the Church resolve itself into but the history of the 
aims and the efforts, the trials and the sufferings, and the sacrifices 
of Christ's Vicars on earth to ward off heresy and error, to 
check their insidious advance, to repair their ravages, and to 
preserve intact and undefiled the " faith once delivered to the 
saints." For this end they felt they were in this world — but 
not of it 

For it, and to attain it, they withstood Roman power in the 
heyday of its might and its splendor, and Grecian subtlety in 
the very acme of its polish and its refinement. Oriental des- 
potism in its crudest forms, and Western barbarism in the 
fiercest floods of its most savage fury. For it, and to attain it, 
they opposed the ambitions of kings and potentates, and the 
lust and passions of the great and the powerful ; the sanguinary 
outbursts of lawless multitudes, as well as the vain and noxious 
output of proud, arrogant, misguided human reason. For it, 
and to attain it, their guiding hand and stimulating, but cor- 
rective, impulse were upon schools and scholars, whether of 
olden Antioch and Athens, Alexandria and Constantinople, 
mediaeval Paris and Oxford, as well as the Louvain and Wash- 



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522 THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF [Jan., 

ington of to-day. For it, in fine« they bore slander and mis- 
representation, persecution and hatred, and stripes and chains, 
and exile and death. And why ? Because they could not do 
otherwise; because the injunction of the Master pressed ever 
upon them; because the interests of his kingdom they must at 
every cost conserve. 

Again, brethren, in doing so, from another point of view, they 
were only measuring up to the full responsibilities of the posi- 
tion in which he himself had placed them. If it was part of 
our Lord's plan for the salvation of the souls of men, to found 
a spiritual kingdom — and his words bear no other interpreta- 
tion — and if the headship of that kingdom was to be in himself 
and its earthly headship in the Apostle of his choice; and if 
that kingdom was to be visible, permanent, doing and continu- 
ing at all times his work in the world, it surely would be only 
in accord with the truth and the infallibility of the divine prom- 
ise, that there should exist, in the presence of men, visible to 
the gaze of the world, an institution of this character, and thus 
we should be prepared also to witness in the action of his earthly 
vicars, whenever and wherever the purity and integrity of the 
faith, which is the very life of the Church, were touched or jeop- 
ardized, only what the princes of this world would do for their 
own in like circumstances and under like conditions. And as 
kings and princes would not then hesitate to put forth the whole 
force of their power and their sovereignty, to employ every law- 
ful means at their disposal, in order to shield their people and 
their country, so must the Chief of God's Church maintain, 
without impairment, the spiritual inheritance placed within his 
keeping and safeguard the weal of the flock entrusted to his 
care. For him to do otherwise, to be possible even to do 
otherwise, would be a falsification of the history of the past, 
nay, a falsification of the divine promise itself. 

Modernism, brethren, is the latest newcomer to strut into 
the arena and to challenge the gaze and attention of the world, 
not as a foe, but under the guise of a friend ; not, as it claims, 
to attack, but to reform the Church — a reformation, however, 
which, the Holy Father says, is death. Carried away by the 
spirit of novelty of the age, dazzled not only by the vaunted 
triumphs of science in the realms of sense, but also in regions 
which are beyond its sphere, possessed to the full with an un- 
controllable desire to pursue dangerous intellectual pathways. 



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i9o8.] The Rights of the Supreme Pontiff 523 

and brooking no restraint in its intellectual methods, gifted with 
a certain scholarship and learning peculiar to itself. Modernism 
seeks not only to break with the past, but to heap contumely 
upon it ; not only to disregard the Fathers and the Doctors and 
the Apostolical traditions of antiquity, but to exclude them from 
any share in its plan for a new interpretation of the Scriptures ; 
for a reconstruction of theology and philosophy, which shall, above 
all, exclude the Angelic Doctor and his school from their do- 
main; for a reconstruction and reformation of the Church her- 
self which shall make her harmonize her policy and her insti- 
tutions with the widest and deepest results of scientific inquiry ; 
and, in a word, with every aspiration of humanity. 

Modernism, will it last ? Who can tell ? But one thing is 
certain, one thing is clear : It can no longer hide itself beneath 
the broad mantle of the Church ; no longer be free to work 
its poisonous way, not only into the branches and shoots, as 
the Holy Father says, but into the very trunk of the tree of 
faith, and into the heart of the Church; but now, being ''cast 
out into exterior darkness,'' it will be left to find its place among 
and to share the fate of the other heresies, the other errors, 
and the other aberrations of human reason, which have so 
often vexed the course of the batk of Peter down the stream 
of time. iu^^ 

Brethren, with grateful, loyal hearts, then, will we acclaim 
the act which has wrought this blissful consummation, and, 
with joyous obedience, accept it. With renewed devotion will we 
rally around him whose act it was, and in his voice recognize 
the voice of him who once said to the tempest and the storm : 
'' Peace, be still." Thus will it ever be, as it has ever been. 
Thus will it ever be, that our vision will be brightened and 
our hope gladdened, our courage uplifted and our very life 
pulsate with the throbbings of a new life within us, as we be- 
hold that olden bark ploughing her way triumphantly through 
the tumultuous seas that would engulf her ; ploughing her way 
triumphantly through the angry waves and the winds that madly 
beat against her ; through the shipwrecks of philosophies and the 
shattered hulks of the empires and monarchies now strewn along 
the shores of time ; ever bearing with her and within her, the 
souls of the redeemed, the souls of the redeemed of Christ, and 
bearing them, aye, up to the eternal mountains that stand for- 
ever around the heavenly Jerusalem. 



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THE ERRORS CONDEMNED. 

BY THOMAS F. BURKE, C.S.P. 

IT is our duty to-day, in this one of a course of 
sermons on the latest Encyclical of our Supreme 
Pontiff, to bring to your attention the principal 
fallacies that are there laid bare. The main part 
of the Encyclical is doctrinal in character. It 
expounds, and then condemns, not one but many errors which 
had found defenders in certain circles within the Church at the 
present time. To this set of errors has been given the title 
'' Modernism.'^ If we consider the basic principles upon which 
these fallacies are constructed, if we bear in mind that these 
principles are agnostic and pantheistic in tendency, we may 
rightly say that Modernism is not new but rather ancient, 
older even than Christianity itself. But if we consider the prin- 
ciples of Modernism in their application to the facts and dogmas 
upon which Catholic faith rests and to the nature of that faith 
itself, if we bear in mind that these principles form the basis 
of a system that disregards the sacred traditions of Christian 
teaching, then it is indeed a new heresy or rather a new ** com- 
bination of heresies." 

Modernism attacks the very foundations of belief. Apart 
from any philosophical considerations, the Catholic rests his 
faith, his acceptance of the Christian religion, upon certain real 
things, objective facts and truths concerning God. That God 
exists ; that God has given a revelation to man ; that God sent 
his only-begotten Son upon earth ; that this Son is Jesus Christ 
both God and man; that he founded a Church, to the care of 
which he committed his teachings and his commands, and that 
these teachings and commands have been safeguarded and given 
to men of all times by that Church ; these are the preliminaries 
of the Catholic's act of faith. They are based upon the con- 
clusions of reason and the testimony of history, and without 
them man can have no certainty as to his religious obligations. 

In other words, whatever the spiritual life of any individual 



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I908.] THE ERRORS CONDEMNED 525 

man may be, to whatever development it may attain, to what- 
ever heights it may reach, to whatever intimacy of union with 
God it may aspire, that life is built upon historical facts or 
truths as upon a foundation. Thus whether the Catholic be 
the humblest in mind and the simplest in devotion, or whether 
he be possessed of a mental ability akin to that of a St. Thomas, 
or whether he be vouchsafed extraordinary spiritual privileges 
such as were evidenced in the contemplative, mystic powers of 
a St. John of the Cross or a St Teresa, he builds the structure 
of his religious life upon truths and facts, certain, objective, 
real, divine. 

For each and for all the foundation is the same. "Rob man 
of the historical basis of his faith; tell him that he cannot 
know whether Christ existed as he has been pictured or whether 
he was God; tell him that the miracles heretofore alleged as 
proofs of Christ's mission and divinity are unrealities and mere 
human inventions; tell him there is no set of truths really im- 
parted by God to man; tell him that faith is not conviction 
based upon evidence but rather a sentiment created in the in- 
dividual soul ; and you have cast him adrift on the sea of doubt, 
to be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. 

Now Modernism asserts principles that are bound to give 
birth to a germ destructive of faith, for it denies the objective 
reality of those very truths and facts upon which Christianity 
rests, and in virtue of which man accepts it as a reasonable 
belief. 

Such is the position of the modernists, first because their 
religious philosophy is in essence agnostic. By this we mean 
that it denies to man's reason the power to pass judgment or 
to form conclusions upon anything that is not perceptible to 
the senses. Human reason is confined entirely within the field 
of phenomena, of those things that appear. Starting from this 
principle, Modernism claims that the world beyond the sight 
of man is likewise the world beyond the intellect of man; and 
that it is, therefore, impossible to place any trust in the con- 
clusions of that reason concerning God or the things of God. 
The Deity and any supposed revelation of his will to man are 
not, therefore, objects of human science, nor are they in any 
sense historical subjects. Science and history thus become 
atheistic. God and all that is divine are excluded. 



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526 THE Errors Condemned [Jan., 

Immediately the vast difference between Modernism and 
Catholic teaching is apparent. 

While Modernism declares that human reason is incapable 
of arriving at a knowledge of even God's existence, the Catholic 
Church teaches that the one true God can be known with cer- 
tainty '* by the natural light of reason by means of the things 
that are made" (Cone. Vat. De Revel. Can. i.). 

While Modernism declares that the human intellect is under 
such limitations that it can in no way transcend the visible, the 
Catholic Church teaches that reason, by the principle of caus- 
ality, can come to a knowledge of the unseen, and particularly 
of the attributes of God. 

While Modernism declares, on the principle of agnosticism, 
that it is impossible for the human reason to be the recipient 
of any external heavenly message, the Catholic Church teaches 
that it is not only possible but that it is expedient ''that man 
should be taught, through the medium of divine revelation, 
about God and the worship to be paid him '' (Cone. Vat. De 
Revel. Can. i). 

While Modernism declares that it is not within the sphere 
of reason to consider any facts and evidences for the securing 
of belief, the Catholic Church, condemning this assertion, teaches 
that divine revelation can be made credible by external signs 
(Cone. Vat. De Fide. Can. 3). 

Radical differences these and such as constitute an irrecon- 
cilable opposition between the belief of the Catholic Church and 
the philosophy of Modernism. The latter would build faith 
upon the negation of the powers of reason, while the former 
builds it upon the assertion of reason's legitimate conclusions. 

This negation, upon which so much of the Modernist system 
rests, destroys also the validity of one of the primary witnesses 
to Christian faith, namely. Miracles. Since human reason, ac» 
cording to that system, is incapable of any certain knowledge 
of God, it follows that any facts that partake of a divine char- 
acter are, likewise, beyond the sphere of man's intellect. The 
miraculous is impossible. Only the human is recognized. Jesus 
Christ cannot be conceived by man's mind as divine. If, then, 
in the accounts of our Lord's life, any miracles are ascribed to 
him, they are not to be taken as witnesses to the truth of his 
words or to the divinity of his being ; but they are to be con- 



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i9o8.] The Errors Condemned 527 

sidered merely as the products of devout imagination, which 
Christ's Apostles and disciples have read into the story. 

This contradicts uncompromisingly the belief of the Catho- 
lic. The Vatican Council, for instance, declares : '' In order that 
the submission of our faith might be in accordance with reason, 
God hath willed to give us, together with the internal assist- 
ance of the Holy Ghost, external proofs of his revelation, name- 
ly, divine facts; and above all miracles and prophecies, which, 
while they clearly manifest God's almighty power and infinite 
knowledge, are most certain divine signs of revelation adapted 
to the understanding of all men." 

We have, then, in our acceptance of Catholic faith the in- 
ternal assistance of the Holy Ghost, but we have something 
besides. 

Why do we accept the teachings of the Church ? Because 
we believe they are the teachings of Jesus Christ, who is God 
made man. Why do we believe that Jesus is God ? The chief 
witness to that fact is the Resurrection of Christ. If we are 
asked what evidence we have for the truth of the Resurrection, 
we answer that we know this great miracle to be a fact in the 
same way that we know all other events of history, on human, 
credible, and reliable evidence. With St. Paul we say : '' If 
Christ be not risen from the dead, then is our preaching vain, 
and your faith is also vain " (I. Cor. xv. 14). In other words, 
disprove and destroy this great miracle, and you have taken 
away the whole value of Christianity as a divinely revealed re- 
ligion. 

The modernists declare that not only this great miracle of 
the Resurrection, but all the miracles attributed to Christ are 
not historical facts, not things which have really taken place so 
as to be historically true. While these things are considered 
objects of faith, in their sense of the word, they are merely 
the inventions of men, devout and earnest men reading their 
own ideas into the life of the God made man, that so he might 
appear unto the world. The practical conclusion is, therefore, 
this, that the good Christian reading the New Testament would 
have to remember that all the wonderful works of Christ, all 
that pertains to his Resurrection and Ascension, and many of 
his parables — ^as one writer has pointed out, about seven-tenths 
of all the Gospel narrative — are things which never actually 



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528 THE Errors Condemned [Jan., 

happened in history, but were attributed to Christ by enthusi- 
astic disciples long after his death. As, in connection with 
their fundamental philosophical principles, faith is founded upon 
the negation of reason, here faith is founded upon the negation 
of history. Faith that is robbed of reason as its basis and of 
history as its witness is like a sun that gives neither light nor 
heat, painted but not real. 

Oh, ye whose teachings have called forth in this Encyclical 
the unwilling rebuke and condemnation from the mouth of Peter 
— ye who protest your love for Christ, for Church, for Chris- 
tian people, who have yielded principles in your mistaken zeal 
and your desire to reconcile the learning of the world with the 
faith of Christianity — do you not see, can you not see, that in 
stripping Christ of his miraculous power, that in taking him 
from out that world of fact in which he moved and taught, that 
in making his divinity dependent upon the faith of his disci- 
ples, a faith that, in its enthusiasm, did not hesitate to invent 
and to impose, do you not see that in all this you have joined 
hands with those unbelievers who recognize that their task of 
destruction is achieved when they disprove the miracles attri- 
buted to Jesus and undermine the historical foundations of Chris- 
tianity ? Do you not see that the reality of the divine Christ 
is bound up with the reality of his works; that faith in Christ 
is joined to a knowledge of such historical facts as that he 
cured the sick and the dead by his gentle touch; that he par- 
doned the repentant sinner; that he foretold things that were 
to come; that he died upon the cross; that he rose from the 
dead; that he ascended into heaven? Do you not see that in 
destroying these, you destroy him ? Do you not see that in 
saying these beliefs are ill-founded, and that they may change 
and even disappear, that you annihilate Jesus Christ, God made 
man ? 

In keeping with these principles Modernism perverts the 
idea of revelation and distorts the idea of faith. Far from 
admitting a set of truths made known to man from God as 
from a source apart from man, and far from recognizing faith 
as the act by which man gives assent to these truths. Modem- 
ism holds that both faith and revelation are entirely within 
man. On the principle that our knowledge is altogether sub- 
jective and relative, the defenders of Modernism declare that 



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I908.] THE ERRORS CONDEMNED 529 

what we know of God and ultimate reality is '' but certain ef- 
fects wrought in the soul of man.'' 

The Catholic ideas of faith and revelation are contained in 
a decree of the Vatican Council, where it is stated that : " This 
faith, as the Catholic Church professes, is a supernatural virtue 
by which, through the gift of God and the aid of grace, we 
believe that the things revealed by him are true, not because 
of their intrinsic truth as seen by the natural light of reason, 
but because of the authority of God himself who reveals them 
to us and who can neither be deceived nor deceive." 

From this we see that man, exercising faith, performs an 
act of his intellect, that there is an internal element in the gen- 
esis of that act, namely, the grace of God in the soul, but also 
that the object of this act is something external to itself, God 
and his divine revelation. 

The modernist substitutes a species of faith totally different, 
for he makes faith consist not in conviction based upon evi- 
dence, but in a religious sentiment or experience totally with- 
in man and through which alone he comes to a knowledge of 
God and religion. More than that, this religious sentiment is 
not only faith, but with that faith and in it revelation too 
abides. In other words, faith and revelation are begun and 
completed entirely within the soul of man. This theory is sub- 
jectivism run riot — Protestantism outdone. It practically makes 
man the creator of his own religion. No external authority 
would, under such conditions have the right to dictate to a 
conscience that imagines itself guided directly by the indwelling 
God. it proclaims one religion to be as good as another. No 
one could logically question the validity and the soundness of 
any man's religious sentiment, because, as the world of an ex- 
ternal revelation would be to him an unknowable world, so too 
would be the world oi another's spiritual experience. 

As a matter of fact, these and like conclusions have already 
been reached in the school of the modernists. They tell us 
that all religions are true, and that the Catholic form of reli- 
gion is to be accepted only because it contains more truth than 
the others. They deny that the sacraments were instituted by 
Christ, but claim these were brought into being by the Church ; 
thus robbing the sacraments of their very essence and power. 
They deny that Christ instituted the Church itself, but hold 

VOU LXXXTI.— 34 



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530 The Errors Condemned [Jan., 

that it was gradually formed in the Christian community ; thus 
taking from that Church all divine authority. They deny that 
the dogmas of the Church have any stability, but state that 
these may essentially change or be entirely obliterated as new 
conditions of life arise. They despise ecclesiastical tradition. 
Say what they may, they build up a religion different from 
Catholicism, and they cannot hold to both. 

It is, in a sense, an old question that is propounded. Is 
man, in his religious belief, the master or the pupil, the lord 
or the disciple ? Is man left to wander with no guide but him- 
self and the creations of his own mind and the impulses of his 
own heart; or is he under the direction of the Supreme Law- 
giver and the revealing Lord ? If man, taken either individu- 
ally or collectively, be dependent solely upon himself for the 
creation and development of his religious being, then Pius X. 
is wrong. But if, as reason and history testify, there is a God 
above us, if God has been manifested to man in the person of 
Jesus Christ, divine and human, if that Divine Person has left 
upon earth a Church to be a guide unto man as to his teach- 
ings and precepts, if the existence of these external facts is 
necessary for man's religious life, if there exist for man any 
absolute truth, any truth beyond the borders of his own in- 
tellect, then Pius X. is right. 

The modernists deny that we can obtain by reason any knowl- 
edge of God ; they deny the historical reality of miracles ; they 
deny the existence of an external revelation given by God to 
man ; they deny that faith is conviction ; but leave it rather a 
mere sentiment. In all these things they take issue with Catho- 
lic teaching, and consequently merit condemnation. 

On one day in the life of our Blessed Lord, after he had 
declared to the assembled multitude the great mystery of the 
Eucharist, his heart was saddened by knowing that many re- 
fused to accept it. Some, who up to that time had been his 
disciples, turned away and walked no more with him. Then, in 
tenderness and yet in steadfastness, he spoke to the Apostles: 
'' Will you also go away ? '' And Peter, for himself and for the 
rest, replied with the answer of faith and loyalty : '' Lord, to 
whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of Eternal Life.'* 

That scene has been repeated many times in the history of 
the Church. She has stood '' endowed with a single, undying 



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I908.] THE ERRORS CONDEMNED 53 1 

personality — an unbroken personal consciousness/' bearing tes- 
timony to the facts in the life of her founder, to the truths that 
he taught. In asserting these, she has often seen some of her 
children refuse submission ; she has beheld them depart from 
her. To- day as question of her teaching arises, and she reas- 
serts her doctrine, some of her children hesitate to accept. 
They are men who, up to the present, have protested their ad- 
herence to her, their love for her, and their desire to bring 
others unto her; men who, in the words of the Encyclical itself, 
'Mead a life of the greatest activity, of assiduous and ardent 
application to every branch of learning," and who ''possess, as 
a rule, a reputation for the strictest morality/' To them she 
turns in her tenderness, and yet in her steadfastness, and asks : 
" Will you also go away ? " What will their answer be ? We 
pray that it may be that which St. Peter spoke; but whether 
it will be so or not is known only to the Searcher of hearts. 
To all her children, and therefore to us, the Church likewise 
speaks the word: "Will you also go away?" What is our 
answer ? With faith and with loyalty we reply : " To whom 
shall we go ? Thou hast the words of Eternal Life." 



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flew JSoohd. 

Nobody hearkens more willingly, 

THE THIRTEENTH nor with happier results, than does 

CENTURY. Dr. Walsh to the invitation given 

By Dr. Walsh. by the Son of Sirac to praise the 

men of renown, our fathers in their 
generation. This fine volume,* which does credit to the press 
that issued it, is, as the title suggests, a eulogy of the men who 
lived and the works that were achieved in the thirteenth cen- 
tury. That age, with its wonderful activity, its various essays 
into new paths, its great men in all the arts of war and peace, 
offers an inexbaustable field to the student, and a splendid store- 
house of brilliant material for the popular lecturer. And Dr. 
Walsh, who is both a student and a popular lecturer, comes for- 
ward in this volume, laden with the results of omnivorous read- 
ing, and lays his treasures, in almost boundless profusion, at 
the feet of his audience. All the great issues, forces^ and in- 
stitutions of the thirteenth century are reviewed at generous 
length — the rise and character, the curricula and the influences 
of the early universities; the steps taken towards popular edu- 
cation, both literary and technical; the development of letters; 
the great books and the great writers of the period: the Latin 
hymns of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, the Golden 
Legend, the Romance of the Rose, Joceylin of Brakeland, Mat- 
thew Paris, and Vincent of Beauvais ; hospitals ; famous women ; 
Marco Polo and the story of geographical exploration ; the sys- 
tematization of law; and the beginnings of modern commerce. 
This catalogue does not exhaust the list of Dr. Walsh's topics. 
The contents of the book were first put together in the 
form of popular lectures, a fact which accounts for the diffuse- 
ness of style and the occasional repetitions which are observable. 
As a professed panegyrist, the doctor, of course, presents only 
what redounds to the glory of that age; so we do not expect 
him to strike any strictly judicial balance between the good and 
the bad. And his rSle exempts from criticism his occasional 
straining of the significance of facts in order to credit his favor- 
ite century with the origin of almost all the good things, and 
some of the questionably good things, which the present age 

« Thi Thirtitntk, Greatest of Cemturies, By James J. Walsh. Ph.D., LL.D. New York: 
Catholic Summer-School Press. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 533 

claims as its own production, from democracy to co-education; 
and the practice of initiation into secret societies. 

Those who read for entertainment will find the book a rich 
source of enjoyment and instruction. And we think that there 
are few well-read persons who will not find in Dr. Walsh's 
pages some piece of information hitherto unknown to them. It 
need not be said that the tone of the work is distinctively 
Catholic. The doctor's underlying purpose is to vindicate the 
Church's claim to have been the mightiest force in European 
civilization. Though the doctor never goes beyond the range 
of a popular lecturer, he occasionally gives utterance to obser- 
vations and reflections that would do credit to a study of deeper 
thought. For instance, he draws attention to a fact that is 
seldom noted sufficiently, either by the advocates or the op- 
ponents of evolution. It is that for this theory no argument 
can be drawn from the development of man as judged by the 
monuments of his intellect in historic time: 

We may be *' the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of 
time," but one thing is certain, that we can scarcely hope to 
equal, and do not think at all of surpassing, some of the great 
literary achievements of long past ages. 

In the things of the spirit, apparently, there is very little, 
if any, evolution. Homer wrote nearly three thousand years 
ago as supreme an expression of human life in absolute liter- 
ary values as the world has ever known, or, with all reverence 
for the future, be it said, is ever likely to know. 

As a further proof of his assertion, he cites the Book of 
Job and the Code of Hammurabi. 

We unite with Dr. Walsh in hoping that this book will prove 
to be the beginning of a series that will offer to the general 
public the lectures that have been delivered at the Catholic 
Summer- School. 

A good translation of the Acts of 

THE VATICAN COUNCIL, the Vatican Council • is a most 

timely contribution to our English 
theological library. Who can doubt that of all the enormous 
output of thought that has appeared during the past fifty years, 
the document which. is destined to outlast all the others, and 
which will have a living value for posterity when almost every- 

* Thi Dtcrtfs of tht Vatican Council, Edited, with an Introduction, by Rev. Vincent 
McVabb, O.P. London: Bums & Gates. 



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534 JVtFF BOOKS [Jan., 

thing else that has come from the printing press of the nine- 
teenth century will either have been buried in oblivion or will 
have become obsolete, is a little book, ** no larger than a page 
or two of a daily newspaper/' containing the results of two 
hundred and twenty-two days* travail of the largest and most 
representative body of bishops that ever met together since the 
foundation of the Catholic Church. If that document will have 
a value for posterity, it certainly has a still higher value for 
the present day. For, like every other Council of the Church, 
the Vatican treated of doctrinal matters of special importance 
to its own age. 

Nevertheless, one who would undertake to show, from an 
analysis of our current theological, pastoral, and apologetic 
literature, that the Acts of the Vatican Council are not suffi- 
ciently utilized, might make out a fair case for the thesis. For 
a decade or two, indeed, after 1870, there was no end of atten- 
tion turned to the teaching of the Council regarding the in- 
fallibility of the Pope. But since discussion of that doctrine 
subsided, the decrees may be said to have almost dropped out 
of sight. Yet the First Dogmatic Constitution deals with ques- 
tions which, so far from having become obsolete, are every day 
assuming a growing importance in the struggle between Cathol- 
icism and unbelief. The relation of God to the world; the 
nature of revelation and supernatural faith ; the relation between 
reason and faith — these are the strong places on the ramparts 
of Sion around which the intellectual struggle surges most 
fiercely to-day, Nothing is of more vital interest to the wel- 
fare of souls than that the rapidly growing section of the laity 
which is coming into close and insidious contact with unbelief 
should have a thorough grasp of Catholic doctrine on these 
subjects. And, with all reverence for the many learned ex- 
positors of the Vatican decrees, nowhere is the Catholic doc- 
trine to be found set forth with so much simplicity, clearness, 
and force as in the text of the decrees itself: ''For," to quote 
from that authority, ''the doctrine of faith which God has re- 
vealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention, to 
be perfected by human ingenuity ; but has been delivered as a 
divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully kept and 
infallibly declared." Father McNabb's translation offers no open- 
ing for criticism. The publishers have given it a setting worthy 
of its dignity. 



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i9o8.] NEW BOOKS 535 

This work* is valuable! primarily , 

PENANCE IN THE EARLY for its intrinsic merit ; accidentally 

CHURCH. as a "sign of the times." A word, 

By Rev. M. J. O'DonneU. i^ the beginning, therefore, con- 

cerning this secondary importance 
— the present doctorate thesis is the first that the theological 
faculty of Maynooth has caused to be published in the ver- 
nacular. Furthermore, the essay is distinctly in the modern 
style (if we may use the word in its blamelese sense), quite in 
accord with the numerous ** Studies in Positive Theology " that 
we are accustomed to expect from such writers as Batiffol, 
Vacandard, Ermoni, Turmel, and others. 

And, yet again, the topic chosen is at the same time one 
of the most debated and most interesting in the modern theol- 
ogy, the Sacrament of Penance in the Early Church. Conse- 
quently, we may well believe that even conservative old May- 
nooth now declares that she will not be behindhand in adopting 
the new tendency of theological scholarship. Of course, as the 
editor remarks in the '^ Notes " to the present number of the 
magazine, there is no " Modernism " in Ireland ; it is quite un- 
necessary for him even to refer to it, except as an interesting 
but remote phenomenon. 

Dr. O'DonneU's work is instinct with the spirit of histori- 
cal criticism. He has a thesis, indeed; he does not claim to 
be absolutely dispassionate and objective in his treatment of 
the subject — he allows that he starts with the purpose of con- 
futing such men as Dr. Lea, but none the less he does not allow 
his historical findings to be predetermined by his theological 
convictions. The result is an excellent mingling, in the proper 
proportions, of theology, history, and criticism. 

Needless to say, he does not attempt to cover the whole 
ground. This volume is a slender one of 150 pages. We may 
quote his own limitation of the subject: 

In connection with the Sacrament of Penance, it is only 
towards the end of the second century and the beginning of 
the third that we find sufficient evidence to formulate a con- 
sistent theory regarding the belief and the practice of the 
Church. With this period, therefore, I intend to deal. My 

^ Penaiui in thi Barfy Church, With a short Sketch of Subsequent Development. By 
*Rer. M. J. O'DonneU. Dublin : M. H. GUI & Son. 



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536 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

aim will be not merely to vindicate the sacramental character 
of penance, but to give a description, full as may be, of the 
early discipline associated with its administration. 

We have already indicated our belief that the author suc- 
ceeds admirably. 

In an introductory chapter, he demonstrates the fact that 
the Church of the second century was conscious of possessing 
the power of forgiving post-baptismal sins, and that this power 
was to be exercised through the ministers of the Church in a 
public action. In his second chapter he quotes the Fathers of 
the east and west of the third century, allowing their words 
to bear the burden of proving that the universal Church exer- 
cised her God-given power, at least in some cases. The third 
chapter deals with the question of the reservation of the iria 
capitalia. Dr. O'Donnell maintains — against the opinion of 
many able Catholic scholars, including Battifol and Vacandard — 
that there was no general practice of refusing absolution in 
these cases. In the remainder of the volume he discusses va- 
rious collateral questions: Public Penance; Confession, its Ne- 
cessity and Character ; Its Frequency ; Absolution ; and be in- 
cludes a chapter on the Development of the Doctrine of the 
Sacrament. 

Altogether the book is possibly the best discussion of the 
matter in our language. We have still to wait for some one 
who will answer Dr. Lea throughout, but in the meanwhile we 
must be extremely grateful for such an offering as this. 

Better than the finest accounts of 

THE LOVB OF BOOKS. the most eloquent historians does 

By De Bury. the little classic * which we owe to 

old Richard de Bury, enable us to 
realize the appreciation, amounting to affectionate veneration, 
which the scholars of the Middle Ages displayed for books. In 
his Philobiblion, Bury may be taken to be the spokesman of 
his age, and few speakers have exhibited more tender eloquence 
than is to be found in the pages wherein he praises '^ the store- 
houses of wisdom " ; exhorts men to love them at their true 
value, and complains of the neglect and ill-treatment which books 

* Tk€ Lovi of Books, Being the *' Philobiblion " ef Richard de Buiy, Bishop of DuifaaBu 
St. Louis: B. Herder. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 537 

receive. Bury's chief interest and ambition in life was to col- 
lect books, not that he might revel in the joys of selfish owner- 
ship ; but to make provision for needy scholars. In the Pro- 
logue here he tells, in his quaint, sincere, old-world style, how, 
taking thought and looking around to see what good work he 
could set himself to, ''there soon occurred to our contempla- 
tion a host of unhappy, nay, rather, of elect scholars, in whom 
God, the Creator, and Nature, his handmaid, planted the roots 
of excellent morals and of famous sciences, whom the poverty 
of their circumstances so oppressed that, before the frown of 
adverse fortune, the seeds of excellence, so fruitful in the cul- 
tivated field of youth, not being watered by the rains they re- 
quire, are forced to wither away." 

These talents, he continues, are lost to the Church, because 
their owners have no money to support themselves or to pro- 
vide the books necessary to their education. So, he resolved to 
devote himself to the work of providing books for the needy. 
"To this end, most acceptable in the sight of God, our atten- 
tion has long been unweariedly devoted. This ecstatic love has 
carried us away so powerfully that we have resigned all thoughts 
of other earthly things, and have given ourselves up to a pas- 
sion for acquiring books." 

This is no empty phrase-making. In his time Bury was 
tutor to Edward of Windsor, afterwards Edward III. ; he was 
twice ambassador to Pope John XXII. ; and, whilst Bishop of 
Durham, he was Lord Chancellor of England. All his great 
opportunities for book-collecting were made the most of; his 
agents were all over Europe, and when a book was found he 
never counted the cost. It is said that Richard's collections 
exceeded that of all the other English bishops put together. 
Towards the end of the work, the author '' showeth that he has 
collected so great store of books for the common benefit of 
scholars, and not for his own pleasure only." He destined them 
to a college which he proposed to found in the ** reverend uni- 
versity of Oxford, the chief nursing mother of all liberal arts." 
The most original and characteristic chapters are the Complaint 
of Books against Wars, against the Clergy already Promoted, 
against the Possessioners, and against the Mendicants. Expelled, 
too often, from the houses of the Clergy, the books complain: 

We have to mourn for the homes of which we have been 
unjustly robbed ; and as to our coverings, not that they have 



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538 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

not been given to us, but that the coverings anciently given 
to us have been torn by violent hands, insomuch that our soul 
is bowed down to the dust, our belly cleaveth unto the earth. 
We suffer from various diseases, enduring pains in our back 
and sides; we lie with our limbs unstrung by palsey, and 
there is no man who layeth it to heart, and no man who pro- 
vides a mollifying plaster. Our native whiteness that was 
clear with light has turned to dun and yellow, so that no 
leech who should see us would doubt that we are diseased 
with jaundice. Some of us are suffering from gout; as our 
twisted extremities plainly show. 

The books exhibit their endurance of all the ills that flesh 
is heir to. They are put in pledge at taverns, their ancient no- 
bility is ruined by having new names imposed upon them by 
worthless compilers, translators, and transformers, ''so that, 
against our will, the name of some wretched step-father is im- 
posed upon us, and the sons are robbed of the names of their 
true fathers." 

Alas ! for the noblest of human hopes. What became of the 
good bishop's books is a matter of conjecture. Most probably 
they went, at his death in 1345, to the house of tbe Durham 
Benedictines, at Oxford, where they remained till tbe suppres- 
sion by Henry VIII. Then some went to Duke Humphrey's 
library, others to Balliol, and the remainder to the purchaser 
of the dissolved college. How many prayers have been offered 
up, for the past three hundred years, at ''the chief nursing 
mother of all liberal arts " for the prince of book- lovers ? In 
1888, for the first time, an accurate text of the Latin original 
was printed, the results of fifteen years of labor, by an eminent 
scholar. From that text the present translation is made. This 
publication is among the first of a series which proposes to is- 
sue popular editions of the old English classics. The translator 
has cleverly preserved the quaintness of the original. 

The indefatigable Father Lasance 

THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. appears again in the lists with his 

By Lasance. tenth manual of devotion.* It is 

in his usual field — the field he has 

won for himself by his former successes — that of devotional lit- 

* Thoughts on tki Rtligious Lift, etc. By Rev. F. L. Lasance. New York : Bensiger 

Brothers. 



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i9o8.] New Books 539 

erature, manuals, prayer books, compilations for the benefit of 
religious communities. 

He is part author, part editor of the present volume, and 
from the combined efforts of his own pen and those of such writ- 
ers as Dom Bede Camm, Reginald Buckler, Blosius, Father Fa- 
ber, St. Francis de Sales, and others, he has put together a very 
comprehensive manual of Reflections on the General Principles 
of Religious Life, on Charity, Vocation, the Vows, the Rules, 
the Cloister Virtues, and the Main Devotions of the Church/' 
The result is a volume that may be used equally well as a 
source of thoughts for meditation, or a thesaurus of informa- 
tion on the multitudinous points indicated. It is a fit compan- 
ion for his Prayer Book for Religious. 

How are we to distinguish between 

ESSENTIALS AND NON- what is of obligation and what is 

ESSENTIALS. not, in matters of faith and practice. 

By Hughes. \^ ^ question frequently asked both 

by Catholics and non • Catholics. It 
is one which demands a careful reply that cannot be given in 
a sentence or two. Vague, evasive answers will not satisfy an 
intelligent inquirer. Exaggeration, on one side or the other, 
may easily result in harm. Some time ago the subject was 
treated with ability in a series of papers in the Ave Maria^ 
which are now published in book form.* If the volume bears 
no Imprimatur — which is somewhat surprising — the want is not 
due to any danger that it might not pass the ordeal of the 
most rigid canonical censorship. Father Hughes expounds the 
theological principles of the question with admirable clearness 
and conciseness; and with detail sufHcient to convey a thor- 
oughly practical grasp of Catholic teaching and practice, either 
to the inquiring stranger, or to the children of the household. 

No one, at the present day, can go 

ISRAEL'S HISTORICAL very far in the study of the Bible 

NARRATIVES. without feeling at times the need 

By Kent. of just such a work as Dr. Kent's 

Student's Old Testamentf The 

second volume, which lies before us, contains the historical and 

* Essentials and Non-Essentials of the Catholic Religion, By the Rev. H. G. Hughes. 
South Bend, Indiana: The Ave Maria Press. 

MstaeVs Historical and Bio^taphical Natrutives, By Charles Foster Kent, Ph.D. New 
York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 



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540 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

biographical narratives covering the period from Samuel to the 
Maccabean triumph. The work, apart from the notes, chiefly 
textual, and an introduction on the character of the narratives, 
is simply an edition of the Old Testament arranged according 
to subject-matter; thus, in the present instance, the historical 
materials are disposed, not in the canonical order, but accord- 
ing to the chronological sequence of events. It is, in fact, a 
sort of harmony of the Old Testament, which gives us at a 
glance, in parallel columns, all the narratives referring to any 
particular event, precisely as a gospel harmony or synopsis. 
Thus, for the reign of David, we have the parallel accounts of 
Samuel and the Chronicler; for the Maccabean times, of First 
and Second Maccabees, the editor includes not only the his- 
torical books proper, but also the historical portions of certain 
prophetical books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Haggai. The excel- 
lent maps and chronological tables will be welcomed as valua- 
ble aids by the student — if the cost of the six rather expensive 
volumes, which will comprise the set, do not keep them out of 
his reach. 

The Catholic reader will be pleased to note that the learned 
Yale professor includes the two books of Maccabees among his 
historical sources, and favors their admission into the canon. 
He will be pleased likewise to see that high historical value is 
accorded to the first book of Maccabees, and that some histor- 
ical elements, at least, are recognized as existing in the second ; 
and while he will regret that this scholar has been unable to 
accord a higher degree of historical trustworthiness to these 
books of Sacred Scripture, he will better comprehend the rea- 
son for it on learning that the erudite Jesuit commentator, Fa- 
ther Kaabenbauer, until recently the very bulwark of conserva- 
tive criticism, has felt constrained to take an attitude on this 
question essentially similar to Dr. Kent's. The errors and in- 
accuracies which the Jesuit author points out in these books 
are ascribed to popular rumor; but they are reconciled with 
the doctrine of inspiration by an admirable application of the 
theory respecting the intention of the writer. 

The book of Esther is placed by Dr. Kent among the his- 
torical writings; not that he regards the facts it relates as real 
history, but because the work exhibits the temper of the chosen 
race in the second century before Christ. On his own ground, 
then, we fail to see how he can in consistency omit Judith and 



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I9o8.] ^EW BOOKS 541 

Tobias. An impartial criticism will not rank them below Es- 
ther in historical worth ; and a devout mind will find in them 
far more food for edification than in the story of Vashti's rival, 
especially as it stands in the Protestant Bible. We do not 
doubt that if Judith and Tobias were found in the Protestant 
Canon, our author could reconcile his conscience to including 
them among the historical books, just as easily as he has found 
room for Esther. Dr. Kent's method of dealing with Esther 
has been followed by the Catholic Cosquin with respect to 
Tobias; and the Sulpician Father Vigouroux, the present sec- 
retary of the Biblical Commission, with unwonted boldness, has 
added his great authority to the application by giving it his 
encouragement, if not entire acceptance. If this radical method 
of dealing with the deutero-canonical historical books is to 
prevail in the circles of Vigouroux and Knabenbauer, objection 
on the part of scholars like Dr. Kent to including them in the 
Canon would probably disappear. Our author's favorable view 
of Maccabees leads us to hope that he is free from the bias 
which so unwisely excludes from the Canon the beautiful books 
of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus ; and that perhaps the day is not 
far distant when the Church's position respecting the Canon of 
the Old Testament will be fully vindicated by non- Catholic 
scholars. 

The attitude which the Yale professor takes up in reference 
to Ezra and Nehemiah is an indication that Van Hoonacker, 
the distinguished Louvain professor, is at last about to come 
into his own. The priority of Nehemiah to Ezra in the work 
of reforming the restored Jewish community, first mooted and 
then, post multa artamina, proven by Van Hoonacker, is fully 
upheld by Dr. Kent ; and it seems likely that the great restorer 
of Israel will receive the place in history that he deserves. 
The Ezra of Dr. Kent, however, is far too shadowy a figure 
to appeal to the historical sense of the Dutch critic. 

The general plan of the present volume and its execution 
are worthy of all praise ; but many incidental blemishes, partic- 
ularly its freedom in questioning or denying the trustworthi- 
ness of many narratives, prevent us from recommending this 
otherwise admirable work as a manual suitable to Catholic 
students of the Bible. 



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542 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

This book* is a study of the 
A STUDY IN APOLOGETICS, methods of apologetics. This des- 
By Gardeil. ignation of its character is an in- 

dication of its timeliness. In what 
relation to the supernatural act of faith^ stand the motives which 
prompt our belief that God has given a supernatural revelation, 
and our assent to the truths contained in that revelation ? This 
problem Father Gardeil considers from the subjective and the 
objective points of view, and resolves by the principles of St. 
Thomas. The work, which, considering the scope of the ques- 
tion, is very moderate in size, is divided into three books. 

In the first the notion of credibility, the degrees of reason- 
able credibility, and its special character, are expounded. The 
credibility of faith, Father Gardeil concludes, is usually based 
on motives which have a relative force. Nevertheless, the sec- 
ond book proceeds to establish the possibility of rigorously 
demonstrating the fact of a divine attestation of revelation, in 
accordance with the words of the Vatican Council: cum recta 
ratio fidei fundamenta demonstrat. In the third book Father 
Gardeil applies his principles and conclusions to the apprecia- 
tion of the various methods of apologetics. The existence of 
scientific apologetic, a type of which is Zigliara's PropiEdeutica^ 
Father Gardeil argues, is a possibility following from the pes* 
sibility of having demonstrative proof of the credibility of rev- 
elation. His next step is to show that, while the motives of 
credibility, for the most part, do not in themselves possess 
demonstrative force, yet, grouped under the hegemony of the- 
ology, which may be done without falling into a vicious circle, 
they are adequate. The author then proceeds to examine the 
subjective method in general. While he concedes to it some 
subordinate utility and efficacy, his verdict on it is : '' L'apol- 
ogetique immantiste n'aboutit pas comme doctrine; si il sem- 
ble aboutir dans des consciences individuelles, c'est en vertu 
des causes qui ne sont pas du ressort apologetique." 

In support of this conclusion he examines, successively, the 
three subjective methods, the pragmatist, the moral, and the 
fideist. If the pragmatist method confines itself strictly to its 
own resources, it is incapable of resulting in a doctrine ; but if, 
illogically, instead of building solely on action and life, it as- 
sumes the existence of the supernatural in Christian life, it may 

* La CridihUiU it U ApoUgeHque. Par le Pere A. Gardeil. Paris : Lecofifre. 



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I908.J New Books 543 

be granted a limited utility in certain cases. In examining the 
moral method, which he condemns as either inefficient, or, if it 
assumes the existence of the supernatural, a mere begging of 
the question, Farther Gardeil, of course, has his eye on New- 
man. His most significant, direct criticism of the Cardinal's 
doctrine is contained in a footnote: 

From the very first page of his Grammar of Assent ^ New- 
man debars himself from reaching apologetically the specifi- 
cally Christian assent of faith. That assent, in fact, is essen- 
tially /w^/^r testimonium. Now the assent of which Newman 
speaks all the time, in his Grammar and elsewhere, is not an 
assent essentially relative to veracious testimony, but a belief 
that is the highest form of opinion, but never transcends the 
sphere of opinion, which is created by the vraisemblances and 
internal harmonies between the external world (les chases) and 
our interior dispositions. At bottom, Newman, through the 
Kantian Coleridge, whose influence on him he acknowledged, 
has his views colored by the Kantian idea of faith, which is 
characterized by the objective insufficiency and the subjective 
sufficiency of the motives on which adhesion is based. 

A disciple of Newman would reply to this stricture by con- 
tending that for Newman a convergence of high probabilities 
may, by their cumulative force, beget an assent accompanied by 
complete certitude. In an appendix consisting of a further dis- 
cussion on the availability of miracles as a proof of credibility, 
the author brings his principles to bear on the views expressed 
by Le Roy, Lebreton, and some other recent writers who have 
advocated the '' phenomenalist '' position on this subject. This 
remarkably logical treatise will repay a thorough study. In a 
closing note Father Gardeil observes that he was putting the 
finishing touches to the last lines just as the Pope's Encyclical 
against Modernism appeared, which document, he continues, con- 
firms the views and conclusions of the book, and, in particular, 
of the appendix, concerning phenomenist philosophy and apol- 
ogetics. 

If one desires to measure the dis- 
RELI6I0N AND HISTORIC tance traveled by German Protest- 
FAITHS. antism, under the guidance of in- 

By Pflelderer. dividualism, since Luther formu- 

lated the principle. Dr. Pfleiderer, 
professor of Protestant theology in the University of Berlin, 



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544 JVSW^ BOOKS [Jan., 

and a widely acknowledged leader and light of contemporary 
English and American Protestant thought^ may be accepted as 
the register. The readings of that index display the fact that 
this Protestantism has broken with everything that the first re- 
formers considered essentials of Christianity. The present work* 
though comparatively small, and superficial in character, con* 
sists of a series of lectures delivered to a general audience in 
Berlin University, and exhibits the professor's valuation of 
Christianity. In that estimate the supernatural is rejected as 
mythical, the dogmatic has no place ; Christianity is reduced to 
its purely ethical element, and its Founder is shorn of all super- 
human authority. These are the proportions to which Christian- 
ity is reduced in order to meet the needs of the vast mass of 
people in the various Protestant sects who refuse to believe in 
the traditional faiths of these bodies and yet desire to keep up 
some profession of Christianity. This Protestantism, eviscerated 
of the last traces of supernatural religion, is a mere natural 
theism which graciously accords to Jesus of Nazareth a primacy 
of honor among the great moral teachers of the world. And 
it is this conception of Christianity that is accepted, for the 
most part, among moral and religious teachers of our American 
secular universities. No wonder that sincere Protestants who 
still retain allegiance to the creeds of their fathers, and know 
the present trend of thought, are beginning to admit that all 
hope of saving supernatural religion from being utterly swept 
away by the onflowing tide of rationalism and positivism must 
be placed in the Catholic Church. 

If the first half-score of the lectures contained in the col- 
lection were issued as a separate volume it might be recom- 
mended as a defence of the universality of the religious instinct 
as manifested in the great ethnic religions of the ancient world. 
But though, like the curate's egg, parts of it are excellent, the 
objectionable section is of a character too pernicious to per- 
mit any recommendation of the volume. 

The eloquent Dominican, Father 

RITUAL. Proctor, after an interval of three 

years, has given to the public at 

large the course of sermons on Catholic ritual which he deliv- 

• Rtligion and Historic Faiths. By Otto Pfleidercr, Professor of the University of Berlin. 
New York: B. W. Huebsch. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 545 

ered in the Cathedral of Westminster.* In five discourses, which 
are apologetic in tenor, he treats of the use and abuse of ritual, 
the soul of ritual, the language of ritual, the centre of ritual, 
and the development of ritual. The ordinary objections of non- 
Catholics against the elaborate ceremonies of the Church and 
the display of material wealth in religious worship are taken 
up in the sermon on " The Soul of Ritual." Father Proctor also 
answers those who, in their revolt against excessive externalism 
in religion, would go to the opposite extreme, and deprive re- 
ligion of the aid which it receives from symbolic embodiment 
of internal acts and- dispositions. The last address is a reply 
to the prevalent contention that in all things the early Church 
ought to be the rule of the Church to-day: "It was so, or it 
was not so, in primitive Christian times, in Apostolic days, so 
should it be now." 

Father Proctor replies by showing that the principle of de- 
velopment applies to the whole life of the Church. ** As there 
is development in doctrine, development in worship, there must 
be development in ritual, the Church's expression of doctrine 
and cult ; there must be development in our attitude towards 
the developed truth, i. ^., in our rites and ceremonies." 

A logic- chopping critic might be tempted to object that 
Father Proctor's line of argument proves too much. Sometimes 
it could be prolonged logically towards the conclusion that the 
law of development ought to prevent any permanent fixation 
of ritual at all. Yet in ritual as in dogma, though less rigor- 
ously, the Church insists on conformity to ancient tradition. 
''Truth expands as a tree; so consequently does ritual. Doc- 
trine makes progress, not by change in substance, but by ac- 
cidental development — so must ceremonial. As Christianity 
enters more deeply into the hearts, the lives, the minds of men, 
so it develops greater outward pomp, more exterior worship, 
more ceremonious demonstration of faith, hope, and love." This 
principle alone can scarcely account for the development of 
the ritual of the Mass, without any corresponding doctrinal 
development; from the simple primitive rite to the elaborate 
form of subsequent times. It is scarcely fair, however, to ex- 
pect from an orator the dialectical exactitude of a theological 
treatise. 

* RihuU in CatMclic Worship. Sermons Preached in Westminster Cathedral during the 
Lent of Z904. By the Very Rev. Father Proctor. New York : Benziger Brothers. 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 35 



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546 NEW Books LJan., 

A handy, compendious, and accurate little manual of cere- 
monies proper for ordinary parochial needs is the translation 
of the German handbook of Father Ganns, S.J. The transla- 
tion* has been carefully made by one Jesuit, and edited by 
another, a sufficient guarantee that the book is faithful to ap- 
proved authorities. 

When, in 1906, Pius X« beatified 
BLESSED JULIE BILLIART. the foundress of the Sisters of 

Notre Dame de Namur,t it was 
rightly interpreted as another mark of the Holy Father's zeal 
for the teaching of catechism. For Blessed Julie Billiart's life 
was signalized by a marvelous devotion to that office. Bom in 
1 75 1, she was only seven years old when she began to gather 
her little companions around her to teach them the catechism. 
At the age of twenty-three she became a helpless invalid ; and 
for years she gathered around her bed the little ones of the 
village to give them religious instruction. 

Through her subsequent life, almost to the end, pass the 
baleful storms of the French Revolution. During the early days 
she was the chief instrument in preserving religion in and around 
her native village, where a schismatical priest was in possession. 
Once she barely escaped from a disorderly rabble, who had in- 
vaded her home to kill the " devote," by being carried, helpless 
as she was, downstairs and placed in a cart by her friends, and 
secretly conveyed to a place of safety. Her institute, the Con- 
gregation of Notre Dame, was launched during the period of 
peace established by Bonaparte. Her first houses, situated in 
Flanders and near the French frontier, suffered sadly during the 
frequent campaigns which swept across that quarter of Europe 
in the later Napoleonic wars. 

Sisters from Gembloux, Fleurus, Jumet, and other towns 
were frequently obliged to flee to Namur, where they were com- 
paratively safe from military violence. Fugitives in the disas- 
trous flight from Waterloo invaded the Convent of Fleurus. 
At Jumet a Prussian officer took up his quarters in the convent, 
and protected the Sisters from annoyance. The Sisters of Gem- 
bloux suffered from the French. 

* Handbook of dnmonusjor Priests and Semimariams, By J. F. MUller, S.J. Translated 
by A. Ganns, S.J. St. Louis : B. Herder. 

* TA€ Lift of th€ Blessed Julie Billiart, By a Member of the Sisters of Notre Dame*. 
New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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i9o8.] NEW BOOKS 547 

After twenty- two years of helpless suffering the use of her 
limbs was miraculously restored to Julie. During a mission at 
Amiens, Father Enfantin, a member of the Fathers of the Faith^ 
who highly esteemed Julie's work, and knowing that she could 
do more for God's glory if she had the use of her limbs, said 
to her: ''lam beginning to-day a novena to the Sacred Heart 
for a person in whom I am interested. Will you join ? " Julie, 
unsuspecting, promised to join. On the following Friday, after 
the erection of the mission cross, Father Enfantin suddenly 
came to Julie, who was sitting in her chair, and said : " Mother, 
if you have any faith, take one step in honor of the Heart of 
Jesus." Julie rose and took the required step — the first for 
twenty-two years. "Take another." She obeyed. "Take a 
third." Again she obeyed, remarking that she felt able to con- 
tinue. "No, that will do. Sit down." And Father Enfantin 
went away, forbidding her to tell the sisters what had happened. 
The cure was permanent. The biography continues: 

The sisters had already retired for the night and noticed 
nothing, for, in spite of her infirmities, Julie needed no help 
to undress, but slipped on to her low couch from a chair of 
the same height. For three days she kept her cure a secret, 
maintaining her self-control so far that she remained seated 
when, on the following Sunday, the public procession of the 
Blessed Sacrament passed her door. On the last day of the 
novena Father Enfantin gave her leave to publish the fact. 
Julie prolonged her thanksgiving after Mass, while the sisters 
went down to breakfast. The little orphans, with their mis- 
tress, were in the adjoining room, with a glass door looking 
on the staircase. Suddenly one of the youngest of them gave 
a scream. " Look, Ma Mire is walking downstairs ! " 

The closing chapter of this excellent piece of biography, in 
which the story of a modern valiant woman, whose life was one 
of wonderful activity and true sanctity, is told with good sense 
and literary ability, contains a modest account of the successes 
which have attended the labors of her children. Among these 
successes is that which the work of the Sisters of Notre Dame 
has achieved in America. "For sixty three years they have 
helped the bishops and pastors of the United States to solve 
the difficult problem of equipping and maintaining Catholic 
schools absolutely dependent on voluntary support, yet in no 



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548 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

wise inferior to the State schools financed at the public ex- 
pense. Their success in educational matters may be gauged 
from the fact that Julie's American daughters have been selected 
by the hierarchy to open Trinity College in connection with the 
Catholic University at Washington." The latest foreign expan- 
sion of the order has been in the Transvaal, whither some Eng- 
lish Sisters settled last year; and already the political struggle 
going on there now threatens to involve their suppression. 



A sense for scientific completeness, 

HISTORY OF COMMERCE, probably, induced the author of 

By Day. this text- book for beginners in 

economics* to start ab avo^ by 
sketching the conditions of trade, or all that we know about 
them, as they existed in the Mesopotamian Valley and along 
the banks of the Nile, in the days before Joseph. But the 
author is obviously conscious that the student has but little 
valuable information to gain from our scanty knowledge of the 
commerce of these ancient times or of the subsequent ages of 
early Greece and Rome. For he disposes of all these periods 
in about thirty pages, out of a total of over six hundred, and 
begins his serious work in Part II., devoted to Mediaeval Com- 
merce. 

This part, covering from about the year looo to 1500, is a 
brief but suggestive sketch of the mediaeval commercial and in- 
dustrial world. The story of the rise and expansion of com- 
mercial Europe, till it assumes the huge proportions which be- 
long to it in the nineteenth century, makes a large demand on 
the writer's powers of lucid statement, method, and condensation. 
Up to the beginning of the last century, the history is little 
more than a bare outline. But from that date commerce of the 
various European countries, especially of England and Ger- 
many, is treated with rich detail, and the salient factors brought 
out in bold relief. One hundred and fifty pages are given to 
the history of the commercial growth of the United States; 
but, except so far as it is incidentally noted in relation to this 
country, South America is ignored. The part played by the 
introduction of railways, and manufacturing machinery, the culti- 
vation of cotton, mining, and shipping receive sufficient atten- 

*A History ofCommtrct, By Clive Day, Ph.D. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. 

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I908.] NEW BOOKS 549 

tion, but the same can scarcely be said of the agricultural ex- 
pansion since 1835. 

To keep so large a subject, however, within the reasonable 
limits of a text-book, means that some things had to be unduly 
crowded, or even crowded out. A work of this kind, in the 
production of which the author has had but little help from 
similar attempts by predecessors in the endeavor, cannot be ex- 
pected to attain anything like perfection before it reaches a 
second or a third, or even a fourth edition, a success to which 
this one will, no doubt, attain. There are numerous special 
bibliographies attached to the various divisions, and a large 
general list of works at the end. To every chapter is added a 
list of questions well adapted to stimulate the pupil to the cul- 
tivation of reflection and personal research. 

Students of early church history 
PATR0L06T. and patrology will welcome the ap- 

pearance of another volume of the 
series of early texts and documents which is being issued under 
the editorship of MM. Hemmer and Lejay. The present number * 
contains the Didach^, or Doctrine of the Apostles, and the Epistle 
of Barnabas. The Greek text is accompanied by a French ver- 
sion, critical notes, and references. M. Hemmer has furnished an 
erudite, critical introduction to the Didach^, while M. Ogier has 
written one for the Epistle. The introduction, tables, critical 
and explanatory notes, place a scholarly knowledge of these two 
valuable documents of Christian origins within easy grasp of the 
industrious student. 

Much depth of feeling and much 
SOME RECENT VERSE, delicate beauty of thought have 

gone into the making of Miss 
Logue's brief poems. " The Quiet Hour " f — happily named for 
its suggestion of solitude and veiled twilight memories fraught 
with tenderness and pain — is a creditable addition to contem- 
porary Catholic verse. There are signs of immaturity in the 
little volume, but none the less it has sincere artistic purpose. 
And in more than one poem Miss Logue has undeniably touched 

^ Les Pires Apostoliques^ I, Doctrine tUs Apotres. ^pitrt de Bamabi, Hemmer, Ogier et 
Laurent. Paris : Picard et Fils. 

t The Quiet Hour. And Other Verses, By EmUy Logue. Philadelphia : Peter Reilly ; 
Dublin : Browne & Nolan. 



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550 New Books [Jan., 

life. The quieter tragedies of men — and particularly of women — 
are very real to her; but real also is the nearness of God, the 
pity of his gracious Mother, and the watchful angels. "The 
Waiting Love'' is characteristic in its blending of divine and 
human love, as also in its severe simplicity and absence of 
imagery or metaphor. Devotional and meditative poems pre- 
dominate in the collection, although there is a charming blank- 
verse narrative of St. Wenceslaus, and the sonnets are, as a 
rule, excellent. That entitled "The Poet"— 

Most Godlike man of men I upon thy heart 
The woes of all the world are graven deep — 

is one of Miss Logue's best pieces of work, and makes us hope- 
ful of her poetic future. 

The Toiler^^ a new volume by the Canadian author of Songs 
of the Wayside^ brings with it a message of cheer and sympa- 
thy and earnest courage. Dr. Fischer has a true love of hu- 
manity and of natural beauty; but in metre and in diction he 
might well be more fastidious. From a critical standpoint 
" June Mornings " is far better than the title poem ; it has in 
fact more precision of form and more originality of conception 
than almost any other in the collection. 

A new Christmas story in special holiday dress and orna- 
mented pages, entitled The Little City of Hope;\ by F. Marion 
Crawford, has just been published by The Macmillan Company. 
The tale, as with all of Mr. Crawford's work, is admirably done 
from the viewpoint of writing; but why it should be called a 
Christmas story, save that it is published for the holiday time 
and mentions Christmas, we are at a loss to know. 

All admirers of that inspiring singer, Sidney Lanier — and 
we urge those who know him not, to become acquainted with 
his writings — will give an enthusiastic welcome to a new edi- 
tion of his Hymns of the Marshes. J The volume is admirably 
printed, and the photographs which it contains, taken from 
the marshes themselves, are a pleasant aid in the interpretation 
of the songs. 

• The Toiler. And Other Poems. By William J. Fischer. Toronto : William Briggs. 
t The Little City of Hope. By F. Marion Crawford. New York: The Macmillan Com- 
pany. 

X Hymns of the Marshes. By Sidney Lanier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 551 

This new volume,* from the pen of Henry Van Dyke, is 
made up of sketches, descriptive and narrative, which endeavor 
to illustrate the pleasure and benefit to be derived from days 
spent out of doors, in touch with the joys that nature offers in 
wood and stream and mountain. The volume also includes some 
short stories, done in the easy, pleasant style of Dr. Van Dyke, 
which are wholesome and refreshing. The technical work oa 
the volume and the illustrations are well done. 



Daily attendance at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the 
subject of a valuable little pamphlet f which, in an interesting 
way, presents to the reader considerations on the mysteries of 
the Holy Mass, and the abundant graces which it offers as a 
means of our sanctification. 

A small, handy edition of the New Testament): just pub- 
lished should serve well to promote a more frequent reading 
of Holy Scripture among the faithful. Considering the small 
price of this volume, no one can have an excuse for not hav- 
ing a copy of the New Testament. 

^Days Off, By Henrj Van Dyke. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 
t Daily Mass ; or, the Mystic Treasures 0/ the Holy Sacrifice. By Rev. J. McDonnell, S.J. 
Dnblin: Irish Messenger Office. 

X The New Testament, New York : The C. Wildermann Company. 



NOTICE. 

The latest Encyclical of the Holy Father on " Mod- 
ernism " is too extensive for publication in The Catho- 
lic World. Desirous that it should be obtainable in 
handy form, we have issued a complete English transla- 
tion in pamphlet, and will mail it to any address on the 
receipt of twenty-five cents, postage free. Address, Thb 
Catholic World, lao West 6oth Street, New York City. 



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foxcign pedobicals* 

TAe Tablet (26 Oct.) : Statistics concerning the American pa* 
rochial school system are advanced in reply to certain 
English Catholics who have asserted that here we ap- 
prove, at least tacitly, of the secular schools. The of* 
ficial stand of the Church on this question is shown to 

be identical in both countries. Fr. Thurston, S.J., 

continues his discussion of the Elevation in the Mass. 
The main question considered is liturgical, that is, con- 
cerning the practice of showing the Host to the congre- 
gation. Although Socialism is characterized by Lady 

Lovat as ''a dream impossible of realization,'' she says 
that '' the first thing that must strike the reader of arti- 
cles on the subject of Socialism is the weakness of the 
arguments in refuting it.'' A refutation is not attempted 
here. The writer simply urges Catholics to oppose the 
Socialist propaganda. 

(2 Nov.) : Rev. George Angus ventures to break a lance 
with Bishop Ingram apropos of various remarks made by 
the latter here in Ameriqa. For example, the Bishop of 
London is quoted as saying that ** the special function of 
the Anglican Communion is to preserve exact truth " — 
yet how is it, asks Rev. Angus, '' that she can do this and 
tolerate within her comprehensive bosom good men who 

teach exact opposites." Fr. Thurston points out how 

an abuse crept into the devotion of laymen at Mass; they 
came to consider that the mere sight of the Host at the 
Elevation was sufficient to fulfil the obligation of hear- 
ing Mass. In regard to the attitude of the faithful dur- 
ing the Elevation, the opinion is expressed that ''the 
usage which prevails among the good Catholics of one's 
immediate neighborhood is the safest arbiter of right and 
wrong in all those rubrical questions in which ecclesias- 
tical authority does not speak plainly." Promise is 

made of two more historical romances from the prolific 
pen of Father Hugh Benson. Rev. Spencer Jones con- 
cludes his study on ''Corporate Reunion Regarded as a 
Science." A double contrast is drawn between matters of 
dogma and matters of discipline. In the former he shows 
that it is impossible for the Catholic Church to change, 
since it is committed to its "de fide" pronouncements, 



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I908.J FOREIGN PERIODICALS 553 

while he contends that other churches can and have 
changed in dogmatic teaching. In disciplinary matters all 
communions might change and adapt themselves to cor- 
porate reunion. The writer notes that the great majority 
of non-Catholics are opposed to the Church simply be- 
cause of certain disciplinary rules, e. £., church service 
in Latin, celibacy of the clergy, etc. It is on these 
points that he suggests compromise. 
(9 Nov.): Contains a statement of the dispute between 
Mr. Williams on one side, with Fr. Norris of the Oratory 
and Abbot Gasquet on the other, in regard to Newman 

and the recent Encyclical. In the Literary Notes the 

article by Fr. CliflFord in The Catholic World of Octo- 
ber is quoted with approval. The present-day unrest so 
frankly recognized by the American writer is said to pre- 
sent a " curious contrast to the picture of perfect peace and 
unanimity fondly imagined by some amiable optimists.'' 
(16 Nov.): The Roman Correspondent states thaf never 
for a moment did the Roman authorities think of asso- 
ciating the name of Newman with Modernism.'' 
TAe Month (Nov.) : Rev. Sydney F. Smith gives an exposition of 
the Encyclical on,'' Modernism." He aims at an elucida- 
tion of the tenets of Modernism which will enable Catho- 
lics to appreciate better the application of the Encyclical 
to doctrines. The common a priori conviction that Papal 
injunction is detrimental to progress appears to be the 
justification of critics, however insufficient their knowledge 
or deficient their judgment. The Pope's right to legislate 
concerning a matter antagonistic to the fundamental dog- 
mas of Catholicism needs no vindication. In the arti- 
cle ''Science and its Counterfeits," by the editor, atten- 
tion is called to the distinction between theoretical and 
practical science. The vast horde- of would-be scientists, 
purveyors of exploded theories, oracles of sensational 
journalism, have sinned against theoretical science. In 
opposition to the true scientific discretion of Huxley, Dar- 
win, and Wallace, who acknowledged the impassable gulf 
between the organic and inorganic, we have the unwar- 
ranted assertion of Mr. Edward Clodd, a popular scien- 
tist, that the origin of life presents no greater problem 

than the origin of water. Rev. Joseph Keating, in his 

"Apology for Parody," says that the manifest prejudice 

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154 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [!"•» 

against parody is ill-founded. Many great poets have not 
disdained to be parodists. Parody becomes objectionable 
when employed in a malicious or irreverent spirit. The 
skilful and experienced parodist keeps without the pale 
of poetry while in the field of burlesque. 

The National Review (Dec.) : '' Episodes of the Month " deals 
particularly with the attitude that England ought to as- 
sume toward Germany. Alfred Austin contributes a 

poem : " How Can One Serve One's King ? " " Some 

Unpublished Pages of German Diplomacy/' by Ignotus, 
states that England has many times of late escaped war 
with Germany only by a hair's breadth, and that Ger- 
many must eventually wage war with England. Lord 

William Cecil in '^ Missions of China " reviews the en- 
deavor to Christianize the Chinese Empire, and pays a 
glowing tribute to the Catholic missionaries' work there. 
He states that, alone, they are inadequate for the task. 

"The State and the Family," by St. Loe Strachey, 

is a paper in which it is emphatically charged that the 
object of the Socialists is the destruction of the family. 

The Expository Times (Nov.) : Professor Sanday on the Apoca- 
lypse. He would like to think that its author himself 
was a sufferer in the Neronian Persecution.— —Rev. 
Charles S. Macalpine writes of the Sanctification of Christ, 
basing his discussion on the exegesis of the texts: "Him 
whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world" 
(John X. 36) and " For their sakes I sanctify myself, that 
they themselves also may be sanctified in truth " (John 
xvii. 19). The Cambridge Modern History is recog- 
nized as the best example of what is now understood by 
the writing of history. 

The Irish Monthly (Nov.) : The sixth of the Little Essays on 
Life and Character is a narrative about the adventures of 
the writer during boyhood, in the world of books, the 
friends he met there, and the influence they exert in 

shaping character. ^Alice Furlong's description of the 

interior peace which reigns in a certain holy monastery 
will awaken responsive echoes in the hearts of those who 

have ever visited Mount Mellary Abbey. " The Tower 

of Religious Perfection," is a sermon preached by the 
late Fr. Bridgett, C.SS.R., at the profession of a Re- 
demptorist nun. 

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I908.J FOREIGN PERIODICALS 555 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Nov.) : The Rev. John Ncary 
contributes a paper on the " Infallibility of the Pope in 
Defining Dogmatic Facts/' It is a brief sketch of Jan- 
senism, dealing in particular with the question raised by 
Arnauld on the condemnation of the Augustinus. The 
Jansenist contention, that the propositions were not con- 
demned in the sense of Jansenius, but in a sense errone- 
ously assigned to him, is, to say the least, neither just 
nor logical. From the controversy we have learned that 
a dogmatic fact is any fact pertaining to dogma, this in- 
cludes apprehending the true sense of an author.— ^The 
Exposition of the recent Decree is continued. The pro- 
positions from the eighth to the twenty-sixth are divided 
into those concerning inspiration and revelation, and 
treated under separate headings. By way of introduc- 
tion, there are a few observations on the nature of reve- 
lation and inspiration. The Abb^ Loisy's doctrines are 
mentioned as especially coming under the condemned pro- 
positions. '' We value," says Dr. Coughlan, " no less than 
eminent writers, the practical value of Scripture and 
Creeds ; but we believe them to be practically useful be- 
cause we believe them first to be intellectually true." 

Dr. McCaffrey, of Maynooth, takes the editors of Lord 
Acton's Lectures on Modern History severely to task for 
the carelessness manifested in their work. The lectures, 
it appears, were printed from manuscripts prepared by 
Lord Acton while Regius Professor of Modern History 
at Cambridge; but, unfortunately, he was not spared to 
make the requisite corrections for the press, and those 
who got the manuscripts ready for publication seemed to 
think that no corrections were necessary. Aside from 
these editorial blunders, the lectures themselves possess 
literary charm, but '' should not be called history." Many 
contradictory and unscientific statements are quoted. 
'' The man who relied on Macaulay, Sharpe, and Burke, 
may have done excellent literary work, but he is not a 
model whom we should like to recommend to earnest 
students of history." The mania of Acton, for accusing 
the Church, the Popes, and the Councils of murder, is 
pointed out. 

Le Correspondani (25 Oct.) : Mgr. Chapon, Bishop of Nice, con- 
tributes an article on the traditional and modern critic. 

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556 FOREIGN Periodicals [Jan., 

The latter critics, he tells us, employ methods a priori 
and subjective. They are theorizers who wish to reduce 

the origins of Christianity to a system. ^Writing of 

religious art in France during the nineteenth century, 
Alphonse Germain maintains that there was no decadence. 
(id Nov.): The latest novel of Ren^ Bazin, Le BU qui 
Uve^ is declared to be excellent by Jacques Duval. 
It is a sociological study of the past fifty years, and 
exposes the faults and duties of Catholics in the face 

of the syndicate movement in country places. ^By 

facts and by the text of their own platform, an anony- 
mous writer proves that the anti-military propaganda of 
the German and French Socialists can result in nothing 
but the ruin of France and the welfare of Germany. 

La Dimocratie Ckretienne (8 Oct.) : " The Social Sense and the 
Formation of Christian Consciences," by Abb^ Six, de- 
fines the social sense as an aptitude and disposition of 
soul to see and feel at once whether one's acts not only 
respect the rights of others, but also safeguard the funda- 
mental constitution of society in general, as well as the 
different organisms which compose it, and the functions 
implied in them. The writer discusses the necessity for, 
and the manner of forming, this sense. 
(8 Nov.): In the first article, "An Historic Hour — On 
the Morrow of the Encyclical * Pascendi,' " Mgr. Vanneuf- 
ville applies this document to ** Christian Democracy " for 
the purpose of showing that the teaching of the Encyc- 
lical, far from retarding, aids the movement for Christian 
Democracy, while agnostic immanence, on the other hand, 

would be ruinous to it. ^The Social Homily delivered 

by Cardinal Maffi at the '' Social Week '' of Pistoia takes 
up the gospel narrative of the multiplication of the 
loaves and fishes, and evolves from it lessons in regard 

to modem economics. ^The account of the Congress 

of German Catholics at Wtirzburg contains extracts from 
numerous speeches emphasizing the practical benefits 
which have already sprung from the union of the Catho- 
lics in Germany, and outlining plans for their future 
efforts. 

£tudes (5 Nov.): M. Ferdinand Prat writes on the theology of 
St. Paul. He considers the subjectivism of Ritschl's 
understanding of Paul's theology, and compares this with 



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I908.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 557 

the accepted notion.— —The article on the religious crisis 
of Israel is continued, 

(20 Nov,) : M. Jules Lebreton has an extensive article 
on the Encyclical and the Theology of the Modernists. 
He finds that there are two great influences directing 
the ''Modernist" movement: the religious philosophy 
of Kant and Schleiermacher and the positive sciences. 
Under this double influence, certain liberal Catholic the- 
ologians have reconstructed the notions of revelation and 
authority so radically that Protestants have entirely ac- 
quiesced. With such reinterpretations the Church au- 
thorities can have no patience. M. Boub^e contributes 

a paper on the " Observance of the Sabbath in England/' 
apropos of the recent convention in Yarmouth. 

La Civilth Cattolica (2 Nov.) : '' Modernistic Philosophy " is 
the second article upon Modernism, and purposes to 
show the entirely naturalistic character of modern philos- 
ophy. An article upon Guyan's " Esquisse d'une mor- 
ale sans obligation ni sanction " is a continuation of the 
study of the moral problem considered in previous issues. 
(16 Nov.): The third in the series of articles upon Modern- 
ism is a review of The Programme of the Modernists^ a book 
written as a '' Reply to the Encyclical of Pius X. — ' Pas- 
cendi Dominici Gregis.' " The "Programme" — which is an 
exposition of the principles advocated by the Modernists — 
is described as " an involuntary confirmation of the Encyc- 
lical, which it bitterly assails/' and " the critical method/' 
which it advocates as "an application of the naturalistic 

method to divine things." "The Lay School/' begun 

in the issue of 19 Oct., is continued. 

Annales de Philosophie Chritienne (Nov.): Most English and 
American readers will find some of the book notices and 
the " Chronicle of the Philosophic and Religious Move- 
ment in England" more interesting than the set articles 
in this number of the Annales. The editor himself re- 
views an extremely important work on The Moral Crisis 
of the New Times^ by Paul Bureau (Bloud, 1907). The 
moral crisis is more marked than either the intellectual 
or the political crisis in France. "France has received 
no moral education for a century past." The "children 
of tradition/' always blindly opposed to change of any 
and all kinds, are submitted to criticism for the evil they 

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5S8 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan., 

have done, but praised none the less for the ''previous 
service they have rendered in behalf of the moral wel- 
fare." The question of Development of Doctrine is dis- 
cussed apropos of the joint work of the late M. Brune- 
tiire and M. de Labriolle on St. Vincent de Lerins ; and, 
again, in a brief review of Through Scylla and Charybdis. 
The reviewer declares that the title of Tyrrell's latest 
work might be '' Neither Scholastic nor Pragmatist." He 
defends the unfortunate author against the charge of 
equivocation or double-dealing in his famous articles on 
the limits of the development theory. The Annates will 
publish later a more complete review of Through Scylla 

and Charybdis, Cardinal Gibbons is . briefly defended 

against the attack of Sabatier Jn the ''Lettre Ouverte/' 
Sir Oliver Lodge's new catechism is ridiculed. 

La Revue Apologitique (i6 Oct.): M. C. de Ktrwan points out 
the superiority of the method of criticism employed by 
men of the school of M. TAbb^ Fontaine over that em- 
ployed by writers of whom M. Ed. le Roy is a type. He 
complains that the latter school is imbued with the un- 
just prejudice that the intelligence of the day is in itself 
and intrinsically superior to that of generations gone by. 
^The recent work of M. Pierre Batiffol on " The Teach- 
ing of Jesus '' is regarded as dangerous by M. J. A. Wilt- 

mann. ''The Formation of Eve'' is given treatment 

by Philomathe. 

Revue Pratique d^ Apologetique (i Nov.): M. Battifol concludes 
his studies on "The Nascent Church and Catholicism/' 
an analysis of the teaching of the apostolic and sub- 
apostolic writers concerning the Church. M. Lepin, 

known of late for his searching study of the Gospel of 
St. John, takes the story of the multiplication of the 
loaves as a means of disproving Loisy's theory that the 
Fourth Gospel is all " one grand allegory."-^— Some cor- 
respondence is given (the answers being written by M. 
Guibert) on the ground and the qualities of the obedi- 
ence due to the recent instructions on Modernism. 
(15 Nov.): M. Baudrillart prints his discourse, which was 
delivered to the students of the Institui Catholique de 
Paris ^ on " The Modern Spirit and the Christian Spirit" 
He admits the gravity of the present intellectual situa- 
tion among Catholic students. He warns against com« 

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I908.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 559 

promise, but insists upon the possibility of a synthesis 
between intellectual activity and a '' submission pure and 
simple to the authority of the Church/' He ridicules 
the current saying " True in dogma, but false in history/' 
declaring that if such an absurdity be thinkable for a 
German brain, it certainly is unthinkable for a French 

one. M. Lepin finishes his study on the historicity of 

the narration of the multiplying of the loaves in St 
John. A correspondence on the " failure of the cate- 
chism " by the professor of catechetical pedagogy, at 

Mans. The Parisian paper Le Matin of the nth of 

October published a violent attack on Pius X., charg- 
ing his Holiness with contradicting the intellectual poli- 
cies of Leo XIII. The charge is answered in this num- 
ber of the Revue by E. A., who carefully covers the 
questions of Modern Civilization"; "The Church and 
the Civil Power " ; " Separation of Church and State in 
France " ; '' Ecclesiastical Studies," etc., showing that 
Pius X., in all these matters, is quite in accord with the 
policy of Leo XIII., whom the writer in Le Matin^ wish- 
ing to institute an insidious comparison, had admitted 
to be ''the admirable Leo, perhaps the clearest brain 

and the greatest genius of his century." Of special 

interest is the page from M. Guibert, demonstrating that 
Newman is not a " modernist," in the evil sense of the 
word. 

V Action Sociale de la Femme (Oct.) : L. Duval-Arnould con* 
tributes a conference on the rights of the child. He con- 
siders, in particular, the right to life and to family train- 
ing : under this heading he discusses divorce. Then fol- 
lows the right of heritage, with a few thoughts on he- 
redity. The right of personality concludes the article. 

Marguerite Bois tells of the Associations of Heads 

of Families, whose purpose is to secure for parents some 
influence on the spirit of the teaching given their chil- 
dren. 

Stimmen aus Maria^Laach (21 Oct.): Fr. Bessmer, S.J., treats 
of ''Religious Obedience," at the same time explaining 

the first eight propositions of the new Syllabus. Fr. 

Banterkus, S.J., contributes a treatise on "Taxes on In- 
crease in Valuation." " A Valuable Contribution to His- 
torical Statistics of Population," by Fr. Krose, S.J., showi 

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56o FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan. 

how much in this direction was done by Bishop Thiel, 
of San Jos^ de Costa Rica, who, with the help of parish 
registers, gave quite complete statistics of the population 

of that place. Fr. Stockmann discusses GotUsminne 

and Gral^ two Catholic periodicals whose field is re- 
ligious poetry. He sympathizes with their aim to intro- 
duce good Catholic poetry into the German national lit- 
erature, but cautions them against being deflected into 
by-paths. 

Raz6n y Fe (Nov.) : Ruiz Amado writes at length on the edu- 
cational problems of Spain. His views are not over- 
hopeful nor are his judgments of various Ministers of 
Public Education over-complimentary. E. Portillo con- 
tinues his critical study of eighteenth century Spanish 
Church History in an article on the Concordat of 1753. 

^The measurableness of sensations is treated by 

Ugarte de Ercilla. 

Esfanay Amirica (15 Nov.): In an article on the ''progres- 
sive " school of Catholic biblical scholars, Anacleto Orej6n 
expresses his belief in the good faith and sincerity of 
such men as Lagrange, Hummelauer, Bonaccorsi, Minoc- 
chi. Prat, and Battifol, though he is unwilling to agree 
so fully as they with the conclusions of the " rationalis- 
tic " higher critics. He is of opinion, however, '' that it 
matters little to the Catholic whether such books as 
Judges, the four books of Kings, and others are the orig- 
inal work of a single author or are a mosaic formed out 
of diverse documents derived from different sources; 
whether the Psalms are chiefly the work of David and 
were completed in the time of Esdras, or belonged only 
in small measure to the royal Prophet and were finished 
in the time of the Machabees; whether the Epistle to 
the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, by Barnabas, or 
by Apollo." P. M. Velez calls attention to the deca- 
dent condition of the Spanish merchant marine and praises 
the advocates of a more energetic effort to develop trade 
especially with the Spanish-American countries.— Max- 
imilian Estebanez treats of the benefits resulting from a 

sound, well-established system of credit Guillermo 

Jtinemann writes about Agustin de Rojas. 



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Current Bvents. 

No very striking event has taken 
France. place in France. The Anti-Mili- 

tarists seem to have been shamed 
into silence, for the time being at all events. The intervention 
in Morocco, forced upon the country by the massacre at Cas* 
ablanca, has led to no foreign intervention. In the contest go- 
ing on in that country between the two Sultans, France has 
taken the side of the present occupant of the throne, and, in 
consequence, his success seems to be assured. On his part it is 
said that he is inclined to renounce his former pro- German ten- 
dencies. In consequence, the prospects are somewhat better for 
a settlement on the lines of the Algeciras Act, which gave to 
Spain and France the right to organize a police force in order to 
maintain order on the coast On the other side of Morocco, the 
Algerian border, one of the tribes has commenced hostilities, and 
the prospect has become somewhat disquieting. 

The frequency of crimes of all sorts is attributed by many 
to the practical abolition of capital punishment which has re- 
sulted from the action of successive Presidents. The moral in- 
fluence of the Church in France being now very little, the guil- 
lotine is being invoked to punish crime which should have been 
prevented, if the secular education which the state has established 
had proved as beneficial as its advocates claim. The public, by 
the voice of juries at trials, is calling upon the government to 
carry out to the letter the law as it exists; while the govern- 
ment, strange to say, is striving to suppress this expression of 
opinion. One of the newspapers put to its readers the question 
whether or no they were in favor of the systematic infliction of 
the death penalty; and of the 1,412,000 replies which it received, 
1, 083,000 were in the aflirmative. This discussion, and the 
causes which have led to it, clearly indicate that although France 
is very wealthy, said by some authorities to be the wealthiest 
nation in Europe, it is suffering in what is of far greater im- 
portance. The state of the navy, as disclosed by the highest 
authorities (to which we shall subsequently refer) confirms this 
view. 

The bill for devolution of Church property has passed the 
Chamber of Deputies. It is of so unjust a character that many 
who were in favor of the Separation Law voted against it, the 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 36 

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562 Current Events [Jan., 

minority numbering 218. Should the Senate pass the Bill, all 
the collateral heirs of donors of property to the Church will be 
prevented from bringing a legal action to recover it. The mania 
for robbing has become so strong that the government finds it 
necessary to introduce a bill for the protection of the works of 
art in the churches and other places. 

The loyalty of the troops has been a matter of discussion, 
owing to certain incidents which took place in the recent move- 
ment among the wine growers of the Midi. There does not 
seem, however, to be grave cause for anxiety. The troops sent 
to Casablanca have proved not only gallant, but also well dis- 
ciplined. With regard to the Navy, however, there are the 
gravest of reasons for apprehensions. These reasons are given 
by the reporter of the naval estimates for 1908, M. Charles 
Chaumet In the administration of the fighting fleet he declares 
there are on all sides instability and anarchy. '' In presence of 
progressive decomposition every one is casting on his neighbor 
the responsibility for a situation for which no one personally is re- 
sponsible. Sailors, engineers, gunners, administrators — are pitted 
against one another in the most regrettable hostility. There is 
no longer any confidence. . . . Our navy is a garment too 
old to admit of patching." Complete discouragement exists 
among the officers. They are convinced that an entire organ- 
ic reformation is necessary, and neither Ministerial initiative, 
nor the Admiralty, nor yet Parliamentary committees can effect 
the great reform. These allegations are supported by a vast 
mass of evidence which has been laid before the Chamber of 
Deputies. M. Chaumet's report was accepted and the Deputies 
voted that a complete reform was necessary and urgent, and 
invited the government to present as soon as possible an or- 
ganic naval Bill. 

The visit of the German Emperor 
Germany. to England, accompanied as he was 

by his Foreign Secretary although 
not by his Chancellor, cannot be looked upon as having no 
political significance, notwithstanding the declarations that have 
been made that it was purely a personal visit to his uncle the 
King. Theretofore the relations between the governments had 
been what is described as correct, while between a large part 
of the people of Germany and a smaller part of the people of 
England considerable distrust and even hatred existed with a 



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i9o8.] Current Events 563 

more or less confident expectation of war in the not distant 
future. The natural desire for expansion, consequent upon the 
union of the many states of which Germany once consisted, led 
to a desire for the acquisition of territory outside Europe, a 
desire which in several instances had been thwarted by Eng- 
land. This, with other things, contributed to the formation of 
ill-feeling. The visit of the Emperor has at the most con- 
tributed to what is called a diUnte. By the people he was 
cordially greeted, and the City of London showered upon him 
all the honors in its power to grant. In the speech which he 
made he declared that his aim, above all, was the maintenance 
of peace. History, he ventured to hope, would do him justice 
by showing that he had unswervingly pursued that aim. The 
main prop and base for the peace of the world was the main- 
tenance of good relations between the two countries, and as far 
as lay in his power he would further strengthen them. With 
his own wishes the German nation coincided. 

These declarations might have inspired greater confidence 
if they had led to a less vigorous preparation of the means 
necessary for entering upon a war. So far, however, is this 
from being the case that notwithstanding the financial difficulties 
in which Germany is involved, and the exceedingly heavy 
burden of taxation under which its population groans, a pro- 
ject for largely adding to the strength of the navy has been 
presented to the Reichstag. This programme fixes the age 
limit for battleships and large cruisers at twenty instead of 
twenty- five years. Seventeen battleships are to be laid down 
in the next ten years, being an increase on former proposals 
of three battleships. Large cruisers in proportion are to be 
built. Within eight years the tonnage of the navy is to be 
more than doubled. This, of course, involves additional ex- 
penditure, an expenditure which amounts to more than $25,000,- 
000. " Unswervingly on the offensive," is the German reply to 
the limitation of armaments, which was one of the aspirations of 
The Hague Conference, and the practical commentary upon the 
Speech of the Emperor. The one thing which tends to place 
a limit on this warlike development is the want of money. 
There is for the current year a deficit amounting to $25,000,- 
000, the debt is large and is growing, the taxes imposed last 
year have proved unproductive. The price of food has risen by 
about 50 per cent, and industrial prospects are not bright. The 



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564 Current Events [Jan., 

financial officials of the Empire are at their wits' end to raise 
the wherewithal, as it is hard to find anything which is not 
already taxed to the full extent of its power to bear the burden. 

For many years Prussia has been striving to supplant the 
Poles and to drive them from their homes, in order to give 
their places to German colonizers. The wish of the govern- 
ment is to Germanize Poland ; not being able to do it by legiti- 
mate means, by superiority of intelligence and skill, large sums 
of money have been spent in expropriating the land owners 
for the benefit of intruders of Prussian nationality. Sixty 
millions were voted for this purpose in 1902. One of the first 
demands on the new Reichstag has been for the appropriation 
of a further sum of nearly ninety millions. The proposal elic- 
ited warm protests from the Catholic centre and the Poles who 
are members of the house. It shows the lengths to which the 
advocates of compulsory unification will go. Gratitude perhaps 
ought to be felt that the government is willing to pay a fair 
price for the land which it is determined to take. 

Prince Btilow manages the Reichstag by means of a union 
of parties, who on almost all points of internal politics are op- 
posed to each other. One party is opposed to the extension 
of popular rights, another is in favor of this extension. The 
maintenance of a high tariff on food is desired by some, others 
wish to have it lowered. It is hard to ride so many horses, 
and the Chancellor has barely escaped a fall to the ground. 
A member of the National Liberal Party, one of the parties of 
which the bloc is constituted, severely criticised the connection 
of Prince Btilow with the camarilla of which so much has been 
heard of late. The Prince, to the surprise of all, gave an in- 
timation that he would resign unless he were properly sup- 
ported. This, of course, was a novel step for a German min- 
ister to take ; for they have looked upon themselves as respon- 
sible only to the Emperor. Some, therefore, think that it in- 
augurates a new era in German political institutions: the era 
of ministerial responsibility to Parliament. This, however, is 
we think a somewhat hasty conclusion. 

The most distinctive event of the 
Austria-Hungary. month in the Dual Monarchy has 

been a repetition of the scenes 
which some two years ago made the Parliaments both of Aus- 



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i9o8.] Current Events 565 

tria and of Hungary a byword throughout the world, and 
which tended greatly to the discredit of parliamentary institu* 
tions. Of these scenes nationalist passions are the cause. For 
an American the state of things in the Austro- Hungarian Em- 
pire, and in the Balkan provinces of Turkey, affords not merely 
an interesting but an instructive study. Side by side one an- 
other for hundreds of years have lived nationalities, too nume- 
rous to mention, who have maintained and still maintain not 
only their own characteristics, but also their mutual antipathies. 
The result in the Balkan Peninsula is anarchy, murder, and 
bloodshed, a. chronic state of almost civil war, and in the Austro- 
Hungarian dominions unlimited confusion and parliamentary par^ 
alysis. There has arisen no power sufficiently strong to weld 
these nationalities into one coherent whole. Hopes are enter- 
tained and statements are repeatedly made that nothing of the 
kind is likely to take place here, and certainly no effort should 
be spared to prevent the calamitous state of things which is 
the cause of chronic unrest. Vigilance in the preservation of 
free institutions, and of their preservation from corruption of 
every kind, will be the only safeguard. 

The events at Csernova, in Hungary, illustrate the incon- 
venience, to say the least, of the residence in the same place 
of two opposed nationalities. In this case the two nationalities 
were the Magyar and the Slovak. A patriot of the last-named 
race, the parish priest of the place, had been sentenced to be 
imprisoned for two years for having advocated the use of the 
Slovak language in the law-courts and the schools. A church 
which he had built awaited consecration, but his parishioners 
and compatriots, unwilling to have it consecrated in his absence, 
opposed the attempt to carry out this rite made by the au- 
thorities. The armed Magyar police fired four volleys and killed 
eleven persons (among whom were five women and two chil- 
dren), severely wounded eight, and slightly wounded eighty. 
This shocking affair naturally led to representations being made 
in Parliament ; but the government, being made up of Magyars 
(although they were the very same who had distinguished them- 
selves in obstruction in defence of their own asserted rights), 
paid no attention to the speaker, calling him liar and traitor, 
and even justified the murders. This is only one example of 
how liberty is understood by the dominant race in Hungary, by 
a government which has a son of Kossuth as one of its members. 



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566 Current Events [Jan., 

Even the criticisms made by some of the members of the 
Austria Reichsrath were resented as an interference with their 
right to tyrannize. In fact, a determined and systematic effort 
is biding made by arbitrary means to Magyarize the non- Magyar 
races, an attempt which is a clear departure from the policy of 
the great Hungarian leader Deak, who treated the non- Magyar 
races as younger brethren, and wished a complete tolerance to 
be given to them. The present generation of Hungarian politi- 
cians is greatly wanting in the wise moderation which char- 
acterized the re-founders and re-creators of the kingdom. For 
their own supremacy they have entered into a conflict not only 
with Austria, but with the majority of their fellow- citizens. The 
treatment of the Slovaks shows the lengths to which they are 
ready to go. Of these there are some three millions, and for 
them there have been provided only three primary schools and 
one infant school. Their children have, consequently, to attend 
the Magyar schools, the mistresses of which are forbidden to 
speak a word of Slovak. The Slovak language is entirely ex- 
cluded from the secondary schools. Pupils found reading a 
Slovak book or journal are expelled. Slovak gymnastic and 
choral and even co-operative societies are forbidden. Slovak 
literary institutions have been destroyed, and their school asso- 
ciation dissolved. 

Similar proceedings, although perhaps in not so aggravated 
a form, taken against the use of the Croatian language, have 
brought on a contest with the Croats in the parliament, and an 
agitation in Croatia for separation from Hungary. The same 
methods of obstruction which the Magyar opposition so long 
used against the former Liberal governments have been adopted 
by the Croats against the quondam obstructionists, and the lat- 
ter are very much puzzled how to save their face and yet have 
to yield to the same method which they themselves claimed 
the right to use. Many scenes have taken place and methods 
to overcome obstruction tried, so many that it would be tedious 
to describe them. That they should succeed is of the greatest 
importance, for it is necessary that the treaty made with Aus- 
tria, after many years of failure, should be ratified by the Legis- 
lature. 

In the Austrian Cabinet several changes have been made, 
the reasons for which it is impossible for a foreigner to under- 
stand. One result of these changes is: the Cabinet which has 



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i9o8.] Current Events 567 

Baron von Beck for its Premier, now consists of eight Parlia- 
mentarians, four officials, and one soldier, and is thus the near- 
est approach to a Parliamentary ministry that Austria has had 
for many years. A second result has been to assure the rati- 
fication, so far as Austria is concerned, of the new treaty with 
Hungary. 

On the second of December the Emperor- King Francis 
Joseph entered upon the sixtieth year of his reign, the year of 
his Diamond Jubilee. He is the most experienced ruler in the 
world, and one of the best loved. He has learned in the school 
of suffering so to govern as to win the confidence of the gov- 
erned. For many years he has been the one bond of union 
between the numerous antagonistic races of which his dominions 
consist. In fact, the gravest apprehensions have been felt, lest 
on his death there should be a general break-up. Foreseeing 
this danger, he took the wise course of placing the sovereign 
power upon a more secure basis by promoting the recently- 
passed bill establishing universal suffrage, and thereby giving 
the people a greater interest in the maintenance of the power 
in which they themselves shared. Greater confidence is, there- 
fore, felt in the future stability of the Empire, even in the 
event of the Emperor's death. 

The third Duma has begun its ses- 
Russia. sions. How much work it will do 

or be allowed to do has yet to be 
seen. There are some who have good hopes of its success, 
based upon the elimination of inexperienced visionaries and on 
the chastening influences of the past. This elimination has been 
secured by an arbitrary alteration of the fundamental law, but 
where an autocrat rules, gratitude may be felt that the Duma as 
a whole was not eliminated. By the changes which have been 
made, a preponderating value has been given to the votes of the 
intellectual and the wealthier classes, the influence of the peas- 
ants being thereby greatly reduced : and so men of moderate and 
sound views entertain hopes that practical reforms may eventu- 
ate. Friends of Russia and of the human race wherever found 
should share in these hopes. It is the only thing that stands 
between anarchy and despotism. 

How great is the need for a change is shown by the follow- 
ing facts: During the eighteen months ended last June 44,020 



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568 Current Events [Jan-, 

persons have been killed and wounded and 2,381 executed. In 
the words of a landlord, the situation is thus described: ''We 
landlords live in constant fear of assassination. The peasants 
around us are revolutionaries to a man. Scarcely one of us has 
not received numbers of letters signifying our death warrant. 
• • . Every now and then one of us would be murdered, 
or, at best, his property destroyed. ... In some cases the 
' execution ' was carried out by the order of a revolutionary 
committee, in others by simple hooligans. ... A neigh- 
bor of mine was recently murdered, with his wife in his own 
house in broad daylight, by a gang of hooligans within a stone's 
throw of a village, not a single inhabitant of which so much 
as lifted his finger to offer aid.'' 

To save human society in Russia from lapsing into manifest 
barbarism, or from being crushed under the heel of a despotism 
that is worse than barbarism, is the task set before the present 
Duma. The Duma is made up of the most incompatible ele- 
ments, there are some who wish for its complete abolition; of 
these extremists some desire a return to absolute rule, others 
a complete subversion of existing institutions. Some accept the 
consitution, if so it may be called, of the 30th of October; and 
of these some wish to keep strictly within its limits, while others 
wish to extend them. In the debate on the address to the 
Tsar the majority suppressed all reference to an autocracy. 
M. Stolypin, amid the cheers of a majority, emphasized the 
fact that they were under the rule of an autocrat and owed 
their existence to his good- will and pleasure. What will the 
end be ? 

One of the results of the Anglo- Russian Agreement has been 
to bring into discussion a project for linking the Russian Trans- 
Caspian and the Indian Railways. Between the two systems 
there is only an interval of 400 miles. The result would be to 
render it easy to travel the entire distance from Paris to Cal- 
cutta by land, and a still further unification of the human race 
by means of mutual intercourse. It will not be long before it 
will be possible to take a railroad ticket to Mecca, passing 
through Jerusalem on the way ; for the Turkish government is 
rapidly pushing on the road which it is making in order to 
maintain better hold over the Arabian peninsula. 

Within the bounds of the Russian Empire there exists the 
only Legislative Assembly in Europe based on universal adult 



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i9o8.] Current events 569 

suffrage. This is the Finnish Diet. Its members are elected by 
women as well as by men, and women may not only vote but may 
be elected. Such is, in fact, the case. Of the 200 members 19 
are women. A law which they have passed may be taken as 
an instance of the monstrous '^ regiment " of women. The new 
enactment amounts to a total prohibition of all traffic in spirits, 
beer, and wine. For technical and medical purposes spirits may 
be dealt in by the State. The ecclesiastical use of wine is for- 
bidden, and some non-alcoholic beverage must be substituted 
for Communion. No one is allowed to keep alcoholic drinks in 
his house ; the law authorizes the police and various other offi- 
cials to enter any house on reasonable grounds of suspicion and 
search it for spirits, wine, or beer. Carrying alcohol involves 
the forfeiture of the vehicle with horse and harness. A vessel, 
the principal part of the cargo of which is alcohol, will be 
seized. Such are the provisions of a bill which has been passed 
by one of the most democratic assemblies of the world. It has, 
however, to go to the Tsar for approval before it can become 
law. Strange is the state of things when, for the maintenance 
of reasonable liberty, an appeal has to be made to the autocrat 
of all the Russias. 

As a consequence of the separation 
Norway and Sweden. from Sweden, which took place two 

years ago, the treaty of 1855 has 
been abrogated, by which the integrity of Norway and Sweden, 
as against Russia, was guaranteed by Great Britain and France. 
Negotiations were immediately entered into by Norway for se- 
curing a new guarantee of her independence. These negotia- 
tions have resulted in the making of a new treaty, and this 
time with four great Powers — France, Germany, Great Britain, 
and Russia. Sweden has been left out — it neither guarantees 
nor is guaranteed. This has caused no little dissatisfaction in 
that country — has, perhaps, accelerated the death of King Os- 
car. He is, in fact, said to have died of a broken heart on 
account of the ingratitude of his former subjects, whom he had 
always treated not merely with justice but with a benevolent 
regard for all their rights. The possession of power seems to 
deteriorate not only kings and potentates, but also the mass 
of the people. The new treaty renders it possible that the re- 
lations between Norway and Sweden will become strained, and 



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570 Current Events [Jan. 

precludes the hope of the union or alliance between the three 
Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Norway, and Sweden — which 
might naturally have been expected. 

The trial of Signor Nasi, once a 
Italy. Minister of Education, throws an 

interesting light upon the morals 
and manners of '' regenerated " Italy. This minister is accused 
of the commonplace practice of appropriating to his own use 
funds which should have been applied to the benefit of the 
public, and of innumerable acts of petty peculation. When these 
accusations were endorsed by a parliamentary committee, the 
ex- Minister fled the country. The Courts proceeded to con- 
demn him in his absence, but their proceedings were quashed 
by the highest tribunal, on the ground of the privilege of an 
ex-Minister. He then returned. Thereupon the Senate formed 
itself into a court for the purpose of trying the case, but the 
end is not yet in sight, for the trial has been so irregularly con- 
ducted that all of the legal defenders of the accused have with- 
drawn, and its proceedings have come to a standstill. The de- 
fence of the accused is that he cannot be called upon to account 
for the moneys which he spent in the public service. The point 
of the attack is that no money ought to be spent except under 
the control of the body which granted it. Freedom from ren- 
dering an account may, indeed, have been lawful in former times, 
but is so no longer. A light is thus thrown both upon the 
methods of the past and on the aspirations of the present, 
and indicates the desire for a stricter rule of law. 



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THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 

DR. HENRY M. LEIPZIGER, supervisor of free lectures in New York 
City, has presented his annual report to the Board of Education, which 
indicates an attendance of 1,141,447 persons, representing 5,464 audiences. 
There is room for doubt whether the needs of the workingman have had the 
same consideration that was given in previous years, especially when the first 
appropiations were voted for the free lecture system. Dr. Leipziger states 
that it is earnestly to be desired that the work should be further concentrated 
along university lines to include systematic study of special subjects and 
examinations which will be recognized and rewarded by the colleges and uni- 
versities. This recommendation clearly involves a tendency to get away from 
the masses of the people, in order to specialize on topics that appeal to the 
few, perhaps less than ten out of every hundred of the average population. 
The first duty of the Board of Education is to provide for the common schools 
and the plain citizens. In a neighborhood filled with honest workingmen, 
who pay high rents in tenement houses, the following subjects could hardly 
be expected to awaken general enthusiasm : 

Europe on the Eve of the French Revolution. New York Harbor. Vol- 
taire and the Critics. The Wonders of New York. The Peaceful French 
Revolution. The Adirondacks. Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. 
Niagara Falls. Napoleon and France. The City ot Washington. Napo- 
leon and Europe. Beyond the Mississippi. The Fall of Napoleon : Metter- 
nich and the Reconstruction of Europe. Cowboy Life on the Plains. The 
Founding of the United States. The Period of Exploration. The Founda- 
tions of Modern Industry. From 1835 to 1850. Revolutionary France and 
Napoleon III. Laad Thirst Awakened. Cavour and United Italy. 

A studious comparison of the cost of these lectures with the small num- 
ber in attendance should arouse the Commissioners of Education to do some 
thinking on the best plans of instructing the multitude. 

• • • 

The children's library as a separate department originated with the 
Brooklyn Public Library, in 1890, as claimed in an excellent account written 
by Robert E. Park, Ph.D. It is without doubt, however, that the special 
needs of children were considered and in some way provided for by librarians 
long before that date. But the honor of making the children's room a suc- 
cess may be cheerfully conceded to Brooklyn; and then to Minneapolis 
where, in 1893, a library for children was established in which were listed 
twenty thousand books. This is still the largest children's library in the 
country. Boston, New Haven, Seattle, Omaha, and San Francisco all 
opened either reading rooms or circulating libraries for children soon after. 
Since then, most of the large libraries and many of the small ones all over 
the country have provided special rooms for children. 

In a pleasant room, which is the children's exclusively, they find a 

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572 THE Columbian Reading Union [Jan., 

person always willing to assist them. Most of these librarians hare taken, 
besides the regular library work, a special course preparatory to working 
with children. 

At the Carnegie Library of Pittsburg the training school for children's 
libraries offers a two years' course for those who wish to take up the work in 
this department. This course includes, besides the regular library work, 
lectures on the Planning and Equipment of Children's Rooms, Organization 
of Children's Departments ; Book Selection for Children; Selection for Social 
Groups, according to race, nationality, or social conditions ; Selections for 
Classes of Children; Selections for Individual Children; Story Telling; 
Home Libraries and Reading Classes ; Catalogues for Children. 

The course also gives practice in the work of story-telling. Stories are 
told that <<aim to make the children familiar with some dramatic and roman- 
tic forms of world literature, and to rouse their interest in real literature." 
These stories are tales from '< The Iliad" and ''The Odyssey," from Norse 
mythology and ''The Nibelungenlied," from Shakespeare, legends of King 
Arthur and the Round Table, tales of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and 
from old English and Scotch Ballads. 

Prior to the meetings of the Conference of Libraries at Narragansett 
Pier, in 1906, a list of questions was sent to one hundred of the largest libra- 
ries, asking about their work with schools. The following statistics were 
compiled from the answers : 

Thirty-seven have separate collections of books for use in schools; 
twenty-seven make work with schools a part of the library work ; forty-eight 
send books to schools. In their co-operation with schools, the librarians try 
to have books upon topics used in study, also convenient and conspicuous 
pictures illustrating such studies at the psychological moment. On the day 
the child reaches Japan in his geography work, for instance, he finds in the 
library about the walls colored photographs of Japanese scenes and people. 
To the child this seems a wonderfully happy accident ; but it is really due to 
a plan for systematic and timely help worked out by librarians and assistants. 

Among the other devices that the modern school of library training has 
invented and popularized is the Home Library, a small case of books placed 
in a child's home. At a stated time each week ten or twelve children of the 
neighborhood meet about the case, and a visitor from the library gives out 
the books, and in various ways makes the " library hour " pass pleasantly, 
with profit to the children. 

The Home Library has almost attained the importance of a movement; 
that is to say, it has come to be regarded as a distinctly social and moral in- 
fluence. In cooperation with the Social Settlement, juvenile courts, news- 
boys' homes, and other similar institutions, it penetrates out-of-the-way cor- 
ners of the city, carrying the experience of the human family in story and 
history. 

• • « 

A correspondent reports that he has looked in vain among the encyclo- 
pedias within his reach for any account of the abundant literature of Spanish 
America. This subject was assigned to the Rev. Charles Warren Currier 
some time ago for a course of lectures at the Catholic Summer-School. 



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i9o8.] THE Columbian Reading union 573 

Father Currier treated of the origins of the Spanish language; Spain's 
scientific and historical writers; her poets, dramatists, and novelists. 

Father Currier added the following bibliography, which is the best avail- 
able on the subject : 

Antonio Leon Pinelo — Biblioteca Oriental i Occidental, Madrid, 1619. 

Agustin Davilay Padilla — Historiade la Fundacion j Discurso de la Pro- 
vinciade Santiago de Mejico. O. P., etc. (This is the first printed work in 
which reference is made to printing in America.) 

Eguiara y Eguren — Biblioteca Mejicana. c. 1755* 

Juan Maria Guiterrez — America Poetica, 1846. Apuntes biograficos de 
escritores, oradores y hombres de Estado de la Republica Arjentina, i860. 

Estudios biograficos y criticos sobre algunos poetas sur americanos ante- 
riores al siglo XIX., 1865. Origen del arte de imprimir en la America, Es- 
panola, etc. 

Beristain y Souza (Mexico) — Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrio« 
nal, etc., early XIX. Century. 

Pablo Herrera — ^Ensayo sobre la historia de la literatura Ecuatoriana. 

Jose Toribio Medina — Historia de la Literatura Colonial de Chili. San- 
tiago, 1878. 3 vols. 

Vergara y Vergara — Historia literaria de Colombia. 

J. M. Torres Caicedo^Ensayos biograficos y de literatura sobre los prin- 
cipales poetas y literatos Latino- Americanos, Paris, 1863. 3 vols. 

J. M. Rojas— Biblioteca Escritores Venezolanos, Paris, 1875. 

Beitrage zur Geschichte des Romans im Spanischen Siid-Amerika. Fer- 
dinand Wolf in the Jahrbuch fixr romanische und englische Literatur. Vols. 
2 and 4. 

Beitrage zur Geschichte der spanisch-amerikanischen Literatur, by Juan 
Maria Gutierrez, translated by Ferdinand Wolf in the Jahrbuch fiir roman- 
ische und englische Literatur, 1861. Vol. 3. 

Jose Domingo Cortes — Diccionario Biografico Americano, Paris, 1875. 
By the same author: Flores Chilenas; Poetas Americanos; Poetas chilenos ; 
Estadisticabibliografica de Bolivia ; Galeria de Hombres celebres de Bolivia ; 
Parnaso Boliviano; Parnaso Peruano; Parnaso Chileno; Parnaso Arjen- 
tino; Obras poeticas dramaticas de Jose Marmol; America Poetica; Prosis- 
tas Americanos ; Poetisas Americanas. 

Garcia Merou — Recuerdos liter arios. Confide ncias literarias. 

M. M. Ramsey — Latin-American Literature in ''Library of the World's 
Best Literature." Vol. 22. 

Icazbalceta — Bibliotheca Mejicana, etc. 

Harrisse — Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima. 

M* Ca Ma 



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BOOKS RECEIVED. 

The Macmillan Compant, New York: 

TJULittUCifyofHopi, A Christmas Story. By F. Marion Crawford. IDoalEBted. Pp. 
209. Price $2.25. 
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York : 

Tkt M€ssa£€s of j€sus AecortUmx to ikt Gospil of St John. By James Stevenson Ri^gs. 
D.D. Pp. zvi.-374. Hymns oftht iianhet. By Sidney Lanier. Illustrated from Na- 
ture by Henry Troth. Pp. viii.-€i. Price $3 net. 
Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, New York : 

Mtdittval and Modem History. By J. A. Dewe. A.M. With Maps and Illustrations. 
Pp. S»8. 
Mission of the Iim aculatb Virgin, Staten Island. N. Y. : 

Society of Si. Vincent de Paul. Report of the Superior Council of New Yoric to the Coun- 
cil General in Paris, for the year 1906. 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston: 

Greece and the jEgean Islands. By Philip S. Marden. Price $3 net. lUnstzmted. Pp. 
iz.-386. 
GiNN & Co., Boston : 

The History of Music to the Death of Schnbert. By John K. Paine. Pp. 314. Moral 
Training in the Public Schools, The California Prize Essays. Pp. 903. 
L. C. Page & Co., Boston : 

The Sorceress 0/ Rome. By Nathan Gallizier. Illustrated. Pp. zi.^6z. Castles and 
Chateaux of old Navarre and the Basque Provinces. By Frances Miltoun. With many 
Illustrations. Pp. zvii.-456. Mexico and Her People of To-4ay. By Nevin O. Winter. 
Illustrated from original photographs by the author and C. R. Birt. Pp. 395. 
Oliver Ditson Company, Boston : 

Irish Songs : A Collection of Airs Old and New. Edited and the Piano Accompaniments 
Arranged by N. Clifford Page. Price 50 cents. Postpaid. In cloth, $1.25. Messe 
Solennelle (St. CectliaJ. For Soli and Chorus. By Charles Gounod. Price 50 cents. 
J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia : 

The Secrets of the Vatican. Illustrated. By Douglas Sladen. Pp. xxyii.-505. Price $5 
net. The Good Neighbor in the Modem City. By Mary £. Richmond. Pp. ix.-Z52. 
Price 60 cents net. 
Peter Reilly. Philadelphia: 

" The Quiet Hour" ; And Other Verses, By Emily Logue. Pp. 69. Price 80 cents net. 
Open Court Publishing Company. Chicago : 

The Philosopher's Martyrdom, A Satire. By Paul Cams. Pp. 67. Paper. 
M. H. Wiltzius Company. Milwaukee: 

The Ecclesiastical Year for Catholic Schools and Institutions. Traoslated from the German 
of Rev. Andrew Pets by a member of the Dominican Order. Pp. 288. Price 25 cents. 
Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. : 

Twenty-fifth Annual Rtfort of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the 
Smithsonian Instituium. igo3-igo4. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the 
Year Ending June 30^ rgo6. 
Catholic Truth Society. London, England: 

The Orthodox Eastern Church. By Adrian Fortescue, Ph.D., D.D. Illustrated. Pp. 
zxvii -451. 

Carey & Co.. London, England : 

Catholic Hymns and Benediction Services, ^etc. By S. B. Bamford. Pp. 40. Paper. Price 
IS. 6d. Mass of St. Bmno, By Richard R. Terry. Pp. 19. Paper. Price u. Mass 
of St. Gregory. By R. R. Terry. Pp. 36. Paper. Pnce u. td. net. 
Rome Press. Rome. Italy : 

Is the Pope Independent f or. Outlines of the Roman Question. By the Rt. Rev. Mgr. John 
Prior, D.D. Pp.138. Price 50 cents. 
P. Lethielleux, Paris : 

Manuel du Ridacteur d*Ordo en Latin et en Franfais. Par le R. P. Dom P. Joumier, 
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CATHOLIC WORLD. 

Vol. LXXXVI. FEBRUARY, 1908. No. 515. 

THE COST OF CHRISTIAN LIVING. 

BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D. 

|HE opening article in the November issue of this 
magazine described the nature, causes, conse- 
quences, and fallacies of the theory that happi- 
ness and welfare consist in the indefinite expan- 
sion and satisfaction of material wants. In the 
closing paragraph it was said that, " even the majority of Catho- 
lics seem to hold to the Christian conception of wealth and of 
life only vaguely and theoretically, not clearly and practically.*' 
Like other Christians, we speak much about the duty of avoid- 
ing excessive attachment to and misuse of wealth, but our ut- 
terances are mostly of the nature of platitudes. We do not 
often think into them any concrete meaning as to what precise- 
ly constitutes excessive attachment or misuse in the matter of 
food, clothing, houses, amusements, and '' social '' activities. 
Or, when our concepts are more specific, they are generally so 
liberal and lax as to fit only the very few whose offences .under 
these heads are striking, notorious, and universally condemned. 
As a contribution toward more definite views and estimates, the 
present paper will attempt ''to apply the Christian conception 
to the actual life of to-day, and to indicate more precisely the 
content of a reasonable standard of life." 

According to the Christian teaching, man's chief business on 
earth is to fit himself for the Life Beyond. This task he ful* 
fils by living up to the commandments of Christ and the moral 

Copjright Z907. Thb Missionary Society of St. Paul tbb Apostle 
IN THE State of New York. 
VOL. LXXXVI —37 




Digitized by VjOOQIC 



576 THE Cost of Christian Living [Feb., 

law of nature. As applying to the use of material goods and 
the satisfaction of material wants, the moral law may be sum- 
marized in the following sentences. The soul, its life, and its 
needs are intrinsically superior to the life and needs of the 
body. The intellect and the disinterested will are essentially 
higher faculties than the senses and the selfish will. Hence 
right human life consists, not in the indefinite satisfaction of 
material wants, but in striving to know more and more, and to 
love more and more, the best that is to be known and loved, 
namely, God and, in proportion to their resemblance to him, 
his creatures. It demands that man shall satisfy the cravings 
of his animal and lower nature only to the extent that is com- 
patible with a reasonable attention to the things of the mind 
and spirit. The senses and their demands are not on the same 
moral level as the reason ; they are of subordinate worth and 
importance; they perform the function of instruments. When- 
ever they are made co-ordinate with, or superior to, the reason, 
whenever they are indulged so far as to interfere with the nor- 
mal life and activity of the reason, there occur moral disorder, 
perversion of function, and unrighteous conduct. Similarly, when- 
ever the selfish encroaches upon the disinterested will — as when 
we satisfy our senses with goods that ought to go to the neigh- 
bor, when we indulge such passions as envy and hatred, or 
when we expend upon our minds the time and energy that 
•ught to be given to family, neighbor, or country — the moral 
•rder is inverted and violated. 

Thus far the moral law of reason and nature. The super- 
natural, the Christian, moral law is frankly ascetic; not in the 
sense that it imposes upon all persons the Evangelical Counsels 
•f poverty, chastity, and obedience, but inasmuch as it requires 
men to wage a continuous struggle against many of the crav- 
ings of appetite, and to deny many desires and ambitions which 
are dear to self. Except the child subordinate his will to that 
of his parents ; his love of play to the demands of school ; his 
desire of possession to reasonable self-discipline; his selfishness 
and cruelty to the just claims of his playmates, he will grow 
into a self-willed, passionate, and unlovable youth. He will be 
the antithesis of the Christian type. The Christian young man 
or young woman enters into a series of relations in which the 
need of self-denial is intensified and widened. Purity demands 
rigid control of the desires of the flesh; temperance requires 



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i9o8.] THE Cost of Christian Living 577 

careful self-restraint in eating and drinking; justice enjoins re- 
spect for the rights and goods of others, notwithstanding the 
powerful, manifold, and insidious impulses that make for the 
violation of this precept ; the law of labor forbids indulging the 
tendency to idleness and slothfulness ; charity commands the de- 
nial of that self-satisfaction, self-comfort, and self-assertion, which 
are incompatible with the claims of Christian brotherhood. 
Christianity is ascetic in the stricter sense of the term when it 
urges, nay, requires men to do without many things which are 
in themselves lawful, in order that they may be the better able 
to pass by the things that are unlawful. The words of St. Paul 
concerning the athlete who ''refrains himself from all things/' 
express the true Christian theory and practice. 

Both the natural and the Christian laws of conduct are, con- 
sequently, opposed to the current ideals of life and welfare. 
Both demand that the power to do without shall be cultivated 
to such a degree that the lower nature in man shall be kept in 
constant subjection to the higher. Both deny that it is lawful 
for man to satisfy all wants indifferently, or to seek the indefi- 
nite expansion and satisfaction of his material wants. 

Concerning the value of material goods, the teaching of the 
Divine Founder of Christianity is clear and forcible. Consider 
a few of his pronouncements : '' It is easier for a camel to pass 
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into 
the kingdom of heaven." "Woe to you rich." ''Blessed are 
you poor." " Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth." 
"For a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that 
he possesseth." " Be not solicitous as to what you shall eat, or 
what you shall drink, or what you shall put on." " Seek ye 
first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things 
shall be added unto you." " You cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon." " If thou wouldst be perfect, go sell what thou hast and 
give to the poor, and come follow me." The doctrine of these 
texts is remote, indeed, from the theory that right life consists 
in the ever-widening and varying of material wants, and the 
ever fuller and more diversified satisfaction of them. In many 
places, and under many different forms, Christ insists that ma- 
terial possessions are unimportant for the child of God, and that 
those who have much wealth will find it almost impossible to 
get into his kingdom. 

The great Fathers of the Church used strong, almost ex- 



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578 The Cost of Christian Living [Feb., 

treme language in describing the dangers of riches, and de- 
nouncing the men of wealth of their time. Many of them are 
so severe that they have been, incorrectly however, classified as 
socialists. St. Thomas Aquinas declared that although man can- 
not entirely disregard the pursuit and the possession of exter- 
nal goods, he ought to seek them with moderation, and in con- 
formity with the demands of a simple life. Essentially the same 
views have been held and taught by all the representative au- 
thorities of the Church throughout the Middle Ages, and down 
to the present hour. Neither Christ nor his Church has ever 
sanctioned the theory that right and reasonable life requires 
magnificent houses, furnishings, 'equipage, and entertainment; 
sumptuous food and splendid apparel; costly recreation and 
luxurious amusements. 

Let us apply these general truths and principles to the use 
of material goods and the process of satisfying material wants, 
with a view to more definite and particular conclusions. To 
begin with, we can enclose the field of material welfare by cer- 
tain upper and lower limits, within which 99 of every 100 per- 
sons must have a place if they are to enjoy satisfactory condi- 
tions of Christian living. It would seem that these conditions 
are lacking whenever an average- sized family in one of the 
larger American cities receives an annual income of less than 
$1,000. In another place ("A Living Wage") the writer has 
estimated $600 as the equivalent of a decent livelihood in some 
of the cities of the country ; but he had in mind the very small- 
est amount that would suffice, not the amount that is required 
for a certain reasonable amplitude, security, and contentment, 
which, though not perhaps absolutely necessary, are normal and 
highly desirable. When the family income falls below $1,000 
per year, the quality and amount of food ; the size, appearance, 
adornment, and equipment of the home; the kind of clothes; 
the scant provision for sickness, accidents, and old age; the 
lack of sufficient means for recreation, books, newspapers, charity, 
and religion; and the oppressively real fear of want, will sub- 
ject the members of the family to severe temptations that would 
be unfelt, or much less keenly felt, if the income were above 
the figure named. Insufficient and monotonous food increases 
the craving for strong drink; shabby clothes make persons 
ashamed to appear among their fellows, and lead to loss of 
self-respect, discouragement, and discontent; an unattractive 



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i9o8.] THE Cost of Christian Living 579 

borne produces similar results, and impels some members of tbe 
family to seek outside associations, perbaps in tbe saloon; lack 
of provision for the untoward contingencies of life fosters dis- 
couragement and discontent wbicb are barmful to tbrift and in- 
dustry, and productive of irreligion and envy of tbe neighbor; 
inability to contribute to religion causes men to remain away 
from church, while the absence of reading matter leaves the 
mind barren; insufficiency of recreation is injurious to health, 
efficiency, and contentment. All these evils are, indeed, rela- 
tive. They are felt by families above as well as by those be- 
low the $1,000 limit. Nevertheless, they inflict serious, objec- 
tive injury upon one hundred of the latter to one of the former. 

How shall we define the upper limit of family expenditure 
that is compatible with decent Christian living ? The question 
may at first sight seem preposterous, inasmuch as reasonable 
life is possible at many different stages above the decent mini- 
mum. Yet if the Christian view of life is correct, the maximum 
as well as the minimum ought to be susceptible of concrete 
statement. If expenditures for material goods begin to be harm- 
ful as soon as the limits of moderation are passed and the satis- 
faction of the senses comes into conflict with the life of the 
spirit, those limits ought to be capable of definition in terms of 
goods and of money. To deny this is implicitly to defend the 
theory that right life consists in the indefinite satisfaction of in- 
definitely expanding wants. 

In the matter of shelter the maximum for an average-sized fam- 
ily — husband and wife and four or five children — would seem to 
be a house of about twelve rooms. Obviously the mere fact that 
the residence contains a larger number of rooms does not con- 
stitute a serious impediment to reasonable living. Not the 
quantity of housing, but its accidentals and accessories, is the 
important consideration. Not the rooms in excess of twelve, 
but what they generally bring in their train, makes the differ- 
ence. When the limit here set down is passed, it is not addi- 
tional comfort in the legitimate sense of that term that is de- 
sired, but rather accommodations for numerous servants, facili- 
ties for elaborate social functions, and the consciousness of oc- 
cupying as large or as imposing a dwelling as some neighbor 
or neighbors. Such a house will usually involve adornment, 
furnishings, and equipment which will be distinguished more 
for costliness, richness, and magnificence than simply for beauty. 



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58o THE Cost of Christian Living [Feb., 

All these and many other ends which assume prominence 
about the time that the twelve room limit is exceeded, do create 
real and serious hindrances to decent Christian living. Chief 
among these hindrances are: a great waste of time, energy, 
thought, and money; many other demoralizing conditions that 
seem to be inseparable from sumptuous dwellings and the in- 
dividual and social life therein fostered; the inevitable intensi- 
fication of the passion of envy ; the desire to outdo one's neigh- 
bors in the splendor of material possessions, and in outward show 
generally; a diminution of sincerity in social relations; a lessened 
consciousness of the reality and the universality of Christian 
brotherhood; and finally, immersion to such a degree in the 
things of matter that the higher realities of life are easily for- 
gotten or ignored. 

Satisfaction of the food -want becomes excessive when the 
appetite is stimulated or pampered to the injury of health, and 
when victuals come to be prized for their capacity to please the 
palate rather than for their power to nourish. These conditions 
are reached sooner than most persons realize. Habitually to 
pass by plain food, and to seek the tenderest and most delicate 
grades, implies a condition in which the digestive organs are 
being overtaxed. Mere variety in the articles of diet, when ex- 
tended beyond moderate bounds, produces the same result A 
liberal use of the accidentals, such as, condiments, relishes, ex- 
quisite desserts, is likewise harmful. Even a nice attention to 
the preparation and serving of the food, easily produces undue 
and injurious stimulation of the appetite. These physical ex- 
cesses, or extravagances, are generally accompanied by evils of 
the moral order. The pleasure-giving aspects of diet and of eat- 
ing become too prominent, and are too carefully sought. There 
is an excessive attention to the satisfaction of the food want, 
which constitutes one form of the vice of gluttony. From it 
follows a lessening of control over other appetites ; for the power 
of governing the senses is a unified thing which becomes 
weakened as a whole whenever it suffers injury in any part* 
Failure to control the food- appetite, for example, reduces the 
ability to govern the sex- appetite. Finally, the limits of reason 
are exceeded when the accessories of eating, as the service, the 
dishes, the dining-room furniture, are distinguished chiefly for 
their costliness, richness, and magnificence. 

With regard to clothing, there is excess as soon as the de- 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



i9o8.] THE Cost of Christian Living 581 

sire to be dressed comfortably and decently becomes less promi- 
nent than the desire for conspicuousness, richness, elaborateness, 
splendor. All these are refinements, artificial complications, of 
the process of satisfying the clothing- want. When they come 
to be regularly sought after, they cause a waste of money and 
a deterioration of character. There is waste of money, inas* 
much as these ends are relatively — indeed, we might say, ab- 
solutely — of no importance to reasonable living. The character 
suffers through the indulgence of the passion for distinction in 
mere possessions, and the passions of pride, vanity, and envy. 
It is obviously impossible to draw with precision the line which 
separates comfort, decency, and simple beauty from conspicu- 
ousness, richness, elaborateness, splendor; but the several esti- 
mates of a carefully-selected committee would probably show a 
fairly close agreement. 

The tests of simplicity, moderation, and comparative inex* 
pensiveness mark off the reasonable from the unreasonable in 
the matter of amusement and recreation. When these condi- 
tions are present all the legitimate demands of these wants are 
abundantly supplied. The spirits are refreshed, the energies are 
relaxed, the faculties are recreated. When these bounds are 
exceeded, when amusements and recreation become elaborate, 
manifold, and costly, or when they are elevated to a place 
among the important aims of life, there occurs a perversion 
which is injurious both physically and morally. Time and 
money are wasted, energy is expended in the feverish pursuit of 
new forms of amusement, satiety and disappointment increase, 
and the temptations to unrighteous conduct are multiplied. Even 
the practice of making extensive and frequent sojourns in foreign 
countries, while possessing some educational advantages, con- 
sumes time and money out of all proportion to the resulting 
benefits. In many cases its chief effect is to satisfy jaded cur- 
iosity, fill up heavy- hanging time, or feed the passions of vanity 
and conscious superiority. 

The activities that are denominated ''social" afford perhaps 
the most striking indication of the distinction between the reason- 
able and the meretricious in the satisfaction of material wants. 
There is a certain moderate scale of social activity and enter- 
tainment in which the exercises, the dress, the refreshments, 
and all the other accessories, are distinguished by a certain 
naturalness and simplicity. Where these conditions (which are 



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S82 THE Cost of Christian Living [Feb., 

more easily recognized than described) are verified, the usual 
result is a maximum of enjoyment and right human feeling. 
When these limits are passed ; when the chief concern is about 
the accessories of the entertainment rather than the promotion 
of kindly human intercourse and enjoyment; when the main 
object is to emulate the elaborateness, costliness, or magnifi- 
cence of some other '' function " — genuine enjoyment and kindly 
feeling are generally less than in the simpler conditions, while 
the damage to purse, health, nerves, and character is almost 
invariably greater. 

The foregoing paragraphs may be concretely summarized in 
the statement that the annual expenditure for all purposes ex- 
cept religion and charity, in the case of the overwhelming ma- 
jority of moderately-sized families, ought not to exceed $6,500. 
This amount should suffice for intellectual and educational 
needs, as well as for those of the physical order. Since the 
outlay for religion and charity ought to be in proportion to 
income, it cannot be included in a general estimate of the 
maximum decent cost of living. Of the families that at pres- 
ent expend more than $6,500 for the purposes named, the 
great majority would be gainers, physically, mentally, and 
morally, if they did not go beyond that limit. Probably the 
range of expenditure which would afford the best conditions of 
Christian life for a considerable majority of all American fam- 
ilies, lies between $2,000 and $5,000 per annum. 

The attempt to state so precisely and to define so narrowly 
the cost of living according to the Christian rule of life, will 
probably strike many as presumptuous, preposterous, artificial, 
arbitrary. Nevertheless, if one is sincere, if one wishes to write 
to any serious purpose, if one intends to get beyond empty 
platitudes, one must make some such attempt and in some such 
terms. And the writer is perfectly willing to have his estimate 
subjected to criticism, to criticism as definite and concrete as 
the estimate itself. He is quite confident that, with very rare 
exceptions, $6,500 dollars will seem ample to cover all reason- 
able family expenditures for housing, food, clothing, amuse- 
ments and recreation, social activities, education, and the needs 
of the mind. When families go beyond this figure they are 
satisfying wants which in the interests of the best Christian 
life ought to be denied. In so far as the added amount is 
spent on a house, its principal effect is to increase not legiti- 



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I908.] THE COST OF CHRISTIAN LIVING 583 

mate comfort, but pride, vanity, waste of time, and unsocial 
feelings of superiority. In so far as it is expended for dress, 
it produces the same results, and makes persons unduly at- 
tendant to and dependent upon wants that are unnecessary, 
artificial, and fundamentally ignoble. In so far as it goes for 
food, it does not mean more nourishment, but some injury to 
health, and an undue attachment to the lower or animal self. 
In so far as it is exchanged for amusements, recreation, or so- 
cial activities, the same and other vices are fostered without 
any counterbalancing good result. In so far as it is employed 
for the satisfaction of the needs of the mind — well, no con- 
siderable portion of the extra amount is so employed in the 
actual life of to-day. If it is it goes in almost all cases to pur- 
chase rare or costly editions of books, or masterpieces of paint- 
ing or sculpture. Many of these minister not to the esthetic 
sense so much as to the desire for things that are costly, 
unique, conspicuous. The intellectual and esthetic needs ob- 
tain a more adequate and a more rational satisfaction in the 
family of the average college professor than in the family of 
the average rich man, yet the income of the latter rarely ex- 
ceeds $5,000 a year. 

Where the family expends more than $6,500 for the six 
classes of wants enumerated, the results, except in a few cases, 
will be harmful to Christian life, inasmuch as the senses will be 
exalted to the detriment of the higher will and the reason, the 
altruistic qualities will be unable to obtain reasonable develop- 
ment in the midst of so many influences making for selfishness, 
and the character will grow soft, while the power to do with- 
out will grow weak. 

The belief that men can live noble, religious, and intel- 
lectual lives in the presence of abundant material satisfaction, 
is well called by the economist, Charles Perin, ** the most terrible 
seduction of our time." It counts among its adherents even 
the majority of Catholics. Whether they have little or much 
of this satisfaction, they long for more, and are willing to run 
the risk of the resulting demoralization. Nay, there are Catho- 
lics, both clerical and lay, who realize that the majority of 
their co-religionists whose expenditures are above the level de- 
scribed in these pages would be ''better off" in the true, the 
Catholic, sense of these words, below that level ; yet these same 
Catholics rejoice when their friends reach that scale of ex- 



Digitized by VjOOQIC 



584 The Cost of Christian Living [Feb., 

penditure. So great is the power of a dominant popular fal- 
lacy I 

Of course there is no intention of asserting that the great 
majority of those who exceed the $6,;oo limit, will be unable 
to save their souls. All that is asserted is that the overwhelm- 
ing majority of all families, and the great majority of families 
whose expenditures are actually above that limit, would lead 
more — much more — reasonable, noble, Christian lives if their 
outlay were below it, but above $1,000. 

Perhaps the strongest objection against the maximum set 
down here will be made on behalf of '' social position." Larger, 
much larger, expenditures seem to many persons to be justified 
and necessary in order to maintain that rank in society, that 
place among their fellows, that standard of living to which they 
have become accustomed. To sink below this scale would be a 
hardship and a departure from what they and their friends 
have come to regard as decent living. Now the requirements 
of social rank are among the legitimate needs that ought to be 
regularly met ; for, as St. Thomas expresses it, *' no one ought 
to live unbecomingly." In their discussions concerning the 
duties of almsgiving and of restitution, the theologians have 
always made definite and liberal allowance for this class of needs. 
Let us remember, however, that their estimates and conclusions 
reflect the social conditions of the Middle Ages, when the 
higher conveniences and the luxuries which absorb the greater 
part of the expenditures of the well-to-do classes to-day, were 
practically all unknown ; when most of the exceptional outlay 
was for servants, attendance, and the other accompaniments of 
public power; and when high social rank had its basis less in 
wealth than in public or quasi-public authority and functions. 
Reference was for the most part to rulers, members of the 
nobility, and public officials. Large concessions were made to 
their demands on behalf of social position, in order to safe- 
guard their functions and influence among the people. In other 
words, the chief reason was a social one : the people demanded 
a certain magnificence in the lives of their rulers and of the 
other wielders of social authority. 

No such considerations can be urged in favor of the rich in 
a country like ours. Neither popular welfare, nor popular senti- 
ment, nor any sane interpretation of decent or becoming living, 
will justify expenditures in excess of $6,500 per year. If any 



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i9o8.] THE Cost of Christian Living 585 

serious defense of them is to be attempted, it must be based 
upon the assumption that any reduction of them would injure 
the morals or the self-respect of persons who had long been 
accustomed to this scale of living. That any permanent de- 
terioration in conduct or character would overtake any con- 
siderable fraction of those who would descend to the $6,500 
level, is a supposition that may be summarily dismissed. It is 
overwhelmingly probable that after a short time of adjustment 
to the new conditions, the ''descenders," with rare exceptions, 
would be stronger morally than before. The hypothetical in- 
jury to self-respect does not deserve serious consideration, in- 
asmuch as it refers to a false self-respect, a fear of being 
looked down upon by those who have false standards of worth, 
dignity, and decency. The self-respect which is based upon the 
extravagant satisfaction of material wants, and conditioned by 
the approval of those who believe in that sort of thing, ought 
to be trampled upon and eradicated. 

Suppose that Mr. Carnegie, who has declared that the duty 
of the man of wealth is '' to set an example of modest, unos- 
tentatious living, shunning display or extravagance," were to 
take these words seriously, interpreting them according to their 
ordinary acceptation, and to move from his sumptuous Fifth 
Avenue mansion into a comfortable, medium- sized house in a 
respectable, middle-class neighborhood, there to live on a scale 
of simple and moderate comfort. Does any one think that he 
would suffer any real loss of self-respect, honor, reputation, 
public appreciation, or influence for good ? On the contrary, 
he would gain in all these regards. Not the least of his gains 
would be his enhanced credit for seriousness and sincerity. 
And his experience would be duplicated by every rich man 
and rich woman who would make the experiment. 

Those who would take this step would be better off, not 
only in character and public esteem, but even as regards con- 
tentment and happiness. At least, this would be the result if 
practically all who are now above the $6,500 level were to place 
themselves below it; for the principal factor impelling men to 
believe in the worth of luxurious living, namely, the social 
worship of luxury, would have disappeared. It is the popular 
faith in the happiness-producing power of abundant material 
satisfaction that leads the possessor of such satisfaction to cling 
to it. In reality it causes a greater slavery of the mind to the 



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586 THE Cost of Christian Living [Feb., 

senses, and increases anxiety, worry, and satiety. '' In propor- 
tion as a man strives to exalt and secure himself through ex- 
ternal goods, he falls back wretchedly upon himself, and expe- 
riences an increase of dissatisfaction and ennuV* (Perin, De la 
Rickesse^ p. ii). 

If only a few were to make the experiment, they would 
undoubtedly suffer considerable mental anguish, but it would 
be only temporary. Besides, it would be more than offset by 
the increase of mental and moral freedom, by a deeper and 
truer self-respect, and by the genuine approval of the larger 
and saner part of the community. 

The foregoing discussion may be profitably supplemented by 
a word on the social aspects of excessive living expenditures. 
Beyond doubt, a scale of living in excess of the maximum 
limit defined in these pages renders the overwhelming majority 
of those who adopt it less able and less willing to make sac- 
rifices for the public good, whether on the field of battle, in 
public life, or through any other form of social service. It 
makes great achievements in art, science, or literature morally 
impossible, for the simple reason that it reduces to a minimum 
the power to abstain, to endure, to wait patiently for large re- 
sults. Nor is this all. For every person who lives according 
to this pernicious standard, there are thousands who are un- 
able to do so, yet who adopt it as their ideal, and strive to 
imitate it so far as they are able. Hence these, too, suffer im- 
measurable hurt in their capacity for self-sacrifice, generosity, 
and disinterested social service. All the lessons of history point 
unhesitatingly to the conclusion that social no less than indi- 
vidual welfare, is best promoted by moderate living. President 
Roosevelt has stated this truth in terms that ought to be com- 
mitted to memory and constantly pondered by every one of 
his countrymen : *^ In the last analysis a healthy State can ex- 
ist only when the men and women who make it lead clean, 
vigorous, healthy lives ; when the children are so trained that 
they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome 
them, not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph 
from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man's work, 
to dare and endure, and to labor; to keep himself, and to 
keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the 
housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fear- 
less mother of many children" (The Strenuous Life^ p. 5). 



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I908.] THE COST OF CHRISTIAN LIVING 587 

In the opinion of the writer, there are five hundred chances to 
one that a family will realize these conditions much more fully 
below than above the $6,500 level. 

A stock objection to the doctrine here defended, rests on 
the assertion that every community needs some examples of 
life on a scale of material magnificence, in order to prevent the 
dulling and deadening effect of monotonous mediocrity. Pre- 
cisely why all the real and solid effects of variety could not be 
had within the limits set in this paper, is not easily seen. 
The satisfaction and the uplifting influence that are derived by 
the masses from the contemplation of palatial residences, splen- 
did raiment and equipages, and the other public manifestations 
of excessive expenditure, would be vastly overtopped by the 
benefits that would follow the investment of this money in de- 
cent habitations for the poor, schools, hospitals, parks, play- 
grounds, art galleries, and public concerts. There would also 
be a decrease of social hatred, envy, and discontent. At any 
rate a reduction of ninety per cent in the number of the ex- 
isting instances of magnificent living, would, owing to the com- 
parative rarity of the phenomenon, increase the impression 
made upon the minds and imaginations of the masses. 

The argument on behalf of lavish expenditures for works of 
art in private residences, is likewise of little value. The as- 
sistance and encouragement given to artists would be equally 
great if these purchases were made for the benefit of public 
galleries. 

It must be admitted that luxurious living benefits industry 
in so far as it prevents an excessive accumulation of capital, 
and increases the demand for the products of capital and in- 
dustry; but the money thus spent would be doubly beneficial 
if it were employed in works of public and private benevolence. 

No direct reference has been made in the present paper to 
the question of great private fortunes. While these are a nec- 
essary condition of excessive standards of living, they are sep- 
arable, at least in theory, from the latter, and present a dis- 
tinct problem. The sole object of these pages has been to de- 
fine as precisely as possible the range of expenditure which is 
most compatible with — which, indeed, may be called normal 
for — ^Christian living. Describing this in terms of dollars 
may, at first sight, seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, those who 
admit the soundness of the underlying principles cannot set 



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588 THE Cost of Christian Living [Feb. 

aside the estimate with a wave of the hand. Possibly they 
will find that it is not easily overthrown by concrete argu- 
ment. Throughout the article the writer has had chiefly in 
mind Catholics. For they too are, to a deplorable extent, 
under the delusion that valuable life consists in the indefinite 
satisfaction of material wants. This delusion injures those 
who are below as well as those who are above the reasonable 
maximum. The former are discontented where they ought 
to be well satisfied, and envious where they ought to be 
thankful because of the temptations that they have escaped. 
The latter frequently see their children grow weak in faith and 
character, while they themselves become worldly, cold, and un- 
generous. The contributions to religion, charity, or education 
by Catholics who live sumptuously, by all Catholics, indeed, 
who exceed the bounds of simple and moderate living, are, gen- 
erally speaking, utterly inadequate as compared with their in- 
come. Herein consists the inordinate attachtmnt to wealth which 
is contrary to the Christian principle. It is no longer that 
ridiculous passion for gold which obsessed the misers of our 
nursery tales; it is simply the striving for and indulgence in 
excessive amounts of material satisfaction. 

TJU St. Paul Seminary, 

Footnote. — It ought not to be necessary to remind the reader that wherever a sharp 
tomparison is made between the moral dangers besetting those below and those above the 
$6,500 limit, the statement must be taken in a general sense. For example : The family that 
expends $6,490 is evidently in substantially the same situation as the one whose annual out- 
lay is $6,510. 



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ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.^ 
BY FRANCIS AVELING, D D. 

Chapter XI. 

fRNOUL kept fairly steadily to the course oi studies 
mapped out for him, working less at the legal 
classes than at those in which individual wit and 
brilliance told. While he heard much on all hands 
of the extraordinary ability of Maitre William, as 
he got, day by day, more in touch with the current life of 
the University, he kept, more or less, to the classes at St. Vic- 
tor's, with, occasionally, a lecture at Notre Dame or one of the 
other already noted schools. 

His curiosity took him to the Sorbonne and St. Genevieve, 
and even to St. Jacques and the Cordeliers. At St. Jacques 
he had heard Master Elias Bruneto, and John of Rochelle at 
the Franciscans. And he had seen both John Fidanza, better 
known as Brother Bonaventure, and Thomas the Neapolitan, who 
had come to Paris with a brilliant reputation already gained at 
Cologne. Of the two, he certainly preferred the Dominican 
brother. A certain class prejudice was in his favor. He was 
at least a gentleman bom, even if he did hold such curious 
views with regard to the seculars. And what he said seemed 
to have some sense in it. 

At any rate, the sentences that came so slowly from his 
lips were trenchant; and his dialectic, though far more heavy, 
was also far more brilliant than that of Maitre Louis. He was 
lecturing on a very dry and uninteresting subject, so Amoul 
thought ; and he could not understand how it was that he had 
such a large following of scholars filling up his lecture hall. 

He did not go a second time. His prejudice in favor of 
the secular party increased rather than diminished ; for he was 
getting hand in glove with the little faction among the schol- 

* Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society of St. 
Paul the Apostle in the State of New York. 



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S90 ARNOUL the englishman [Feb., 

ars at St. Victor's that acknowledged Maitre Louis as its lead- 
er and the exponent of its principles. 

The University, he discovered, was just then split up into 
a great number of these little factions. There were few of the 
colleges that had not taken up their stand on the one side or 
the other of the burning controversy ; and the students outside 
the colleges, though more than likely they hardly realized the 
issue at stake, were as venomous and bitter as partisans could 
well be. For the most part, and with few exceptions, they 
were on the secular side ; and as there were practically no in- 
fluences to restrain them, they did not stop short at words or 
arguments, but used their fists and weapons as well. 

Arnoul was coming back one day, along the Rue St. Jacques, 
from the Petit Pont with Maitre Louis and another of his 
friends, when they heard a great commotion going on behind 
St Julien's Church. Gripping their sticks they rushed round 
the corner. It was a pair of begging friars — or rather, had 
been, for one had taken to his heels and was making off as 
fast as his legs could carry him through the crooked streets. 
A crowd of men and boys stood round the remaining friar, 
some of them drunk, some sober, but all abusive and threaten- 
ing. The poor man was shaking and had changed his cry for 
alms into a prayer for mercy. "Good gentlemen all,'' he quav- 
ered, " have pity on a poor friar 1 I have done naught to 
anger you. I am but a poor brother of the Preachers crying 
for alms. Owl" he cried, as the first cudgel caught him on 
the arm from which his alms- basket hung. "Owl For the 
love of God ! Holy Virgin, protect me 1 Ow ! Good masters, 
spare me 1 Ow I " 

He danced about, trying to avoid the cudgels aimed at him, 
for the crowd had quite lost its reason by now. They looked 
upon the unfortunate friar as the embodiment of the Domini- 
can order, and remembered in a muddled way what they were 
pleased to consider their wrongs, their grievances against it. 

There was no responsible member of the University within 
sight, and a sheer lust of torment had seized upon the schol- 
ars. Those who had been drinking lurched about, striking at 
the friar, but as often as not contriving to fetch a ringing blow, 
on the head of one of their companions. It threatened to be- 
come a general miUe. A woman — there were several slatternly 
women standing on the fringe of the crowd, out of harm's 



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I908.J Arnoul the Englishman 591 

way — shrieked out vile abuse and urged the students on. At 
length — for the scrimmage had taken an ugly look and knives 
were drawn-^one of the least drunken of the lot rushed for- 
ward and seized the friar's basket. He was a big, burly fellow 
from Scandinavia. Arnoul had had him pointed out to him as 
one of the strongest men in the English nation. Reckless of 
the blowSi that would have cracked a less thick skull, he forced 
the shaven head, with a crash of breaking twigs, through the 
bottom of the wicker basket. The broken meats and bits of 
bread fell in a shower round the unhappy man. His face was 
besmeared and bleeding, for the rough ends of the dry willow 
twigs had cut and scratched his head. His habit was stained 
with grease and filth. A general guffaw burst from the stu- 
dents and women, the voices of the latter rising shrill and dis- 
cordant in the narrow street. The friar was frightened half 
out of his wits. He stood there rolling his eyes, invoking the 
saints, crying for mercy, trying vainly to get at his face to 
wipe the blood from it, like one distraught. One drunken 
German was still rushing about brandishing a stout club ; but 
he slipped on a greasy mass that had fallen from the friar's 
basket and tumbled, cursing thickly in his own language, to 
the ground. The crowd laughed the more. It was beginning 
to regain its easy-going good-humor. The friar moved his head 
from side to side as far as his unusual collar would permit, 
still rolling his eyes and muttering appeals to the ''good gen- 
tlemen all," until he flopped down upon the cobbles and sat 
in the midst of the debris of his morning's begging, staring 
helplessly at his tormentors. 

How it would have ended I know not, had not a whispered 
warning — " The Guard I " — split up the crowd and sent them 
flying right and left through the tortuous streets and intersect- 
ing lanes. Maitre Louis and Arnoul made away with the rest 
and left the two in the middle of the road, the shaven head of 
the one pitifully and ludicrously bobbing up and down in its 
collar of broken twigs, the other lying prone beside him. 

Such sights, and worse, were far from infrequent ; and Arnoul 
soon became accustomed to them. But he worked on steadily 
at his studies, none the less, thinking of his Devon home and 
his brother, of the great things he was to do. He had his rel- 
iquary always about his neck — the golden reliquary with the 
splinter of the Holy Cross that the Lady Sibilla had given him ; 

VOL. LXXXVI.-— 38 



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592 ARNOUL THE ENGUSHMAN [Feb., 

and from time to time — not very often it is true, since the voy- 
age was a long one — he had news of Buckfast and Woodleigh, 
and sometimes even of Moreleigh, by monks or pilgrims jour- 
neying through Paris. 

The news, scarce as it was, was good and always welcome; 
and when Abbot Benet had passed through on his way to Citeaux 
again in the following year, he had listened to a long and de- 
tailed account of all that was happening at home. Helion was 
dead and had left much property to the Abbey. Roger and 
Budd were well and happy ; but they both missed him sorely — 
or said they did. Isobel was more tyrannical than ever; and 
Sir Guy was, as usual, working hard at Woodleigh and help- 
ing the Moreleigh priest, who had become a chronic invalid, in- 
cessantly. 

" Your brother will kill himself with work," said the Abbot 
with evident approval. '' He is a most zealous priest and a true 
Christian.'' 

** And how is Vipont ? " asked Arnoul tentatively. '' Guy 
must have a great deal to do with him now, if Sir John is so 
unwell ! " 

Abbot Benet frowned. '' Vipont is as well as usual and as 
quarrelsome as ever. He is making trouble over his fief at 
Holne now. His land joins ours. But what interest have you 
in Sir Sigar?" The Abbot looked his question as well as 
spoke it. 

'' None " ; replied the boy, blushing in spite of himself. 
''That is to say, practically none. But I thought Guy — " 

''And how are you doing yourself?" asked the monk, in- 
terrupting him. " I shall have to give Sir Guy an account of 
you when I return. I can see that you are well. But your 
studies — ? Your work?" 

The interview veered to the lad's doings in Paris; the Ab- 
bot listening without any comment to all that he had to tell him. 
But on the whole Arnoul was drifting. The Abbot carried 
back a glowing account of him to Buckfast and Woodleigh. 
The canons at St. Victor's had endorsed his statements as to 
work and studies. He himself would have been surprised had 
he been able to realize how far he had changed. But it was 
true, nevertheless. Maitre Louis had not proved the best of 
mentors and Arnoul looked up to him and admired him so that 
he would not hear a word against him from any one. Maitre 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 593 

Giles had tried to speak to him once ; but he had been silenced 
by Arnoul's prompt anger. Nor could he even countenance 
any of his own misgivings that made themselves felt as Louis 
showed more and more of that extraordinary and complex char- 
acter that lay hidden under his affectation of dialectic and in« 
difference. 

On one occasion they had gone to a tavern together. It 
was at the time of the evening walk, when public lectures were 
over. When they reached the great street of St. Jacques, Mai- 
tre Louis spoke confidentially. " A little wine for the stomach's 
sake ! It is the counsel of St. Paul. After decretals it helps 
the digestion. And I know a famous wine seller close at hand 
where we can have the choicest" 

His companion did not demur; and, turning a corner, they 
entered the cabaret. 

It was very dark and somewhat thick with the stale fumes 
of wine; but it was certainly a cut above the filthy tavern in 
the Rue St. Jacques. Louis was evidently a well-known patron 
of the host, and at once began to speak with him and with the 
other frequenters of the place. 

''Your best I" he commanded. ''Your best, Messire Julien ! 
Bring it out I I have brought you a new companion, a brave 
fellow and an Englishman, who desires the freedom of your 
hospitality. What I Jacques le Boiteux I — at this time of day ! 
Why, even I would not be here now, if it were not in the exe- 
cution of a plain duty I " 

"Duty," laughed Maitre Jacques le Boiteux thickly. "Tis 
a duty that is welcome none the less, my excellent doctor. 
Aales, my girl, look at Maitre Louis 1 He comes hither at the 
call of duty I " And Maitre Jacques joined with Aales in a 
laugh at the bare idea. 

" Duty," he continued, grinning all over his pimply face. 
"Duty I Of course it is a duty 1 Tis a duty that brings me here 
too I 'Tis a duty that brings Aales ! We have all come be- 
cause of duty I " He embraced the eight or ten scholars, serv- 
ing men, and women in a grandiose sweep of his hand. 

" I shall prove to you, my good Maitre Louis, by the Or- 
ganon of Aristotle and Porphyry his Isagoge that it is a duty I 
You will admit that the Manicheans are the most damnable 
heretics, to begin with?" 

" I admit nothing, Maitre Jacques. You will prove in as 



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594 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Feb., 

many arguments as you please, and just as many points as you 
please. But I am here to drink mine host's good wine and not 
to chop logic with a lawyer. Logic for the schools, say I ; not 
for the wine house I '' 

'' Ha 1 Jeannette, my beauty, here is a new suitor for your 
fair hand I Come hither, girl, and make the acquaintance of 
Maitre Arnoul the Englishman 1 If you are off with me, there 
is no reason why you should not love my friends. Now, don't 
you be jealous, my Thomassine; don't sulk over there in a 
corner 1 Here am I getting Blanches Mains out of the way, 
that I may talk to you by yourself 1 " And he laughed brutally. 

Arnoul shrank from the rough tone of familiarity and the 
laugh. This was a side of the Gascon's character that he cer- 
tainly had not seen before, for Louis had dropped for the 
moment his habitual mask of gravity and learning and un- 
covered what lay beneath it. He was learning much of Paris 
and the scholars under the Gascon's tutelage. He did not like 
the laugh and he did not like the words ; but, ashamed of him- 
self for his dislike of both, he turned to the really beautiful 
girl who made her way over towards him. 

"So you are Arnoul the Englishman," she said, her lips 
parting in a smile over two rows of pearly teeth. ''I have 
heard that pig Louis speak of you so often. And he has not 
lied," she continued, frankly scrutinizing his face and form. 
" He said you were an Apollo, or a Paris. I don't know them ; 
but they must be fine fellows if they are anything like you." 

Messire Julien's wine was good ; and the company, when he 
had got over his initial dislike of Maitre Jacques le Boiteux, 
and forgotten the manner of his introduction, Arnoul found 
charming enough. It was the first, but by no means the last 
visit he paid to Julien's tavern. 

So he continued studying the crabbed pages at St. Victor's, 
and reading, without altogether understanding it, the living 
book of human nature that lay opened before his eyes. He 
began to think it a fine thing to boast and swagger about as 
others did ; and spent far more than he could afford on clothes 
and ornament, frequently making his way to the town on the 
other bank of the Seine, to visit the shops and make pur- 
chases. Old Ben Israel noted him down with a shrewd leer as 
a future client, and bowed until his four fringes touched the 
earth whenever he met him. 



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I908.] ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 595 

Arnoul had indeed fitted himself out in fine garments that 
made him look far more like a courtier than a student. He 
bad exchanged his Devon homespun for a gay dress in which 
camlet, and even silk, were made up; and he had procured a 
high, conical felt hat, a new and special creation of Messire 
Richart Bon Valet. This he wore on special days, when he 
left his books behind him and went off on some escapade with 
Maitre Louis or alone. He spent hours on the Pont au Change, 
gazing into the jewellers' shops and turning over in his mind 
whether his little store of money would allow of a golden ring 
or a buckle. When he reluctantly decided that it would not 
allow of so great an extravagance, he almost resolved to wear 
his reliquary so that it could be seen. He was in danger of 
becoming a prig and a fop; and, in spite of all his good in- 
tentions and resolves, his studies were becoming very remiss 
and intermittent. When Maitre Louis, as he had so often 
threatened he would, left St. Victor's to take up his abode in 
a private lodging, he had half a mind to accompany him. But 
the advice Guy had so incessantly poured into his ears at 
Woodleigh restrained him ; or he had not yet sufficient courage 
to take so bold a step. He remained at St. Victor's and hov- 
ered around Louis' lodging, so that it would have been diffi- 
cult to tell from his dress or the society he frequented whether 
he was an extern student or a member of an Hospitium. 

Thus he lived; dipping int9 his parchments occasionally, 
and turning up in his place in the class-rooms just so often as 
was necessary to escape a reprimand from the Canon Prefect, 
until the king returned from his crusade. 

He made a great point of going to all the religious cele- 
brations of City, Town and University — but this more from 
love of excitement than from any devotion they aroused. Every 
one went to them, and one met one's friends there. Also, his 
visits to Messire Julien's became more frequent. He was be- 
ginning to make a great many friends there; and his taste, in 
friends, was changing too. He would have put that fact down 
to the enlarging of his mind, no doubt, or to a certain liberal- 
ness of principles that began to make itself apparent in his 
character. But Maitre Giles was the real cause, though cer- 
tainly the unintentional one, of his ultimately taking himself 
and his belongings away from St. Victor's. 

Now Maitre Giles was a very excellent and orthodox person, 



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596 Arnoul the Englishman [Feb., 

as will already have been perceived. But he had his failings 
and limitations. He was, like so many orthodox persons, a 
terrible bore ; and he was stupid to boot. This combination of 
qualities, together with a habit he possessed of actively inter- 
esting himself in the welfare of other people, made him ex- 
tremely unpopular among the majority of his fellow-students. 
But, no whit daunted by unpopularity, be pursued the even 
tenor of his way, grinding at his texts, poring over manu- 
scripts, giving vent to strange-sounding though perfectly ortho- 
dox, theories, offering advice in season and out of season, and 
generally making himself obnoxious. 

Maitre Giles was pained and shocked at the backslidings of 
Arnoul. He followed him about the Abbey as a ferret follows 
its prey through the windings of a warren ; and not infre- 
quently contrived, as he supposed, to impress the young man 
with his admonitions. Among other things he told him that 
he ought not to waste so much of his time staring in the shops. 
That annoyed and irritated Arnoul so much, that Maitre Giles 
gave no further advice that day. He should employ bis time 
as it suited him; and what was that meddling Giles, that he 
should watch what he did? thought the boy angrily. On an- 
other occasion he overtook him in the streets of the city, near 
the great square that fronts the palace. 

'' Have you seen," he asked, " the Christian Saracens who 
have come to Paris? They were converted to the true faith 
by the sight of the fortitude of King Louis in his captivity. 
Also, the Preachers and the Minorites taught them to see 
the wickedness of Mohammed's law that intoxicates the soul. 
They have come with letters patent from the king commanding 
that they be lodged and fed befittingly until his return, when 
he will himself see to their honorable maintenance." 

•' No " ; Arnoul had not seen them. 

" And do you know that the king is coming back from his 
wars in Egypt?" 

Arnoul had not heard the rumor of the king's return ; but 
it, no less than a sight of the Saracens, promised excitement 
Maitre Giles often managed to pick up authentic scraps of in- 
formation. Atnoul would tolerate him and learn what was to 
happen. It appeared that King Louis had been obliged to give 
hostages for his person and set out for home, leaving Egypt 
unconquered, on account of the disastrous war in Flanders. 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 597 

He was to arrive almost as soon as the envoys from the French 
returned. There would be great doings and rejoicings when 
the king came home. His coming would give a new turn to 
the war of factions in the University. King Louis was sure 
to support the regulars against the seculars. Quite right, too I 
The religious were certainly in the right and the seculars in 
the wrong. 

Arnoul was nettled. "Why do you say that?" he asked 
sharply. ''Everyone knows that the friars are lazy, good-for- 
nothing fellows who will not work, because they find begging 
pays so well. Look at the houses they have I Look at their 
intolerable pride ! They and their rules are the curse of so- 
ciety. And they preach against the getting of an honest liv- 
ing. They would stop all chances of a career in the Church, 
did they but have their way." 

"So"; replied Maitre Giles, "you have had all that from 
Louis and his crew. I knew they were poisoning your mind. 
Do you know anything of the friars themselves? Have you 
talked with Brother Thomas at St. Jacques, or with Brother 
Bonaventure the Franciscan ? " 

"I have heard them lecture," retorted Arnoul. *'The one 
seems to be a pious fool of a mystic; and the other is too 
heavy and dull for comprehension. How he manages to get 
his class full puzzles me." 

"But he does manage. Louis, with his incessant cackling 
about St. Amour, has prejudiced you. That man is a saint, 
mark my words. He is the cleverest man in France; and old 
Maitre Albert knew what he was saying when he prophesied 
that the Dumb Ox would shake the world with his bellowing. 
And so simple and kind he is ! Why ! he will give hours of 
his time to helping a poor fellow, like you or me, in a diffi- 
culty. I would go to him before any one else, if I were in 
trouble — though he is only a year or so older than I am. And, 
what is more, he would listen to me and help me as if I were 
the king himself or the Duchess of Brabant. But I see you 
are deep stuck in the mire of prejudice and hatred of their 
holy lives. Come 1 Maitre Arnoul, this will never do I " 

Arnoul sickened of Giles' criticism and smarted under his 
well-meant fault-finding. He left him as soon as he could — 
after they had seen the converted Saracens in their gorgeous 
eastern dresses, the eleemosynary guests of King Louis at the 



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598 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Feb., 

old palace. And he left him in a temper. Giles was a con- 
ceited coxcomb — setting himself up in a sanctimonious way as 
the censor of his doings I He would not brook it 1 

One or two more interviews with Maitre Giles at St. Vic- 
tor's made up his mind. It was obvious that as long as he 
remained at the Abbey he could not shake off this dour and 
persistent critic. So, saying nothing of his intention save to 
Maitre Louis, one fine day, just after the king's arrival in his 
capital, he followed the example of his friend and vanished 
from St. Victor's. 

Chapter XII. 

Arnoul's new lodgings were in a mean street not far from 
the Hotel of the Abbot of St. Denis, at the extreme north- 
western corner of the University wall, near the Tour de Nesle. 
They were close to those of his friend Maitre Louis. Once he 
had taken the step of removing, bag and baggage, from St 
Victor's he began to realize to some extent what he was really 
doing. There were new dangers as well as old with which he 
would have to cope; and he resolved to be more assiduous 
than ever before in his work and study. He would, of course, 
follow the secular doctors now, since, in a sense, he had defi- 
nitely cast in his lot with them in leaving the Hospitium of 
the canons. And he would strive all the more to justify the 
change he had made, and to prove himself capable of manag- 
ing his own affairs. He could not forget Guy's great hopes, 
and, after all, was he not a de Valletort? He meant to get 
on. 

The presence of King Louis in his capital made a consider- 
able difference in the gaiety and whirl of life in that excite- 
ment-loving place. But the king, while acknowledging the 
glad welcome of his burghers, took little part in their pleasure 
at his return. Rumor had it that he was heartbroken over the 
failure of his Holy War and his own capture; and had shut 
himself up in the Old Palace to brood. As a matter of fact, 
Arnoul saw for himself that he was sad and disheartened; 
for, instead of wearing the apparel that befitted the king of 
kings upon earth, he had discarded the costly furs and scarlet 
silks that he used to wear for plain, sad colors, mostly gray 
or blue, and of a coarse texture. And he would no longer 



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I908.] ARNOUL the ENGLISHMAlSt 599 

suffer the trappings of his charger to be of gold embroidery or 
rich velvet. Even the golden stirrups and greaves had been 
replaced by plainer metal. 

Still, notwithstanding the royal sadness, the city was gayer 
than ever, full as it was of high ecclesiastical and military dig- 
nitaries; and Maitre Arnoul's last resolutions, like the former 
ones, began to waver. 

When the news came that the King of England would make his 
royal progress homewards through France, and that King Louis 
had given orders to the magnates and burghers of all the cities 
through which he would pass on his way to Paris to receive 
him with his Queen and court as was fitting, his excitement 
knew no bounds. All the English nation was excited and full 
of preparations for Henry's reception by the University — ^so ex- 
cited that, while its members shortened their weekly commons 
in order to provide for the expenses of a right royal welcome 
to their monarch, many of them did not forget to drink fre- 
quently to his health and prosperity, nor to quarrel lustily with 
the other nations. 

Arnoul, on that ever-to-be-remembered night before the 
King's expected entry into Paris, had distinguished himself by 
being the most prominent figure in a common tavern brawl. 
It was at Messire Julien's pothouse. Louis was there and le 
Boiteux, with the usual company, male and female. But the 
place was more crowded than usual. All the wine sellers and 
inn-keepers were doing a roaring trade in those days. There 
were a couple of Arabians — the one a student, the other a man 
of middle age who got his living by hawking Spanish parch- 
ments, translations of Aristotle, treatises on medicine, works on 
astrology, who had forgotten the sayings of Lord Mohammed, 
" Never drink wine ; for it is the root of all evil." There was 
a shoemaker and his wife, from over the bridge, sitting to* 
gether on a bench in the corner. The shoemaker was a clerk 
who, for reasons of his own, had given up his studies years 
before and settled down to leather, keeping the benefit of 
clergy that his minor orders secured for him, just as many of 
the tradesmen of the town had done, preferring the jurisdiction 
of the Church to that of the civil courts. Aales and Jeannette 
were there as well, with Thomassine. And there were others, 
scholars, gentlemen's men, women. One singular personage 
was present, conversing in low tones with Maitre Louis, whom 



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6oo Arnoul the Englishman [Feb., 

Arnoul never remembered having seen before. He was a mel- 
ancholy looking specimen of a man with high, sallow cheek- 
bones and deep-set, piercing eyes. His enormous egg-shaped 
head was bald, except for a fringe of iron-gray hair that began 
behind either ear, sticking out in wisps at the sides, and con- 
tinuing in a ragged patch round the back of his head. 

His hands were knotted and wrinkled, with long and dirty 
nails; and his fingers writhed incessantly as he whispered, 
twining themselves together and separating again. Clad in a 
rusty suit of black, with no ornament of any kind, save a leath- 
ern wallet, to lighten its sombre hue, he was leaning forward 
in his eagerness towards Louis; and, from the way in which 
his lips were moving and twisting, he was evidently very much 
in earnest in whatever he was saying. 

Arnoul took a seat on the bench near Jeannette. He had 
on his finest colors and his conical hat. Messire Julien was 
bustling about attending to his guests. All were making merry, 
drinking, joking, singing snatches of popular songs, in the best 
of humors with themselves and each other, when Jacques le 
Boiteux, without rhyme or reason, made an insolent remark to 
Arnoul, coupling his name with that of Jeannette Blanches 
Mains. 

The boy's blood was up in an instant ; and a dull-red wave 
of anger spread over his face and then subsided, leaving him 
deathly pale. He gripped the handle of a small dagger that 
was hidden beneath his tunic. But Maitre Jacques, either from 
stupidity or set purpose, continued his insulting words. 

"You think," he sneered, "you can lord it over us with 
your airs and graces, swaggering about in your fine elothes! 
I wonder how much Ben Israel has advanced you, upstart cub 
of an Englishman that you are I Why I You have been here 
less time than any of us, and you put on airs as if you were 
a licentiate at least 1 You and your precious kingl What's 
your knavish king coming here for, I wonder ? And Louis I 
It's just like him to play the pious, peaceable monarch and or- 
der us to welcome your — 1 Faugh I A fig for your little 
Henry and for you and for all Englishmen, say 1 1 " 

But it was more than Arnoul could stand, and, leaping to 
his feet, he made at the besotten reveller. 

"Take that 1 " he shouted, "and thatl" as he drove his 
fist fair home between Maitre Jacques' eyes, knocking him o£F 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 6oi 

the bench and sending him sprawling on the floor. '' The next 
time you dare to speak of me, or of my king and country, 
you will find this steel in your lying carcass ! " And he bran- 
dished the dagger above the kicking lawyer. 

But he had reckoned without Aales. She sprang at him like 
one possessed, clawing at him with her nails, and trying, de- 
spite the weapon, to get near enough to scratch his face or to 
bite him. In a twinkling the tavern was in an uproar. Every 
one was fighting with every one else; and the low room re- 
sounded with blows and shouting. 

But it was soon over; and while Messire Julien was rue- 
fully counting up the damage, Arnoul found himself pushed 
out into the street and in the company of Maitre Louis and 
his solemn companion, the man in black. 

** That was a foolish thing to do,'' said the melancholy 
stranger, as if speaking to himself. '' A little more and it might 
have become bloodshed. And after the Bull about carrying 
arms, too! Young men are so impetuous and rash." 

His voice was deep and resonant, with a strong nasal twang ; 
but Arnoul was still too angry to notice it. 

'' What would you have me do ? '' he asked furiously. 
''Would you see me swallow such an insult tamely? Nay; I 
shall even now return and plunge my dagger into his lying 
body I" 

He turned to put his threat into execution; but they re- 
strained him and led him away to Louis' lodging, and there, 
when he had recovered his temper, he was introduced to Maitre 
Barthelemy, "the most subtle and profound alchemist in the 
world." Those were the words of Maitre Louis. Maitre Bar- 
thelemy bowed, he did not smile. He was one of those per- 
sons who take themselves very seriously. On the contrary, he 
frowned; and producing a scrap of dirty parchment from his 
wallet he asked the date — day, hour, and year— of Arnoul's 
birth. 

'' You are," he observed, '' a person of singular qualities and 
fortune. I can read in the lines of your features that my part 
shall some day be of use to you. You will take notice," he 
said, turning to Maitre Louis as he made some crabbed signs 
on the parchment, ''that he has a notable development of the 
forehead. Moreover, he was born on a Thursday. I would dare 
hazard that even Mercurius was in conjunction. 



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602 ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN [Feb., 

''Andy touching the other matter, my good Maitre Louis, 
you shall see it for yourself. I have obtained it thrice al- 
ready ; but the powder must be added to the liquid — and slowly/' 
He proceeded to give long directions in a language quite un- 
intelligible to Arnoul. 

'' You have followed me in all I have said ? " he asked when 
he had done, looking towards Louis, who bent his head in 
answer. Then turning to Arnoul again, he began in a less 
mysterious tone of voice : '' Young sir 1 I must cast your horo- 
scope and read the stars in your behalf. The mystic heavens 
of the divine Pythagoras will be in your favor. You will find 
written a good fortune and a high station, be sure of it! But 
be more prudent with your weapon in future I If word of it 
were to reach the Rector, or the Bishop-^l '' Maitre Barthelemy 
made a gesture expressive of what might be expected. 

As Arnoul had quite recovered his temper by now, he hung 
his head sheepishly at the older man's rebuke. He was some- 
what mystified by the extraordinary language to which he had 
been listening, and impressed by the alchemist's manner. He 
certainly was puzzled, though he called to memory some chance 
expressions let drop by Louis and knew what implicit faith he 
had in the man. 

"I shall read the stars and cast your life," continued the 
black-robed Maitre Barthelemy. ''You shall come to my poor 
lodging behind the Chateau de Vauvert, whenever you have 
need of me or my art." 

The lad shuddered involuntarily, for it was well known 
that the Chateau was haunted. Not even the king could in- 
duce any one to live in it. 

" You have a future before you," the alchemist reiterated. 
" Of that I am already convinced. And you will come to 
Maitre Barthelemy whenever you wish his help." 

The night was wearing away. Arnoul was fascinated by the 
glowing — if half- intelligible — sentences of the quack. He looked 
at Maitre Louis and saw him drinking in every word, with 
open eyes and mouth. Well, he might perhaps some day avail 
himself of the opportunity of consulting Maitre Barthelemy the 
magician. But it was late now ; and to-morrow the kings rode 
into Paris. He had not drunk so much but that he knew it 
was high time to get to bed, if he was to be up in time to see 
the entry. So he made his adieux and sought his own lodg- 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 603 

ing, leaving Maitre Louis to listen alone to the astrological 
and alchemical jargon of Maitre Barthelemy. 



Chapter XIII. 

It was ten o'clock by the bells of the city of Paris. Ten 
o'clock, thoughi had it not been for the deserted streets in the 
quarter of the University, it might well have been high noon. 
The sun shone down upon the roofs and gables of the crowded 
houses, and sent its beams through the narrow intervals be- 
tween the overhanging upper stories into all the nooks and 
crannies of the empty streets, seeking out and showing up 
clear and distinct every heap of garbage and every scrap of 
refuse that littered the ground. It was ten o'clock and not 
high noon, for the beams came slantwise through, making a 
narrow line of half-shadow — where all was bathed in a diffused 
yellow glow — along one side of the streets that ran from north 
to south. Where the stream of sunlight touched the jutting 
windows of some more than usually exuberant edifice, or a 
cornice projecting further across the narrow street than its 
fellows, it made bulging shadows, of queer shapes and con* 
sistencies, upon the pavement. But it was difficult to see just 
where the shadow began and the sunlight ended ; for the whole 
space, even in the narrowest of the twisting lanes, and where 
the buildings jostled most together, was full of light. There 
were few people abroad; and, but for the occasional man or 
woman passing through the deserted streets, Paris might have 
been a city of the dead. 

On a sudden, with the jangling of the bells, the silent city 
burst into teeming life. Crowds of students poured out of the 
class-rooms and filled the now animated open spaces. It was 
the end of the morning school; and, after some five hours of 
work, and in many cases of fasting, men were ready for the 
beef and porridge of oatmeal and gravy that formed the staple 
of their breakfast and dinner rolled into one. Most of the 
students carried books and rolls of parchment in which they 
had been noting down, in the curious mediaeval shorthand that 
students used, the chief points of the morning's lessons. 

These they would study diligently after the meal, if they 
were not then occupied in giving lessons themselves, until the 
hour for supper came at five in the afternoon. Then, always 



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6o4 Arnoul the Englishman [Feb., 

supposing that they were diligent scholars, there would follow 
the discussion of serious problems among themselves, and fur- 
ther studies, until the approach of bedtime warned them, espe- 
cially in the winter, that to lie with cold feet was neither 
healthy nor pleasant ; and they stamped about for half an hour 
or so to get them warm again before turning in for the night. 

The scholars were coming from the various classes singly or 
in groups; some of them at once making off in haste towards 
the lodging, college, or cloister where their dinner awaited them, 
others lagging behind to talk. 

One little knot of men in particular stood and chatted to- 
gether. It was composed of only four or five students, and 
among them was Maitre Louis. But from the way they were 
looking about them they were evidently expecting some one 
else. It was Arnoul for whom they were tarrying. He came 
up to them with a brisk step — not, be it confessed, from the 
school, but from his lodging. He had been adding a few fin- 
ishing touches to his finery there. These were his guests. He 
had invited them, on the counsel of Maitre Louis, to do him 
the honor of dining with him at an eating-house of some report 
on the other side of the river. Not that the viands would be 
anything much out of the ordinary to which they were accus- 
tomed at home. That was not to be expected. But it was not 
home; that was the consideration that lent the charm. And 
there was good wine to be had without the trouble of sending 
out for it. 

The waiting guests welcomed their host with great cordial- 
ity. Besides Louis, and those who were invited at his sugges- 
tion, Arnoul had insisted upon asking Maitre Giles and Maitre 
Pierre to be of the party; why, possibly even he could not 
have said. It may have been that he was anxious to empha- 
size his own independence, and to show to his former fellows 
at St Victor's, through the talkative Giles, how well he was 
getting on outside the fold of the Abbey. The others were 
students in Arts and, to a man, of the secular party. 

They made their way quickly to the Petit Pont, and across 
the city. Then, crossing the Pont au Change, and passing the 
Grand Chatelet, they came to the place at which they were to 
dine, and found the room set apart for them. After the meal, 
which proved rather more than an ordinary affair, since mine 
host had put himself out to provide one or two delicacies 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 605 

for the occasion, the wine began to loosen the tongues of the 
diners. They praised the cooking and the excellence of the 
fare, voting Arnoul a prince among good fellows and an alto- 
gether admirable Englishman. One of bis guests compared him 
with the Flemings — much to the latter's disadvantage ; and swore 
that, though it was well known that all Flemings were gluttons, 
none could have ordered so choice and so select a repast. 

The talked veered by degrees to the University and its do- 
ings. Maitre Louis let loose the flood by a reference to his 
hero St. Amour. Every one, naturally, had something to say. 
They were not students of the University of Paris for nothing, 
these guests of Arnoul, and far more than the lessons that they 
learned in the schools, the burning question that agitated the 
whole University interested them. 

''I heard yesterday," said one, ''that the Rector has made 
a new decree by which the extern students are affected." 

"No, no; that's not right," corrected another. **You have 
mixed it up with the Bull. There is a rumor that the Pope 
has issued another Bull — a most abominable Bull — against the 
true and natural representatives of our University. St. Amour, 
they say, he has deprived of his benefices, with Odo of Douai 
and Nicholas of Bar and Canon Christian. 

" It's an unheard-of insult, if it be true ; and the fault lies 
at the door of those accursed black friars. Why can't the Pope 
accept the fair arrangement of our sovereign lord, the king, I 
should like to know? Isn't the commission he appointed good 
enough ? The four Archbishops he named allowed the Jacobins 
to keep their two chairs — and that in perpetuum — against the 
express and just wishes of the University. What more do they 
want? One would think they would never be satisfied." 

'* I crave your pardon," put in Maitre Giles, '* but the Ja- 
cobins had nothing to do with the Bull. You know perfectly 
well, all of you, how some of the seculars have been stirring 
up the common people of the town, as well as the members of 
the University, against the religious and the life they lead. St 
Amour has said publicly, not once but many times, that they 
are accursed because they live on alms. He has denied that 
they can preach or hear confessions, even if sent by the Bishop, 
or by our Lord the Pope himself. And many other things has 
he said too scandalous for repetition." 

" One would think you were a mendicant to hear you talk," 



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6o6 Arnoul the Englishman [Feb., 

sneered another, taking part in the conversation. ''Pass the 
wine, there, Maitre Paul I Why 1 what interest can any of the 
students in this free and enlightened University have in defend- 
ing such wolves in sheep's clothing?" 

''The interest of right and of truth/' snapped Maitre Giles. 
It is true he was something of a busy-body ; it is true he was 
at times a singular bore; but he knew he was right this time, 
and resolved to defend the Jacobins as stoutly as he could. 

" They have filched two chairs from the University/' growled 
one. 

. " They have allowed its privileges to be infringed ; and have 
dared to go on teaching when the doctors shut the schools/' 
argued another. 

"They have done their best to destroy St Amour/' said 
Maitre Louis angrily. 

"And what of all that?" asked Giles, imperturbed by the 
storm of wrath he was raising. " What is the University ? It 
is papal, I believe. We are all clerks, are we not, and under 
the Church's jurisdiction ? And it is a place for teaching. Who 
better than the Pope to decide who shall have the chairs and 
who shall not? It is his right — not the king's or ours. And, 
again 1 I ask you, where will you find better teachers than 
those in St. Jacques ? Fie I You are partisans to talk thus 1 " 

"Partisans I and what are you?" they all cried in chorus. 
"What are you but a partisan of the smug and sanctified 
friars?" 

" Have a little more wine," suggested Maitre Giles, keeping 
himself well in hand. "Maitre Arnoul, pass the wine again, I 
pray you. Partisans, you said ? No ; I am not a partisan. I 
hear lectures at St. Victor's, where the canons are, and at the 
Sorbonne, where your St. Amour was. No; I think I am not 
a partisan. But this hatred of the friars makes my blood boil. 
Why should they be persecuted ? Why should the poet be 
allowed to write so spitefully of them? Why should they be 
hated by the people ? What have they done ? I should like 
to know?" 

"Done?" roared the first speaker. "Done? What have 
they not done ? They have stolen the two chairs they are so 
proud of. They stand apart from the rest of the University, 
caring nothing for its honor or its welfare. They seek to oust 
the secular professors, with their knavish policy and their great 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 607 

parade of sanctity. Done, is it? Isn't that enough to have 
done, rascally hypocrites that they are? How can you or I 
succeed, if these scoundrelly friars are to come into the places 
that were meant for us, and do the work of clerks and teachers, 
free gratis, for nothing?'' 

^'Ahl There you have hit the nail on the head," rejoined 
Maitre Giles with a smirk of joy. *' It's seldom but when it 
touches through the pocket that the heart moves. So — I They 
work for nothing, and they do better work than you ; that's 
where the shoe pinches, is it? Well, if that's the case, a fig 
for your disinterestedness, and a fig for your love of the Uni* 
versity I " 

^' Have a care, Maitre Giles," whispered Arnoul, the host ; 
''do not provoke the gentlemen too much." 

'' In God's name I " Giles broke in roughly — and this showed 
that he was indeed in earnest, for Arnoul had never heard 
him use even the mildest of expletives — '' In God's name I 
Would you have me listen to these slanders and not answer 
them ? " 

Arnoul was silent, if the rest of the company were not. 

" Who is there in all Paris comparable to St. Amour ? " 
asked one. 

" Are the seculars to vanish from the Church ? " 

'' Who founded the regulars I know not — Dominic, Francis, 
Benet — but the priests are of the institution of God," argued 
another. 

"You may say what you will," replied Maitre Giles. "If 
the seculars had remained as they were founded, they would 
even now be as the religious are. It was a clerk secular, I 
mind me, who said : ' Little Jesus I Little Jesus 1 How I have 
confirmed your law and exalted it in this question ! Forsooth, 
had I wished to go against you, I should have known how to 
weaken it with stronger proofs and arguments, and even to 
disprove it altogether 1 ' " 

"Those are the words of Simon of Tournai. I have heard 
them before," commented Maitre Louis, in the act of lifting 
his cup to his lips. "But they were said long ago, and now- 
a-days no secular would ever dream of saying things like 
that" 

" Probably not," said Maitre Giles drily. " He would find 

VOL. LXXXVI. — ^39 



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6o8 Arnoul the Englishman [Feb., 

his persiflage against the friars of little effect, did he commence 
it with such a heading. We are more prudent now, good 
Louis ; but we have none the less the hateful verses of Rute- 
boeuf to listen to." 

" And whose fault is that/' another asked roughly, ''if it 
is not the friars themselves?" 

'' Tis the fault of the seculars, instigating all Paris against 
the religious," replied Giles calmly. 

Arnoul's dinner, which began so well, threatened to end 
badly, if not in a free fight, between the secular students and 
Mattre Giles. He attempted to draw the conversation to a 
more general issue. 

"But this antagonism is not a new thing," he ventured. 
" Nor are the faults all upon one side." 

'' Oh, wonderful I " exclaimed several of the guests. '' Mai t re 
Arnoul has so keen a mind I He has touched the truth in this 
matter I " 

" I believe you," replied Maitre Giles. '' It is by no means 
a new thing. The University has known it and has had to 
fight against it from the beginning. As far back as Abelard** 
and there was a Bernard to fight against him. And now it is 
the religious and St. Amour and Odo. It has always been the 
same. Why was Aristotle forbidden to the students if Thomas 
can expound him now in open school?" 

'' I have heard it said that the early translations contained 
Saracen errors," answered Maitre Pierre, speaking for the first 
time. '' But, indeed, it is as Maitre Arnoul and Maitre Giles 
have said — from the beginning there have been two sides. 
You have Anselm and Bernard against Abelard." 

"Yes; but that's not the same thing. The cases are not 
parallel. Bernard stayed in his monastery, and did not try to 
force himself and his monks into positions in the University ; 
whereas these friars — there's no contenting them. Besides, they 
are not so holy and so disinterested as they would have us 
think." 

" Bethink you," Maitre Pierre returned again. '' There are 
two sides to every question ; and much is forgotten in the heat 
of argument. There are bad friars — not a doubt of it I But 
that is no reason to condemn the whole order. And because 
there are good seculars, it's no reason why we should hold 



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I9o8.] ARNOUL. THE ENGLISHMAN 609 

them all for saints. This crisis is far more a battle of princi- 
ples and privileges than of personalities. But it is the person- 
alities that come to the fore and make themselves felt, while 
the principles lie hidden deep beneath them.'' 

''But, Maitre Pierre, surely Maitre William is a notable 
personality/' said Louis. 

" Undoubtedly/' was his reply. " Undoubtedly he is a per- 
sonality; but you would not have it that he and Christian and 
Odo and Nicholas are stirring up the clerks and people against 
the friars simply in order to make themselves felt. No; they 
represent what is bad in the secular spirit. It is incarnate in 
their persons and comes out with all their personality soaked 
into it. I do not say that they are bad men — " 

" I should think not indeed ! " 

'' Incredible presumption I " 

"The jackanapes of a friar- toadying — Pah I" 

" No, they are not bad men " ; Pierre went on when he could 
make himself heard. ''Maitre William has done much for the 
University and for the new college of Maitre Robert of Sor- 
bon. Neither is the secular spirit altogether a bad thing in it- 
self. But in this question it is the misfortune of these doctors 
to be the representatives of all that is worst in that spirit. 
They are known by what is bad in that which they represent, 
rather than by what is good." 

"And the cursed friars," argued one of the seculars, "they 
are to be known always by what little there is of good, and 
not at all by all that there is of bad." 

"Your pardon, Maitre Just I 'Tis the other way about here 
also. You and your party know them by what is bad. You 
laugh at their begging and poverty ; and hate them for it. But 
you love to know them by that crazy book of the Abbot 
Joachim. You think of them all as blasphemous deceivers, be- 
cause one or two of the Cordeliers have adopted the teaching 
of the Eternal Gospel." 

" Of all the lies that have come from the mouth of hell," 
growled Maitre Just, banging on the table till the cups jumped 
again, " there are none such as are to be found in that un- 
holy book 1 There's a sample of your friars for you 1 Is it 
not the barefooted brothers of the Franciscans who have pub- 
lished the blasphemies?" 



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6io Arnoul the Englishman [Feb., 

'^And St. Amoar who has written Ihe Perils of the Last 
Times f " questioned Pierre innocently. 

'' There's no comparison between them/' shouted Just 
"Where has William written or taught that his doctrine is 
better than that of Christ ? Yet your unholy friars are preach- 
ing a book that asserts that the teaching of the Abbot Joachim 
excells that of the Lord! A book that states that the gospel 
will come to an end in the year 1260 and a new law of the 
spirit succeed it I And they assert that only the barefooted 
are fit to teach men eternal and spiritual truths! Accursed 
that they are I Spawn of the devil I those friars 1 " 

'* My good friend/' said Pierre, endeavoring to calm the 
angry man, "surely you do not believe that the friars teach 
such wicked doctrines I Have you heard Maitre Bonus- Homo 
or Brunetus say such things in the schools ? It is as I say : 
You fasten upon the evil teachings of a few, and dub the whole 
order heretical and accursed in consequence. It would be just 
as foolish for me or my side to judge of all the seculars by 
the book William of St. Amour has written I " 

" But privileges I privileges I The University privileges ! " 
began another. " They must not be infringed ; and the friars 
are infringing them. They will not stand with the rest! If 
they had their way, they would turn the University into a 
nursery of begging brats, and recruit us all for the glory of 
their own orders." 

"And then," put in Giles with a laugh, "they would be- 
gin to fight among themselves! Wherever you have men you 
will have battles; and neither the wisdom of William nor the 
sanctity of Brother Humbert can oust human nature." 

" Come, fill your cups," cried Arnoul, glad to see that the 
conversation was taking a better turn, and trying to steer it yet 
further from the dangerous rocks of controversy. " Fill your 
cups and let us drink to both sides — to the corded friars and 
the black friars as well as to William and Nicholas and Odo of 
Douai! Drink!" And he set them the example by draining 
his cup the first. 

The conversation, like all conversations in those days, had 
been heated and intense. Men were very much in earnest, and 
the merest spark would have sufficed to set the whole Univer- 
sity in a blaze. Their host had been noting the changing ex- 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 6ii 

pressions of bis guests, as well as listening to their words; and 
he had seen the rapid play of feature that accompanied the 
speeches. To a man the seculars were down upon the friars, 
and would hear no word in their favor. Their faces had ex- 
pressed as much when Giles and Pierre were speaking. And, 
if Giles was an index to the other party, they were as unready 
to listen to anything in favor of the secular side. Maitre Pierre, 
however, seemed to have struck a happy line in pointing out 
that there were undoubted faults to be found on both sides. 
Arnoul could quite conceive how the friars seized upon all that 
was worst in their adversaries and exalted it into the common 
type of the secular. And he saw for himself how the blameless 
life and real teaching of the Franciscans and Dominicans were 
distorted into crafty, shifty, and even unchristian living and 
principles, when such insane ravings as were contained in the 
Eternal Gospel were put forward as a sample of what the friars 
held and practised. There were faults on both sides, as Maitre 
Pierre said, but neither was entirely bad. Still, of the two, the 
seculars certainly made for personal independence and liberty; 
and that, to a lad of Arnoul's character, seemed to be worth 
far more than obedience and restraint. 

When his party was over, as they made their way back 
through the crowded town to the south side of the river, the 
latest production of Parisian satire fell upon their ears. Some 
one had set it to a lilting air and was singing it for the bene- 
fit of the gaping crowd. It was a harsh voice, and an unmusi- 
cal, that sang the words; but the people applauded and caught 
up the refrain, destined to resound for many a long day in Pa- 
risian streets : 

"Fr^re Predicator 
Sont de mult simple ator 
Et sont in lor destor 
Mainte bon parisi. 
Papelart et B^guin 
Ont le siecle honi.'' 

Maitre Just turned to Arnoul laughing. ^* There's your friar 1 
Drawn to the life 1 A nice reputation he's got, in truth 1 " 

Giles frowned angrily. ^^ It's that spiteful Ruteboeuf again," 
he exclaimed. ''Were it not for such as he and his kidney, 



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6l2 ARNOUL the ENGUSHMAN [Feb. 

the good people of Paris would know where to look for holi- 
ness and learning! But what with these jealousies and squab- 
bles in the schools, and the acrid spleen of such men as this 
sour rhymer, and the readiness of the people to abuse any- 
thing that is good, they do not know where to look at all/' 

'' Papelart et B^guin 
Ont le Slide honi/' 

shouted the crowd in chorus. 

''Yes, that's it''; commented Giles. "They learn to bate 
all that is devout and religious, and make mock at sanctity and 
holy lives. They will ere long become a nation of infideb." 

'' In the University," said Maitre Pierre under his breath, as 
if speaking to himself, so low that Arnoul just managed to catch 
his words. " In the schools I fear me there are already infidels, 
learning and teaching. Some of these seculars have gone so 
far in their hatred of the religious that they have attacked re- 
ligion itself." 

"Papelart et B^guin 
Ont le siicle honi ! " 

The words and tune caught and stuck in Amoul's mind. 
He walked on with the others in a brown study, thinking. He 
had learnt many things at his dinner party. 

(to be continued.) 



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FRANCIS THOMPSON. POET. 

BY THOMAS J. GERRARD. 

NLY a few weeks ago I was chatting with Francis 
Thompson in his cosy retreat at Southwater, whither 
he had gone as the guest of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, 
to see if haply he might pull together his shat- 
tered frame. Bat the phthisis fiend had caught 
him in a tight grip. He was a dying man; and an old man, 
too, although only forty-six years of age. Still, even in his ex- 
tremity the characteristics of his life were manifest, a shrinking 
from the fellowship of men, a keen perception and love of the 
Church and her teaching, a gorgeous imagination, and a ready 
and masterful power of language. I could not say that conver- 
sation with him was even an easy thing, if by conversation one 
means an unceasing flow of talk. Besides talk there were 
thoughtful silences. Then, after the thought, came the outpour- 
ing of its rich expression. The doings of the outside world had 
little interest for him, but the messages which I had for him 
from his little circle of friends set him all aglow. Now he is 
gone. His spirit, however, enshrined in his verse, remains. 
The world which knew him not, which did not make it. worth 
while to know him, will now wake up to find what a genius it 
has lost. 

' Francis Thompson had a hard life. He was at first intended 
for the priesthood. A Lancashire man by birth, he was edu- 
cated at Ushaw. When he decided that he had no vocation 
for the Church, he turned his thoughts to the profession of 
medicine, and for some time studied at Owen's College, Man- 
chester. This, however, was less satisfactory. He could not 
bear it. So he came to London and gave his life to letters. 
And if this life afforded him an outlet for his flights of thought 
and imagination, if in a large measure it satisfied the hunger of 
his soul and the thirst of his mind, it failed him altogether in 
his care for his poor body. He tasted poverty in its lowest 
dregs. Many and many a time he was on the cruel streets of 



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6l4 FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET [Feb., 

London at night with nowhere to rest his head. He sold 
matches and held hordes' heads to get a few pence to buy food. 
I will not dwell farther on the sad picture, except to say that 
about the time of his thirty-first year a good Samaritan came 
to him who lifted him from the depths, and made him write, 
and published his work, and saw to it that he should always 
know where he could find a meal and welcome. 

But the poet ever lived alone, alone and yet not alone, alone 
with himself and God and our Lady and the saints. He always 
remained poor, though he did not again go down the deep pit 
of despair as heretofore. The fruits of his risen life of reason 
are now bequeathed to mankind in his three books of poetry: 
Poems, published in 1893; Sister Songs in 1895; ^^^ ^^^ 
Poems, 1897. He also wrote a little book in prose called Health 
and Holiness, a Study of the Relations between Brother Ass, 
the Body, and his Rider, the Soul. This was in 1905. One 
more poem, contributed to the new series of the Dublin Review^ 
completes the record of Francis Thompson's work.* 

The obvious thing to say about his poetry is that it is a 
rich expression of an imagination unbounded in its fecundity. 
The most superficial reader observes this at once. Whether the 
choice of words is of the best only those who are widely read 
in the richest of all the tongues of the earth are fit to judge. 
There is something, however, in this poetry which goes deeper 
than imagination. It is the law of reason. And there is some- 
thing in it which confirms and transcends even reason. It is 
the dogma of the Catholic Church. As Coventry Patmore said, 
Francis Thompson was Catholic through and through, from the 
beginning to the end of his being. His work is the concrete 
refutation of the idea that thought and imagination in order to 
be free must be unfettered. It is only very small poets who 
mistake independence for freedom. All the great ones recog« 
nize fetters of some kind as the needful condition of liberty. 
Mrs. Meynell finds this bondage in that of metre. *' It is no 
wonder," she says *' that every poet worthy the name has had 
a passion for metre, for the very verse. To him the difficult 
fetter is the condition of an interior range immeasurable." Of- 
tentimes to the uninitiated this bondage of verse must be un- 
recognizable. Thus few would see in Patmore's poems, unless 

* We may add to this list two short poems contributed to The Catholic World, and 
which are reprinted in this number of the magazine. [Editor C. W.] 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET 615 

they had been told beforehand, what he calls catalectic verse. 
** Nearly all English metres/' he writes in his preface to The 
Unknown Eros, ** owe their existence as metres to * Catalexis/ 
or pause, for the time of one or more feet, and, as a rule, the 
position and amount of catalexis are fixed. But the verse in 
which this volume is written is catalectic par excellence, employ- 
ing the pause (as it does the rhyme) with freedom only limited 
by the exigencies of poetic passion,** 

Some of Thompson's poems are likewise catalectic par excel* 
lence, employing pause and rhyme with freedom limited only by 
the exigencies of poetic passion. But this freedom is kept within 
the bounds of faith and of reason, simply because the passion 
of the poet was so completely informed by reason and his rea- 
son so completely informed by faith. And it is precisely the 
bonds of faith and reason which have served to make the poet 
great. This vast universe, made up of physical and spiritual 
realities, is a reflection of God's mind. Man's unaided mind 
sees but an infinitesimal part of it. The imagination, servant 
of the mind, perceives infinitely less. Therefore, the poet whose 
imagination is controlled by reason, and whose reason is in- 
formed by faith, is as a giant among pigmies when compared 
with those who affect to despise what they call the fetters of 
dogma. He has a broader and deeper insight into the totality 
of things, and so therefore is the better able to tune his song 
in harmony with cosmic perfection. 

When these great issues are considered, the question of mere 
words becomes a small one, for, after all, words are only con- 
ventional signs. And it is the part proper to genius to choose 
them. Lionel Johnson said of Francis Thompson that he had 
done more to harm the English language than the worst Amer- 
ican newspapers: corruptio optima pessima. I remember, too, 
when Health and Holiness first appeared a popular writer came 
to me with the first page of it: ''This is an age when every- 
where the rights of the weaker against the stronger are being 
examined and asserted: the rights of labour against capital, of 
subjects against their rulers, of wives against their husbands, the 
lower creation against its irresponsible master, man. Is it coin- 
cidence merely, that the protest of the body against the tyr- 
rany of the spirit is also audible and even hearkened ? " Would 
I, I was asked, have thus used the word '' hearkened " ? '' No," 
I was bound to say, '* I could not use it. Nor may you. But 



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6l6 FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET [Feb., 

Francis Thompson is of those who may. He belongs to those 
who build up our language. He may make ventures which 
would be sheer impertinence in the likes of you and me." 

Certainly our poet has gone beyond convention in the choice 
of words. But then it must be claimed that he has won his 
right to do so by his wide grasp and observance of laws which 
are so far above human convention. Nor can it be denied that 
in doing so he has done it beautifully. When he writes, for 
instance, in the ode '* To a Snow-flake " : 

What heart could have thought you ? 

Past our devisal 

(O filigree petal I) 

Fashioned so purely, 

Fragilely, surely, 

From what Paradisal 

Imagineless metal. 

Too costly for cost? 
Who hammered you, wrought you, 

From argentine vapour ? 

it makes us think twice and wonder whether, after all, we have 
really been right in our excessive zeal for the Saxon word. 

Passing from the words to the thought behind them, it must 
be noticed that the standpoint from which Thompson first and 
foremost looks out on life is that of a little child. It would 
hardly be enough to say merely that he loved children. He 
loved them with a reverential love. Yes, and he feared them 
with a reverential fear. From the childlike point of view he 
looked into this world and found its smallness; and he looked 
to the beyond of this world and found the greatness of the be- 
yond. Thus his ^* Ex Ore Infantium " at once strikes the key- 
note : 

Little Jesus, wast Thou shy 

Once, and just so small as I ? 

And what did it feel like to be 

Out of heaven, and just like me ? 

Didst Thou kneel at night to pray, 
And didst Thou join Thy hands, this way ? 
And did they tire sometimes, being young, 
And make the prayer seem very long? 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET 617 

And dost Thou like it best, that we 
Should join our hands and pray to Thee ? 
I used to think, before I knew. 
The prayer not said unless we do. 
And did Thy Mother at the night 
Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right? 
And didst Thou feel quite good in bed. 
Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said? 

For a time the poet lived at the Premonstratensian monas- 
tery at Storrington. He dearly loved to be about a religious 
house. Those of us, therefore, who have had the privilege of 
visiting this home of the monks and of walking out from there 
on to the beautiful downs of Sussex, can easily picture him 
standing on one of the slopes and looking out for his '' Daisy.'' 

The hills look over on the South, 

And southward dreams the sea; 
And, with the sea-breeze hand in hand, 

Came innocence and she. 

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry 

Red for the gatherer springs. 
Two children did we stray and talk 

Wise, idle, childish things. 

Oh, there were flowers in Storrington 

On the turf and on the spray ; 
But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills 

Was the Daisy* flower that day I 

And " Daisy " had some sisters and brothers, and a father 
and a mother, all of whom were honored by the poet's song. 
'' To my Godchild " is addressed to Francis M. W. M. ; and 
"The Poppy" to Monica; whilst "Love in Dian's Lap" is 
addressed to their mother. But hear how he tells of "The 
Making of Viola," another of the same family. 

Th$ Father of Heaven. 

Spin, daughter Mary, spin. 
Twirl your wheel with silver din; 
Spin, daughter Mary, spin, 
Spin a tress for Viola. 



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6l8 FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET [Feb., 

Angels. 

Spin, Queen Mary, a 
Brown tress for Viola! 

The Father of Heaven. 

Weave, hands angelical. 

Weave a woof of flesh to pall — 

Weave, hands angelical — 
Flesh to pall oar Viola. 
Angels. 

Weave, singing brothers, a 

Velvet flesh for Viola I 

From childhood his thoughts move forward to girlhood. 
'* Sister Songs " is an offering to two sisters, two whom we 
have already met as children. Here the poet's lighter music 
is at its best. The children of spring, leaves, blossoms, sun- 
beams, fairies, all things beautiful of the season, are invoked 
to sing the praises of Sylvia. 

Then, Spring's little children, your lauds do ye upraise 
To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways 1 
Your lovesome labours lay away. 
And trick you out in holiday, 
For syllabling to Sylvia; 
And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May, 
To bear with me this burthen. 
For singing to Sylvia. 

Then he comes to speak of the *' elder nursling of the nest," 
and at once he is in his splendor: 

But if mine unappeas&d cicatrices 

Might get them lawful ease; 
Were any gentle passion hallowed me, 

Who must none other breath of passion feel. 
Save such as winnows to the fledg&d heel 
The tremulous Paradisal plumages; 
The conscious sacramental trees 
Which ever be 
Shaken celestially. 
Consentient with enamoured wings, might know my 
love for thee. 



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I908.J FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET 619 

Here truly is spiritualized passion, passion ablaze and yet 
under perfect control. It is the fruit of sound dogmatical de- 
votion to our Lady. In the beginning of *^ Sister Songs '' he 
calls upon our Lady to aid his lay in what he has to say of 
her two maidens. The devotion is carried to highest pitch in 
his '^Love in Dian's Lap." 

One of the most powerful and telling proofs in the apology 
for the Catholic Church is the history of what she has done 
for the honor of woman in raising her to her rightful place as 
a rational being equal with man, especially in the later years 
of history. The development of thought and feeling in this 
direction seems to have gone pari passu with that development 
of thought and feeling about our Lady which culminated in 
the definition of the Immaculate Conception. Had St. Thomas 
lived to this hour and seen the change wrought, he had never 
been content with that point of Aristotelianism which spoke of 
a mas occasionatus. He gave many thoughts to Dante, but 
surely not Dante's thought of Beatrice. A leading critic of our 
time has said that only Beatrice and perhaps Laura have re- 
ceived such devotion as Thompson has paid to woman in this 
poem. The latter comparison was also that of Coventry Pat- 
more who wrote of the lines that ''Laura might be proud of 
them/' 

Let us see then how Thompson, by the aid of his imagina- 
tion and words and form, leads us out along that way ol 
eminence (via eminentics) in which, according to the Thomist 
doctrine of analogy, the human mind sees the unseen things 
divine. He is the first to feel the beggarliness of language as 
fit to convey the content of his concepts. 

Oh, but the heavenly grammar did I hold 

Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold I 

So should her deathless beauty take no wrong, 

Praised in her own great kindred's fit and cognate tongue, 

Or if that language yet with us abode 

Which Adam in the garden talked with God 1 

But our untempered speech descends — poor heirs! 

Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's bricklayers : 

Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit. 

Strong but to damn, not memorize, a spirit I 

Realizing that even when the best has been said, the best 



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620 Francis Thompson, Poet [Feb., 

remains unsaid, he rises first from the earthly commonplace to 
the earthly ideal: 

Teach how the crucifix may be 
Carven from the laurel tree, 
Fruit of the Hesperides, 
Burnish take on Eden- trees, 
The Muses' sacred grove be wet 
With the red dew of Olivet, 
And Sappho lay her burning brows 
In white Cecilia's lap of snows 1 

In this way does he tune our ears to his theme. Thus 
prepared we may approach the direct object of his address: 

O therefore you who are 

What words, being to such mysteries 

As raiment to the body is. 

Should rather hide than tell; 

Chaste and intelligential love: 
Whose form is as a grove 
Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove; 
Whose spirit to my touch thrills purer far 
Than is the tingling of a silver bell; 
Whose body other ladies well might bear 
As soul, — y^a, which it profanation were 
For all but you to take as fleshly woof; 

Being spirit truest proof; 
Whose spirit sure is lineal to that 

Which sang Magnificat 

His earthly ideal is only a suggestion of his heavenly ideal. 
The poet will learn all he can and then admit that he knows 
next to nothing. His work of desensualizing everything is car- 
ried to extreme. Perhaps it was the reaction from this move- 
ment of thought which led him in after years to write his 
Health and Holiness. Greater experts than he in the art of 
holiness have had to admit to themselves that their youthful 
zeal against the body was not altogether according to knowl- 
edge. However, there is not much danger of such zeal becom- 
ing widespread, and so we may freely avail ourselves of the 
poet's help in the endeavor to look through and beyond the 
body to the spirit. 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET 621 

Thus do I know her: but for what men call 
Beauty — the loveliness corporeal, 
Its most just praise a thing unproper were 
To singer or to listener, me or her. 

God laid his fingers on the ivories 

Of her pure members as on smooth^ keys, 

And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies. 

The grace of Eve is a reminder of the grace of the Second 
Eve, and the grace of the Second Eve is an expression of the 
grace of God. Still when the poet has made all his flights of 
fancy he comes back to say that the analogy falls infinitely 
short of the reality. 

Beyond your star, still, still the stars are brighter. 
Beyond your highness, still I follow height; 

Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view. 
Beyond your trueness. Lady, Truth stands true. 

And so God's ways of looking at things are not man's 
ways. This is the poet's hope in looking forward to divine judg- 
ment. 

Is it the all-severest mode 

To see ourselves with the eyes of God? 
God rather grant at His assize. 
He see us not with our own eyes. 

It is very well and very necessary in these days to realiie 
and understand as much as possible what is meant by the dark 
glass of mystery. Many, many souls go wrong because they 
have not grasped this doctrine. The unquenchable thirst for 
the Beatific Vision makes men impatient of the present vision, 
which at best is but enigmatic. Thompson is never tired of 
reminding us of this: 

Shade within shade 1 for deeper in the glass 

Now other imaged meanings pass; 
And as the man, the poet there is read. 
Again: 

Cosmic metonymy I 

Weak world unshuttering key I 
One 
Seal of Solomon 1 



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622 FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET [Feb., 

Trope that itself not scans 
Its huge significance, 
Which tries 
Cherubic eyes. 

Primer where the angels all 
God's grammer spell in small, 
Nor spell 
The highest too well. 



Once more: 



Nature, enough I within thy glass 

Too many and too stern the shadows pass. 



The last quotation brings me to speak of what I believe to 
be Thompson's fault — his pessimism. It is quite true that his 
pessimism was that of resignation, not of rebellion. Nor again 
was it without hope. In the stanza following the one just 
mentioned he gives beautiful evidence both of his patience and 
his hope : 

Not without fortitude I wait 
The dark majestical ensuit 
Of destiny, nor peevish rate 
Calm-knowledged Fate. 

And the star of his hope is : '' The Woman I behold, whose 
vision seek all eyes and know not" Still, when all allowances 
have been made, I think we must admit that there is a want 
of balance in the grouping of his picture. He is a mystic and 
is gifted with both sight and insight. But, fortunately, we can 
point to other mystics who have been gifted with broader sight 
and deeper insight. I speak particularly, of course, of this point 
of pessimism. I cannot allow to pass without protest such lines 
as these: 

Ah, the ill that we do in tenderness, and the hateful 

horror of love I 
It has sent more souls to the unslacked Pit than it ever 
will draw above. 

nor again these: 

'Tis said there were no thought of hell, 

Save hell were taught; that there should be 
A Heaven for all's self- credible. 
Not so the thing appears to me. 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET 623 

Tis Heaven that lies beyond our sights. 
And hell too possible that proves; 

For all can feel the God that smites. 
But ah, how few the God that loves 1 

Should any reader feel tempted to indulge such sentiments, 
I recommend an earnest and devout study of the Revelations 
of Divine Love^ by Mother Juliana, of Norwich. There he shall 
read how all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner 
of thing shall be well. '' And also, for more understanding, this 
blessed word was said : Lo^ I loved thee ! Behold and see that I 
loved thee so much ere I died for thee that I would die for thee ; 
and now I have died for thee and suffered willingly that which I 
may. And now is all my bitter pain and all my hard travail 
turned to endless joy and bliss to me and to thee. How should it 
now be that thou shouldst anything pray that pleaseth me but that 
I should full gladly grant it thee f For my pleasing is thy holi-- 
ness and thine endless joy and bliss with me. This is the un* 
derstanding, simply as I can say it, of this blessed word: Lo, 
how I loved thee. This showed our good Lord for to make us 
glad and merry.'' 

But those who knew Francis Thompson best say that he 
was full of inconsistencies; at least they found it hard to re- 
concile the various aspects of his character. It is not surpris- 
ing then to find that the same environment of Storrington 
which furnished him with the note of elemental simplicity in 
"Daisy'' also supplied him with the inspiration for the com- 
plex grandeur of his " Ode to the Setting Sun." In the grounds 
of the monastery there is a great crucifix. As the poet would 
stand at the door of the guest quarters he would look out on 
this crucifix and beyond along the Sussex hills to the Western 
sun. And the glory of the sunset is cast upon the cross. 
The scene gives him his theme. 

The red sun, 
A bubble of fire, drops slowly toward the hill. 
While one bird prattles that the day is done. 

O setting Sun, that as in reverent days 
Sinkest in music to thy smoothed sleep, 

VOL. LXXXTI.— 40 



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624 FRANCIS Thompson, Poet [Feb., 

Discrowned of homage, though yet crowned with rays. 
Hymned not at harvest more, though reapers reap: 

For thee this music wakes not. O deceived, 
If thou hear in these thoughtless harmonies 

A pious phantom of adorings reaved, 
And echo of fair ancient flatteries 1 

Yet, in this field where the Cross planted reigns, 
I know not what strange passion bows my head 

To thee, whose great command upon my veins 
Proves thee a god for me not dead, not dead 1 

For worship it is too incredulous^ 

For doubt — oh, too believing passionate! 

What wild divinity makes my heart thus 

A fount of most baptismal tears ? — Thy straight 

Long beam lies steady on the Cross. Ah mel 
What secret would thy radiant finger show? 

Of thy bright mastership is this the key? 
Is this thy secret then ? And is it woe ? 

Alpha and Omega, sadness and mirth. 

The springing music, and its wasting breath — 

The fairest things in life are Death and Birth, 
And of these two the fairer thing is Death. 

The long, long histoiy of the sun is reviewed. Through all 
the old-world mythologies his life-giving power is noted. 
Through ages and ages he is discerned giving form and color 
and perfume to all creation. Thus is the imagination led through 
cycle after cycle, until the culmination is reached. The poet 
has taken us from nature to nature's God. He was very fond 
of the saint of Assisi, and even lived for a time at the gate of 
the Franciscan monastery at Pantasaph. I cannot help thinking 
that he had in his mind that poet's hymn to the sun when he 
wrote this ode. ''Praised be my Lord God with all His crea- 
tures, and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day^ 
and who brings us the light; fair is he and shines with a very 



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i9o8.] Francis Thompson, Poet 625 

great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us Thee." In a few 
wondrous lines, which are simply big with thought about God 
and the Incarnation and Redemption, the modern poet speaks 
the same idea. 

If with exultant tread 

Thou foot the Eastern sea, 
Or like a golden bee 

Sting the West to angry red, 
Thou dost image, thou dost follow 

That King- Maker of Creation 
Who, ere Hellas hailed Apollo, 

Gave thee, angel-god, thy station; 

Thou art of Him a type memorial. 

Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood 
Upon thy Western rood; 

And His stained brow did veil like thine to- night. 
Yet lift once more Its light. 

And, risen, again departed from our ball. 
But when It set on earth arose in Heaven. 

Thus far the poet has emphasized that aspect of analogy 
which makes us realize how distinct and distant God is from 
us. And in doing so he has performed a very useful service 
in a day when the pantheistic tendency has been gaining such 
strength. But God is not only infinitely distinct and distant 
from us ; he is also infinitely near to us. The recent Encyclical 
has declared that there is a conception of immanence which, if 
properly understood, is irreproachable, and that the sense of 
this concept is that God working in man is more intimately 
present in him than man is even in himself. Provided that we 
make quite sure that God is above us and distinct from us, 
then we not only may but must believe that he is immanent in 
us. All the mystical saints have realized intensely this active 
nearness of God to the soul. Thus St. Augustine could reflect 
on his past life and say: "Thou wast driving me on with Thy 
good, so that I could not be at rest, until Thou wast manifest 
to the eye of my soul." 

A Catholic poet then, wishing to enter into the higher flights 
of mysticism, could not be content with the merely transcenden- 



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6l6 FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET [Feb., 

tal aspect of his analogies. In so doing he would be wander- 
ing off into sheer Deism, which means the annihilation of all 
poetry and of all that is beautiful in religion. Francis Thomp- 
son, then, being at once true Catholic, true poet, and true mys- 
tic, attains his highest and best when he treats of the transcen- 
dental immanence of God. His masterpiece is ''The Hound of 
Heaven.'' Usually his poems take the form of climax. He gives 
one a long and gradual preparation for the culmination. Here, 
however, one comes upon the picture whilst it is in full move- 
ment. The soul is fleeing from God, but cannot escape him, 
for he is in every nook and corner of the world, nay in every 
nook and corner of the soul's whole being. 

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; 

I fled Him, down the arches of the years; 
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 

Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears 
i hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped; 
And shot, precipitated 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. 
But with unhurrying chase 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. 

They beat — and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet — 
" All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 

The soul finds excuses. It is afraid lest in its effort to win 
Divine Love it may lose all created loves. And so it runs here 
and there, following only the instinct of its lower affections. 
But stars and moon, dawn and eve, winds and lightnings all re- 
fuse it company, on account of their fidelity to the Divine 
Lover. The soul who has always been so fond of children, and 
who had hoped one day to be found in the nursery of heaven, 
now turns to the children instead of its Divine Lover. But 
their angel snatches them away. Then it tries the secrets of 
Nature. 

I laughed in the morning's eyes. 
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather. 



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I908.] FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET 627 

Heaven and I wept together, 
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine; 
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart 
I laid my own to beat 
And share commingling heat; 
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart. 

The soul's pace slackens whilst God's pace maintains its 
speed. The soul feels God's love about it as a never-fading 
weed. It is tired out It can no longer pursue the sweet 
things of earth. Yea, even they have taken flight. ''Lo, all 
things fly thee, for thou fliest Me I " At last the Divine Lover 
must speak plainly: 

'' Strange, piteous, futile thing ! 
Wherefore should any set thee love apart? 
Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said), 
''And human love needs human meriting: 

How hast thou merited — 
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot ? 

Alack, thou knowest not 
How little worthy of any love thou art ! 
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, 

Save Me, save only Me? 
All which I took from thee I did but take, 

Not for thy harms. 
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 

All which thy child's mistake 
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: 

Rise, clasp My hand, and come." 

And now I have a scruple as to whether I have not done 
Francis Thompson an injustice in tearing so much of his beau- 
tiful work from its beautiful context. I would, however, call 
the reader's attention to the fact that I have not made a single 
note of reference. My aim has been to give an appreciation 
which shall excite a desire to go to the books themselves. The 
works of Francis Thompson are few in number and they must 
be read from beginning to end. The Catholic public is all 
debtor to him for what he has given to its literature. And be 



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628 FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET [Feb. 

is debtor to none, except to that little handful of friends who 
helped him when life went hard with him ; who watched by his 
bedside as he lay dying in the Hospital of St. John and St 
Elizabeth ; and who laid him to rest in- the cemetery at Kensal 
Green. One of his sublimest odes had been an anthem to 
Mother Earth. By anticipation he thus took his leave of this 
sad passing world of things: 

Now, mortal son-like, 
I thou has suckled, Mother, I at last 
Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, 
Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing, 
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off 
The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun, 
And to the antique order of the dead 
I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set 
Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended 
In a little peace. 



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A NOTE ON FRANCIS THOMPSON. 

The following poems, contributed to the October, 1895, and 
June, 1896, numbers of The Catholic World, by Francis 
Thompson, are republished at the request of many of our readers^ 
and as an evidence of the interest of The Catholic World 
in the work of this great poet. [Editor C. W.] 

REJECTED LOVERS. 

foeta. — I have loved women — they have paid my pains I 
I have loved nature — rather clasp the seal 

I have loved children — look not there for gains : 
I have loved much, but I have loved not Thee. 

And yet when all these loves were loved and proved, 
None have loved me, but Thou, divine Unloved ! 

Chrisius. — ^Thou ask'st; I ask, and have not at thy hand. 

All ways hast sought, and hast thou found no way? 
Ah child! and dost thou yet not understand. 

And in thine own, beholdest not My case? 
O little love I does no man pity thee ? 

I/>, it is writ, that none has pity on Mel " 



LOVE AND THE CHILD. 

*' Why do you so clasp me, 

And draw me to your knee? 
Forsooth, you do but chafe me, 

I pray you let me be : 
I will but be loved now and then ; 

When it liketh me!" 

So I heard a young child, 

A thwart child, a young child. 

Rebellious against love's arms. 

Make its peevish cry. 
To the tender God I turn :— 

*' Pardon, Love most High I 
For I think those arms were even Thine, 

And that child even I." 



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THE "RANSOMERS": A CATHOLIC FORWARD MOVEMENT. 

BY G. ELLIOT ANSTRUTHER. 

[E phenomenon in religious life in England with 
which this sketch proposes to deal is the outcome 
of a work that is hardly twenty years old. In a 
sense it is true that ever since the days of Catho- 
^ lie Emancipation, or, more definitely, since New- 

man and the other Oxford converts, a Catholic forward move- 
ment has been going on in Great Britain. The Church has not 
merely expanded and developed along the lines of normal pro- 
gression; she has besides risen mightily in popular esteem; 
ground lost for more than three centuries has been regained in 
many directions ; and, although Catholic doctrines are still mis- 
understood by a large number of Protestant Englishmen, it is 
as true that the misunderstanding is diminishing steadily, and 
this partly because Catholics themselves are doing more, year 
by year, to make their beliefs and practices better known to 
their Protestant fellow-countrymen. In this work, so necessary 
and so useful, a large part has been taken by the Guild of Our 
Lady of Ransom, an organization which has leapt to the front 
with rapidity and determination, to do battle in Protestant Eng- 
land for the cause of. Holy Church. 

The Guild of Ransom claims to be nothing more than one 
of a number of influences, independent and yet in a sense in- 
ter-dependent, that are steadily moving towards the picture of 
a re- Catholicised England; but the particular works in which 
the Guild engages, covering, as we shall see, a wide and im- 
portant field, entitle that body to special examination apart from 
other societies that, more or less directly, make for the same 
end. It may be well, also, before detailing the various branches 
of the work, to note briefly the genesis and scope of this re- 
markable undertaking. 

The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom was founded twenty years 
ago — to be exact, on St. Willibrord's Day, November 29, 1887. 
Its founder, still happily reigning as Master and leading spirit 
in the work, was the Rev. Philip Fletcher, a priest- convert 
from the Anglican clergy; with him was associated a layman^ 



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Go ogle 



i9o8.] The '' Ransomers'' 631 

Mr. Lister Drummond, also a convert. These two men were 
the first members of a society which has enrolled more than 
sixty thousand members, or '' Ransomers/' on its list during the 
past twenty years. 

The object of the Guild, to state it tersely, is the conver- 
sion of England : officially it is given as being *' to ransom souls 
from the Captivity of Error in this world, and of Purgatory in 
the next.'' The scope is thus definitely marked, but it allows 
work of a many-sided character and provides openings and op- 
portunities for militant as well as spiritual propaganda. But 
the latter has always first place. The highest of the three 
grades into which the Ransomers are divided — white, red, and 
blue — ^are the White Cross members; these are priests who 
undertake to offer Mass at least once each year for the Guild's 
intention. In this manner many thousands of Masses are cele- 
brated annually for the Conversion of England, and thus the 
great apostolate of prayer that was set on foot by a saintly 
Passionist, Father Ignatius Spencer, is continued. Moreover, the 
first duty of every member of the Guild, irrespective of grade, 
is to recite a short daily prayer. 

The constitution, colors, and mottoes of the Guild were cho- 
sen by Father Fletcher with what must seem to us a singular 
felicity, for they link the present with the memory of struggles 
and martyrdoms in the England of a bygone day. The three 
colors are not, indeed, of any national significance; they are 
those of St. John of Matha's Order of Trinitarians, established 
for the redemption of captives. 

The name "Ransomer" comes from the thirteenth century 
order founded by St. Peter Nolasco, whose members earned 
the title when engaged literally in the task of ransoming Chris- 
tian slaves. The daily prayer opens with the aspiration : '' Jesus, 
convert England ; Jesus, have mercy on this country I " — the 
last words of the Venerable Henry Heath, a Franciscan mar- 
tyred at Tyburn in 1643. The motto adopted consists of the 
stirring and beautiful phrase: ''For God, our Lady, and the 
Catholic Faith;" this, together with the badge of the Five 
Wounds, recalls the famous Pilgrimage of Grace, the heroic, 
short-lived campaign which marked the last effort of the Catho- 
lics of England to strike a blow for the Old Religion. Even 
if the thought means prostration at the shrine of pure senti- 
ment, it is good to feel that the splendid watchword which rose 
so bravely on faithful lips in Yorkshire and other parts of 

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632 THE '' RANSOMERS'' [Feb., 

England, is heard again in connection with another rising in 
defence of the Catholic faith. 

It is time now to consider, as shortly as possible, the differ- 
ent branches of Ransom work, and the spirit which animates and 
unifies the whole; for without the requisite spirit there could 
be comparatively little success. It follows, therefore, that every 
Ransomer must cultivate a disposition of genuine friendship 
towards those with whom he or she will be associated in the 
work there is to do. Class distinctions may affect relations in 
secular life, but within the Guild of Ransom the active and 
successful workers are noted, as much as for anything else, by 
their freedom from the British vice of ''snobbery." In com- 
mon work for a common cause many valuable personal friend- 
ships have been made between, for example, professional men 
and poor water-side laborers: all are needed, and have their 
share, in the campaign of Ransom. 

One of Father Fletcher's earliest efforts in pursuit of this 
campaign was to re-create wherever possible the outward and 
distinguishing signs of Catholic devotion such as characterized 
the English people in pre-Reformation times. Thus it was de- 
cided to revive several of the most famous mediaeval pilgrimages, 
and others have since been added to their number. The prin- 
cipal of these events is the annual pilgrimage to Canterbury in 
honor of St. Thomas k Becket. 

At first the townspeople of the ancient city viewed the 
Catholic invasion, with its procession through their streets, and 
prayers at the site of the martyrdom, with curiosity and not a 
little Protestant disdain. Last year the altered spirit was shown 
by the reception of the pilgrims at the railway station by the 
Mayor of Canterbury, who welcomed them in a cordial and 
sympathetic address. Another notable revival is that of the 
historic pilgrimage to Walsingham. Each year, also, there is a 
pilgrimage to York, in honor of the martyrs of the northern 
province, while in London on St. Edward's Day the Ransomers 
repair to Westminster Abbey and kneel in devotion around the 
shrine of the Confessor. These are but the chief of a number 
of pilgrimages undertaken by the Guild as part of its ordinary 
programme. 

Even more remarkable, as an indication of what can be 
done among a Protestant population, are the public religious 
processions which have now become an annual feature in many 
Catholic parishes, especially in London. The Guild, of course. 

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I908.] THE '' RANSOMERS'' 633 

lays no claim to originating outdoor Catholic processions. 
In a few places public or semi-public gatherings of the kind 
have taken place for many years, and in Lancashire especially 
there are processions on a large and magnificent scale. But 
these latter are more in the nature of demonstrations, largely, 
spectacular, whereas the processions organized by the Guild of 
Ransom are purely devotional, public manifestations of Catho- 
lic faith. Hymns are sung en raute^ the rosary and other 
prayers recited in the streets, and halts made frequently in order 
that a Pater, Ave, and Gloria may be said before some street 
altar or window shrine erected by a Catholic householder. 

To one whose experience of religious life in London has 
never included a sight of one of these processions, the spec- 
tacle of public fervor and edification produces, when first 
seen, an impression of surprise that so remarkable an ad- 
vance should have been possible in districts where the great 
majority of the inhabitants are, theoretically at any rate, Prot- 
estant. The success has been secured by the bold principle of 
fearlessly proclaiming a love of faith, and oflfering the challenge 
of Catholic loyalty to whatever spirit of opposition the district 
might be expected to produce. In one or two instances organ- 
ized Protestant societies attempted to stop the processions, and 
questions as to their legality were raised in Parliament In an- 
other case, open violence was threatened, but a body-guard of 
Catholic men, mostly Irish laborers, nipped that little project in 
the bud. Nowadays, as I have said, the procession is part of 
the year's life in many London parishes. It is looked forward 
to with pleasurable expectation by Catholic and Protestant alike, 
the latter being hardly less interested and eager than his neigh- 
bor of the faith ; and were a plebiscite of opinion to be taken 
of the entire district, it would be found, probably, that, what- 
ever their religion, the inhabitants would regard the cessation 
of the Catholic procession as little less than a local calamity. 

At every procession the police attend in force and control 
admirably the large crowds which assemble. In the cases of the 
larger processions, mounted officers are told off by the authori- 
ties to clear the route; but this welcome police aid is solely 
for the sake of good order; it is never required for purposes 
of protection. The vast crowds press forward, but only with 
the eagerness of reverent curiosity. Heads are bared as the 
statues and clergy pass, and a space is made almost automati- 



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634 THE '' RANSOMERS'' [Feb., 

cally when a street altar is reached, so that Father Fletcher 
may kneel before it on the pavement and oflfer a short prayer. 
Some of these street altars, especially in the east end of Lon- 
don, are large and handsome erections, entailing no small ex- 
penditure in money and labor. In one very poor riverside par- 
ish — ^Wapping — upwards of eighty window shrines were counted 
on the occasion of the last procession. At night these are all 
lighted, and the various Catholic houses are again visited by the 
clergy, the scene smacking of some religious festa in Italy rather 
than the heart of what is still nominally Protestant London. 

Another important work carried on by the Ransomers, be- 
longing to an altogether different field, is that of giving Catho- 
lic Evidence lectures in parks and other public places. Hyde 
Park is London's popular forum, where orators of every imag- 
inable shade of opinion expound their views to crowds of vary- 
ing sizes. For years anti- Catholic lecturers poisoned the public 
mind with their diatribes, and beyond the occasional opposition 
of some Catholic in the audience, whose indignation leapt to 
action, their campaign went on unchallenged and unchecked. 
The Ransomers have changed all that. Every Sunday evening 
during the summer months one of the Guild's accredited lay- 
lecturers gives a lecture in the Park, explaining Catholic doc- 
trines and answering objections. These lectures attract large 
and attentive gatherings ; they are always orderly ; and, as the 
speaker deals with a constructive subject, and has no occasion 
for bitterness or vituperation, they are in this and in other re- 
spects strong where the enemy's platform is weak. 

An English crowd is shrewd and fair-minded enough to note 
and profit by the contrast, and one hears nowadays a great deal 
less in Hyde Park about Rome's refusal to ''face the light," 
when it is known that in the course of a few hours a Catholic 
layman will arrive on the scene for the express purpose of in- 
viting it. 

It has been a gratification to several of the Ransom lectur- 
ers to know that their efforts have been so far appreciated as 
to lead to invitations from non- Catholic societies of various 
kinds for explanatory lectures in public halls and chapels; and 
these have often been accepted. Catholic lectures are given also 
in other parts of London, and in several provincial towns, as 
well as occasionally on the sea-front at popular watering- places. 

In connection with the lecture campaign, the work of tract 



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i9o8.] The *' Ransomers" 635 

distribution is a valuable auxiliary. In this the Catholic Truth 
Society generously co-operates by a free grant from its stock 
of excellent leaflets. The tracts are given out in small quan- 
tities to ** Red Cross " Ransomers — the working members — and 
are distributed at the park gates after a lecture, or outside an 
anti- Catholic demonstration, or in other places where they are 
likely to do good. The Guild has evidence that cases of con- 
version have been due, under God, to the public lectures, while 
the amount of popular prejudice that can be met by this means 
is incalculable. 

The foregoing particulars do not by any means exhaust the 
sum of the Guild's activities; it is, indeed, a body which takes 
occasion by the hand in any way calculated to further the end 
in view. Reunions of the members are held from time to time, 
to review the situation and stimulate enthusiasm for yet further 
work. The Ransomers have a monthly magazine of their own, 
The Second Springs a title that fittingly perpetuates Cardinal 
Newman's reference to the Catholic renaissance in England. 
Subsidiary labors, largely under Father Fletcher's personal di- 
rection, include work among boys who have left school, an 
'intercession Book" for the registration of intentions, a ''Deo 
Gratias Book " for recording conversions or the return of lapsed 
Catholics, and much else in the way of quiet effort. And in 
all this it is the Guild's boast that it has not one salaried worker 
in its ranks. 

What is the secret of the Ransomers' success? I am dis- 
posed to find it in the fact that the Guild has inculcated in its 
members a spirit towards their faith that has made them proud 
of it, willing and anxious to manifest it, glorying in the public 
evidence of it, ready to embrace every opportunity of holding up 
the spectacle of their loyalty to it as the badge of Catholic self- 
respect. It is the half-hearted, lukewarm, timorous Catholic who 
draws down upon himself and his Church the scorn of the indif- 
ferent and the ignorant. But a new light leaps into their eyes, 
a quickened intelligence animates their minds, an altogether dif- 
ferent attitude towards the Church of God is theirs when they 
come face to face with public demonstrations of Catholic fervor, 
bold, determined, and sustained. To foster this spirit by the 
methods indicated, and so by degrees to draw the people of 
England nearer to the Church, has been for twenty years, and is 
still, the special work of the Ransomers. 



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THE ENCYCLICAL ON MODERNISM. 

Wb regret to announce that, through the illness of the Rev. 
William O'Brien Pardow, S J., we are unable to publish in this 
number of Thq Cathoi^ic Wori<d, as announced, his contribution 
on the subject of Modernism. We hope to be able to publish his 
paper in an early number of Thb Cathowc World. In place of 
Father Pardow*s sermon, we publish this month the following 
paper by Very Rev. George M. Searle, C.S.P. [Editor C. W.] 



MR. CHARLES JOHNSTON ON MODERNISM. 

BY GEORGE M. SEARLE. C.S.P. 

is somewhat surprising to find in the North 
American Review an article indicating such an 
entire misconception of the whole matter of which 
it treats as that in the December number on 
'* The Catholic Reformation and the Authority of 
the Vatican." Its subject is the Modernist heresy ; and the 
author, Mr. Charles Johnston, seems to imagine that the Church 
can accommodate itself to this, and actually derive new life and 
strength from it, whereas in fact it is simply and absolutely 
destructive of the very idea of the Church as the guardian and 
preserver of a definite divine revelation. Of course, from his 
point of view, it is not inconceivable that the Pope, the Car- 
dinals, the Bishops, and the whole teaching authority in the 
Church should abandon their claim to teach, and become merely 
''seekers" after truth, instead of believing that they possess it ; 
but Mr. Johnston does not seem to realize that this is simply 
to drop the fundamental idea of the Catholic Church. They 
would, by such a course, become Protestants, agnostics, or in- 
fidels at once. 

It is, no doubt, rather hard for non* Catholic Europeans or 
Americans to realize what the position of the Catholic Church 
is with regard to the matter of religion; though it is really 
very much the same as that of the scientific world in the matter 



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i9o8.] MR. Charles Johnston on Modernism 637 

of physical science. Accustomed as they are to regard religion 
as merely a matter of speculation, in which no definite and 
certain results can ever be obtained, they seem to fail even to 
conceive the position of those who maintain and really and 
thoroughly believe that certain facts in the domain of religion 
are known with absolute certainty, though many of them are 
entirely unattainable by abstract reason, and in no way veri- 
fiable by experiment or observation. 

Of course the method by which these facts have been ascer- 
tained is di£ferent from that employed in scientific research, as 
has just been implied ; but we regard them as having even a 
higher degree of certainty than that possessed by any of those 
of experimental science. We believe them to have been revealed 
by God himself, and committed by him to the custody of an 
organization which he has founded for the purpose, and to 
which he has promised his continual and infallible assistance. 
The system — if it may be so called — of Modernism is in itself 
entirely irreconcilable with this fundamental Catholic position. 
It does not need to have the Church condemn it; it condemns 
itself in the minds of all who really hold Catholic principles. 
But when the Church does formally condemn it, the impossi- 
bility of a Catholic holding it becomes even more manifest. 
The idea that it is going to spread and gain ground and put a 
new face on the Catholic Church as a body, is obviously ab- 
surd. If Modernistic theories ever could affect the Church as a 
body, the Church would simply cease to exist; it would have 
no definite faith, and would be resolved into a number of indi- 
viduals holding different views on every religious question, and 
in no way distinguishable from others who had never been 
Catholics at all. 

The fact is that Modernism, from the true Catholic stand- 
point, is, to a large extent, mere nonsense. We may take, for 
instance, the paragraph from the Rinnovamento which Mr John- 
ston says ** is finely said, and in the true spirit of liberty." 
We will substitute in it for ** Christianity," "religion," "faith," 
etc., "science"; for these things are science to a Catholic, and 
science of the highest and most certain kind. Suppose we say, 
then, as a paraphrase: 

" Science is Life ; it is unquenchable aspiration, it is hope, 
it is the striving of the whole being toward that which in life 
partakes of the material (we substitute this for the ' eternal ' in 



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638 Mr. Charles Johnston on Modernism [Feb., 

the original); it is the progressive elevation of our hearts and 
minds in a passionate search after truth." 

(Without, of course, any expectation of ever finding it.) 

''It is in vain that we try to enclose science in intellec- 
tual system and definitive expressions of its development It 
is by its very nature a continuous becoming ; ... as if 
a divine (or, we will say, human) artificer were seeking to ex- 
press in pliant clay, ceaselessly and ever unsatisfied, his in- 
eflFable ideal." 

What arrant nonsense this would be, applied to physical 
science! And to the Catholic, it is just as nonsensical applied 
to religion. Religion is a matter of fact, just as physical science 
is. The Resurrection of Christ is one of its primary facts. " If 
Christ be not risen again," says St. Paul — that is, if his Resur- 
rection be not an actual historical fact — "your faith is vain." 
If we were to have, in astronomy, a perpetual "striving of the 
whole being" to find out whether the earth is round or flat, 
or whether it is larger than the sun or smaller, what an absurd 
thing astronomy would be 1 And yet this is the sort of thing 
that the Modernists would have us do in religion. One of the 
propositions condemned in the Syllabus runs as follows: 

''The Resurrection of the Savior is not properly a fact of 
the historical order, but a fact of merely supernatural order; 
neither demonstrated nor demonstrable." 

That is to say, it is simply an imagination, and as utterly 
useless as would be a speculation as to the appearance of the 
other side of the moon. 

The human artificers of natural science are, of course, far 
from completing their task ; but they are not unsatisfied, in the 
sense that they feel their work to be a failure, which seems to 
be the idea as to the Divine Artificer in the above Modernist 
passage. Their work is good, comprehensible, and practical, as 
far as it goes. The Divine Artificer of the true religion cannot, 
of course, make us completely understand all that he himself 
does, any more than we understand all of physical science, of 
which he also is the author; but it does not follow that we 
understand nothing clearly and practically, in either one or the 
other. If we did not, it would be better to abandon both stud- 
ies, as a waste of time. There is no " true spirit of liberty " in 
"ever learning and never attaining," as St. Paul says, "to the 
knowledge of the truth " ; " you shall know the truth," says our 



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I908.J MR. CHARLES JOHNSTON ON MODERNISM 639 

Lord, *' and the truth shall make you free." That is to say, 
the actual knowledge of it shall make us free, not a perpetual 
and fruitless hunting after it. 

Mr. Johnston proceeds to inveigh against the Vatican for 
setting itself against this ''true spirit of liberty." We cannot 
better illustrate the absurdity of his complaint than by continu- 
ing the parallel which we have instituted between religion and 
natural science. Suppose that in one of our universities a pro- 
fessor was found to be teaching the flatness of the earth, or 
maintaining that the circumference of a circle was exactly three 
times its diameter, or any other scientific heresy, and to be ob- 
stinate in his views; would not the authorities get rid of him, 
if possible ? And if his heresies were numerous and struck at 
the very basis of all scientific teaching, would they not be still 
more intolerant, would they allow him to teach or lecture, or 
have any text-books he might have written used as such in their 
institution ? Would they not '' stem the tide of " his ** intellec- 
tual life," as far as it could a£fect their students ? Would they 
not see that the '' brand of heresy " was '' stamped on them," 
and have them ''held up to the reprobation of the (scientific) 
faithful " ? 

Mr. Johnston, however, seems to have a strange idea that 
the Holy Father wishes or intends to institute some sort of vio- 
lent proceedings; to drive heretical teachers out at the point 
of the bayonet. He even makes the absurd mistake, apparently, 
of supposing that the Pope, in calling on the Cardinals to com- 
bat error and defend the truth " even to the shedding of blood/' 
means that they are to shed other people's blood. It seems 
hardly necessary to say that this means that they have under- 
taken and promised to su£fer martyrdom, if necessary, for the 
truth. This ridiculous blunder is perpetrated again, later in the 
article. 

He also strangely misunderstands a condemnation of the 
Syllabus. The proposition condemned is as follows: 

"Since in the deposit of the faith only revealed truths are 
contained, under no respect does it appertain to the Church to 
pass judgment concerning the assertions of human sciences." 

This condemnation he seem& to understand as meaning that 
under all respects it does appertain to the Church to pass such 
judgment. He does not realize that when a proposition is con- 
demned, it is simply its logical contradictory that is asserted. 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 41 



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640 MR. Charles Johnston on modernism [Feb., 

That is, in this case, it is asserted that in some respects it does 
appertain to the Church to pass judgment on the assertions of 
human sciences. Notice, not on the well-established results of 
human sciences, when they keep strictly within their own sphere ; 
but on their assertions, often hasty, and touching on matters 
not entirely in the sphere of natural science; as that, for in- 
stance, of the complete evolution of man, soul and body, from 
the inferior animal creation. These matters concern the Church 
and the faith ; it is no more an impertinence for the Church to 
concern herself with them, than it is for a physicist like the late 
Lord Kelvin to pass judgment on the conclusions of a geolo- 
gist as to the age of the earth. The Church does not in all 
these matters claim absolute infallibility, which is reserved to 
General Councils, and to the Holy Father, speaking ex cathe^ 
dra ; the matter of Galileo, to which Mr. Johnston alludes later, 
has been so thoroughly thrashed out that it is quite unneces- 
sary to discuss it here. But the conclusion that the Church has 
no business to speak at all, is entirely unwarranted. And the 
imagination that she insists on speaking on all occasions as to 
** what shall or shall not be held true, whether in criticism, his- 
tory, or science " ; that there is a ** claim of the Vatican to ex- 
ercise, by divine right, a despotic power over men's intellects, 
forbidding to the faithful all true liberty of thought," is simply 
absurd and ludicrous, contrary to the actual facts of the case, 
and founded on ignorance of the facts, and of the meaning of 
the phraseology used in ecclesiastical documents, as in the case 
just quoted. 

Mr. Johnston proceeds to launch out into a very '' despotic " 
study of the whole question as to the authority of the Holy 
See. He says : '* This claim grew up, I am entirely convinced, 
as a part of that process by which the Bishop of Rome as- 
sumed the title of Sovereign Pontiff, till then worn by the Ro- 
man Caesars, and with that title assumed much of the Caesars' 
power." He says : '• I am entirely convinced." That settles it, 
of course. *^ Johnston locutus est^ causa finita est^ The claim, 
he says, of the supremacy of Peter is a cardinal part of the 
Vatican's claims, and should be '' sifted as wheat is sifted." 
Of course Mr. Johnston, in his few pages, does this sifting, 
which he seems to think has never been done before. His sift- 
ing, in the first place, is made on the basis of Scripture. His 
competence for this branch of the investigation can be pretty 



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i9o8.] MR. Charles Johnston on Modernism 641 

well judged from his calm assumption that St. James of Jeru- 
salem was "not one of the Twelve"; a simple ignoring of the 
whole Catholic position in this matter. Mr. Johnston probably 
holds that this James was actually the son of Joseph and Mary. 
Of course he does not explain why St. Paul (Gal. i. 19) calls 
him an Apostle — ''other of the Apostles saw I none, saving 
James the brother of the Lord " — and he seems to be quite 
unaware of the possibility of a more distant relative being called 
a brother in Hebrew usage. It is all very well for a writer or 
student to make up his mind in favor of one view or another ; 
but it is not quite so well to be ignorant of any view differing 
from one's own, especially when this differing view is the one 
which has always been held by the vast majority of those in- 
terested in the subject. 

Mr. Johnston also displays the usual one-sidedness as to 
the teachings oi our Lord, which is quite conspicuous in mod- 
ern Protestantism. Indeed, it is a characteristic of Protestant- 
ism — and we may say of heresy in general — to take some par- 
ticular texts; to choose them — as the word heresy itself . implies 
— and ignore the rest. He says: "Where do we find Jesus 
claiming despotic authority over men's intellects, and demand- 
ing that they shall renounce their convictions?" Well, one 
would think that he would remember a pretty strong, impor- 
tant, and fundamental instruction reported as given by our Di- 
vine Lord to this effect: " He that believeth and is baptized 
shall be saved ; but be that believeth not shall be damned " 
(Mark xvi. 16). We quote the ordinary Protestant version, as 
being a little stronger even than our own. Rather despotic 
this seems to us. " If you do not renounce your convictions, 
you will be damned"; or "condemned," as we have it. One 
man, simply as such, cannot lawfully or validly thus threaten 
another; but the Divine Master can thus speak, and so could 
the Apostles, or those who have a right from him to speak in 
his Name. As St. John, who may be supposed to have had, 
above all others, the spirit of Jesus, says: "We are of God. 
He that knoweth God, heareth us. He that is not of God, 
heareth us not. By this we know the spirit of truth and the 
spirit of error." Of truths and of error. It was the denial of 
a dogma^ namely, that of the Incarnation, of which he was 
speaking. And there are plenty more passages similar to these, 
of our Lord and of his Apostles, if Mr. Johnston will take the 



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642 MR. Charles Johnston on Modernism [Feb., 

trouble to look for them. But he simply follows the line so 
often taken nowadays, that our Lord did nothing but lay down 
rules for a sort of universal philanthropy ; that the " way " and 
the '* life/' which he proclaimed himself to be, consisted entirely 
in this ; as for the ** truth/' now despised by our modern Chris- 
tians as '' dogma/' that is regarded as quite unimportant. 

This one-sidedness crops out in him continually. He says 
of St. Peter that '' He expressly forbids the bishops to lord it 
over the faithful, declaring that their only authority should be 
that of holy example." In fact St. Peter declares nothing to 
that eflFect He says simply: ''Neither as lording it over the 
clergy, but being made a pattern of the flock." Just the same 
as would be said by the Pope nowadays. It does not follow, 
because precept should be strengthened by example, that no 
precept should be given. All authorities in the Church, from 
the Pope to the lowest in the hierarchy, know and are con- 
tinually reminded to avoid arrogance, to act as fathers, not as 
slave-drivers. But authority, and obedience to it, are necessary 
in every organization. St. Paul most distinctly states this as 
necessary for Christians (Heb. xiii. 17) : " Obey them," he says, 
'' that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves ; for they 
watch for your souls." (We quote the Protestant version.) 
Evidently these who are to be obeyed are ecclesiastical supe- 
riors, not secular ones; though these also have to be obeyed 
in their own sphere. 

Mr. Johnston seems also to be entirely ignorant of the 
Catholic idea with regard to the authority of the Apostles, as 
distinct from that of the bishops of subsequent times. The 
Apostles were specially inspired and directed individually, and 
each had his own field of action ; but the bishops following them 
had no such independence; such an arrangement could be only 
temporary, unless a perpetual miracle were to be worked. For 
the Church, spread over the whole world, and deprived of the 
special divine assistance given to the Apostles themselves, one 
Supreme Head was necessary, to preserve unity of faith and of 
discipline ; representative government, by congresses or councils, 
would not be sufficient or practical. The successor of St. Peter 
in the Roman See is the only one for whom this position has 
been claimed ; and for him it has generally been allowed. The 
other Apostles were, therefore^ in a different position with re- 
gard to St Peter, from that occupied by the bishops with re- 



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i9o8.] MR. Charles Johnston on Modernism 643 

gard to his successors. Still it would be lawful, even now, to 
remonstrate with the Pope; and— of course — even to disobey 
his commands, if they were in plain opposition to the law of 
God. It is only in definitions ex cathedra with regard to mat- 
ters of faith and morals, that his decisions are, by divine as- 
sistance, infallible and irreformable. But of course, in other 
matters, as with all authorities, the presumption is in his favor ; 
and the overthrowing of this presumption is rather a matter of 
theory than of actual fact 

There is a strange mixing-up of the question of the temporal 
power with that of the government of the Church in the latter 
part of Mr. Johnston's article. He really seems to think that 
the Church claims temporal power over the whole world to the 
exclusion of any other authority. ''If Peter," he says, ''could 
recommend obedience to the son-in-law of Messalina, what be- 
comes of the necessity of temporal power ? " 

This is really laughable. Of course just the same recom« 
mendation, nay, formal command, has been g^ven by the Church 
in all ages, and is given to-day. Temporal rulers are always 
to be obeyed in their own sphere, as we have said; and it is 
because this principle is so strongly impressed on Catholics that 
they make the best citizens. But the claim of the Church to a 
particular exercise of temporal power, limited to a certain area, 
is quite another matter. Of course Mr. Johnston may think this 
a poor plan, and that the spiritual influence of the Church would 
be increased by abandoning it ; but we are convinced (if he will 
allow us to use his own phrase) that the Head of the Church 
can act more impartially toward its various nations if he is not 
the subject of any one in particular in the temporal order. For 
either a subject or a sovereign he must be. 

As to Mr. Johnston's flights into history, our space hardly 
allows us to follow him. No one doubts that some of the Popes 
have not been as free from worldly ambition as could be de- 
sired. But that has nothing to do with the principle of the 
temporal power as just stated, or with the right of the Head of 
the Church to define the truth as revealed by Christ, and com- 
mitted to his care. 

What is most absurd of all, perhaps, in Mr. Johnston's paper 
is his representation of our present Holy Father as a man ac- 
tuated by a love of domination, or desirous of being a despot 
in intellectual matters, or in any others. 



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644 -^^. Charles Johnston on Modernism [Feb. 

Probably there are few men less anxious for authority or 
control over others than he. He began life, and has continued 
it» simply absorbed in the desire to serve God, and to benefit 
his neighbor. He would have been glad to remain a parish 
priest to the end of his days; and his elevation to the Papacy 
was to him an almost unendurable affliction in every way. But 
when it was forced on him, he took up its awful burden with 
a firm determination to be faithful in bearing it, and to pursue 
the clear duty which was unavoidable, of bearing witness to 
the truth which had been left to bis charge. He has no desire 
to impose his own private opinions on any one; it is only the 
deposit of faith which concerns him ; and it is simply because the 
theories of the Modernists are completely destructive of it that 
he is determined, as all his predecessors would have been, to 
root them out of the Church by all means lawfully in his power. 

Mr. Johnston says : ** Let us declare an irenicon." The Holy 
Father, and Catholics generally as such, have no love for fight* 
ing or quarrels; but as for irenicons between truth and false- 
hood, between certainty and doubt, between light and darkness, 
they are not possible. Pius X. and all Catholics must say, in 
these matters, what St. Paul said long ago: "What concord" — 
or irenicon— " hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath the 
faithful with the unbeliever?" Or, to adapt his words to the 
present day : " What irenicon hath the real Catholic with the 
Modernist?" 



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THE CAUSES OF MODERNISM.* 

BY JOSEPH W. DAILY. C.SS.R. 

AST Sunday you heard an able and eloquent an- 
alysis of Modernism. You understand now that 
Modernism, ** lays the axe not to the branches 
and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the 
faith and its deepest fibres. And, having struck 
at the root of immortality, it proceeds to disseminate poison 
through the whole tree, so that there is no part o{ Catholic 
truth it does not touch and strive to corrupt" (Encyclical). 

Therefore, the Holy Father in his Encyclical, ** Fascendi 
Dominici Gregis," has well characterized Modernism, not only 
as heresy, but as the very synthesis of all heresies; that is to 
say, it is a compound of all the heresies that have attacked the 
faith. You know now the nature of Modernism. It is agnos- 
tic in its essence, it perverts the idea of revelation, and dis- 
torts the idea of faith. Modernism, in fact, leads to annihila- 
tion of all religion. Let us go a step further this morning and 
analyze its causes. It is impossible to cure an evil, to apply 
an efficacious remedy, unless we know the causes. Let us then 
consider the causes of Modernism, so that knowing them we 
may avoid them, and, consequently, avoid the malady itself. 

The Holy Father in his searching arraignment of Modernism 
points out the causes " that have engendered it and fostered its 
growth." 

''The proximate and immediate cause of Modernism is the 
perversion of the mind : the remote cause is pride.** Pride has 
engendered every opposition to God and things divine. In op- 
position to the expressed will of God, pride suggested to our 
first parents to eat the forbidden fruit, that they might become 
as God. In opposition to the will of God pride prompted Da- 
vid to number his subjects, with the result that seventy thou- 
sand of his people fell victims to the plague. And wounded 
by the denunciations of Jesus Christ, pride prompted the priests 
and Pharisees to put him to death. The demon of pride has 
been at work from the very beginning, endeavoring to dethrone 

*The third sermon of the Advent (1907) Course preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral, 
New York City. 



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646 THE Causes of Modernism [Feb., 

man from his exalted estate, urging him to soar to forbidden 
heights, that his fall might be inevitable and all the more dis- 
astrous. 

Now pride, intellectual pride, is especially harmful when it 
besets a man of strong and powerful intellect. For when such 
a proud man errs (and err he may, for to err is human), his 
errors are dangerous, because he will not retract; and danger- 
ous, secondly, on account of the many others he will lead into 
error with his great intellect and attainments. When, therefore, 
such a man takes up the economic, the social, the political, or 
religious questions of the day he commands a hearing. This 
flatters his pride. He congratulates himself that homage is be- 
ing paid to his superior intelligence. Goaded on by the spirit 
of pride, he keeps himself before the public by constant adver- 
tisement. His utterances are placarded in glaring headlines. 
Finding himself talked about, his importance assumes prodigious 
proportions in his own estimation. When his utterances appear 
dangerous to faith, he will not hearken to suggestion ; he will 
not take advice. Puffed up by the demon of pride, he believes 
himself well-nigh infallible and will brook no correction. 

The most gifted man is liable to make mistakes. St. Au- 
gustine made mistakes, so did St. Thomas, and these were in- 
tellectual giants. It was a mark of greatness in them to real- 
ize their mistakes, and retract them. A proud man will not 
acknowledge a mistake. Imagining his reputation will suffer, 
and not having the humility to acknowledge and retract, he will 
make a new theory to cover his mistake. And lo, there is your 
full-fledged Modernist. Do not think I am exaggerating, for 
the Holy Father himself in his Encyclical says : '' Pride sits in 
Modernism as in its own house, finding sustenance everywhere 
in its doctrines and occasion to flaunt itself in all its aspects." 

''It is pride which Alls Modernists with that confidence in 
themselves and leads them to hold themselves up as the rule 
for all ; pride which puffs them up with that vainglory which al- 
lows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowl- 
edge, and makes them say, inflated with presumption, '' we are 
not as the rest of men," and which, to make them not as the 
rest of men, leads them to embrace all kinds of most absurd 
novelties. It is pride which rouses in them the spirit of dis- 
obedience and causes them to demand a compromise between 
authority and liberty; it is pride that makes them the reformers 



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i9o8.] The Causes of Modernism 647 

of others, while they forget to reform themselves, and which 
begets their absolute want of respect for authority, not except- 
ing the supreme authority. There is no road that leads so 
quickly and directly to Modernism as pride.^* 

Modernism pretends to new things and new methods. There- 
fore, of necessity, it opposes scholastic philosophy, despises the 
authority of the ancient and, until now, revered Fathers of the 
Church, and ignores tradition. We must maintain that it is 
most essential to acknowledge and follow authority in matters 
of dogma. In fact, any man who thinks he assimilates knowl- 
edge without the assistance of another deceives himself. The 
child must have its tutor to teach it the alphabet and the value 
of combined letters. The young man entering a profession must 
have a teacher to explain the key to the art he would master. 
Men who have attained the pinnacle of fame in their chosen 
professions have all had their masters. St. Augustine had his 
St. Ambrose, and St. Thomas Aquinas his Blessed Albertus 
Mi^nus. Now what authority have the traditional teachers whom 
the Modernists repudiate ? What is scholastic philosophy ? It 
is the philosophy that trained the greatest minds of the world 
to-day. It is the philosophy that trained the greatest minds 
the world has ever seen. It is the philosophy that trained an 
Albertus Magnus, a St. Thomas Aquinas, a St. Bonaventure, 
an Alexander Hales, a Scotus, and a Suarez. What is scholas- 
tic philosophy ? It is the philosophy that brought thousands 
to the feet of these great masters of human thought. Thou- 
sands and thousands of knowledge- loving and knowledge-seek- 
ing students flocked to the great universities of the Middle 
Ages, to Paris, to Cologne, to Padua, and Bologna to study 
scholastic philosophy. 

What is scholastic theology ? Does it treat of mechanics ? 
of technology ? of electricity ? Does it treat of the physical, 
material world as such? No, it treats of metaphysics; that is, 
of the unseen world reached only by reason. It treats of the 
soul, of the true God from the viewpoint of reason. It treats 
of the universe, of the world, inquiring into its highest, its ul- 
timate causes. It may aptly be styled a divine philosophy. 

However, on account of the abuse of the method of scholastic 
philosophy some centuries ago, the philosophy itself came into 
disrepute. The effects were soon felt, especially in the training 
of the teachers of our faith. And this more so during the 



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648 The Causes of Modernism [Feb., 

century just closed, which witnessed the apotheosis, as it were, 
of reason, '' reason unadulterated by faith," as the votaries of 
the purely material sciences would have us believe. 

When the danger was at its height the great Popes of our 
own time appeared on the scene. Guardians of the faith that 
must save the world, they witnessed the havoc which the neglect 
of scholastic philosophy was working among priests and even 
among bishops. Therefore, ''Back to Thomas Aquinas" rang 
out into the Catholic world. '' Back to Aquinas," they ordered 
the professors of theology. And when a professor was found 
who would not go back to Aquinas, under the plea that it 
meant back to darkness and ignorance, these great Popes did 
not hesitate to debar him from his professorial chair. 

Those ousted professors had their followers. No wondet, 
then that there were and are scholars in the Church who in 
public and in private despise scholastic philosophy. No wonder, 
then, that when they see their idols, their teachers, dethroned, 
they feel resentment and disgust for the philosophy that caused 
their overthrow. You see, then, from this that opposition to 
scholastic philosophy has caused Modernism. 

Having seen the reason why the Modernists despise schol- 
astic philosophy, it is easy to discover why they despise what 
is traditional in the Church. 

The votaries of scholastic philosophy were the great theo- 
logians, the teachers in the Church in bygone ages. Those 
theologians, one and all, venerated tradition; venerated, there- 
fore, their predecessors in the chairs of theology ; venerated the 
Fathers of the Church, all of whom constituted the preservers 
of the faith. Now this method of proceeding, this love and 
veneration for the veieres^ the ancients in the faith, as regards 
the teachings of the Church, is most reasonable. 

Our faith, the dogmas of our holy religion, the truths 
taught in the Catholic Church, though not against reason, yet 
have not been formulated by reason, because they are revealed 
truths. They were formulated by Christ and his Apostles. It is 
a principle of faith that with the last of the Apostles the 
''depositum fidei clausum est," that is, that the depository of 
the truths of faith is closed. Therefore, there will be no 
further revelation that the universal world will be obliged to 
believe under pain of eternal damnation. To use an up-to- 
date expression, our faith is made up of revealed truths to 



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i9o8.] THE Causes of Modernism 649 

be handed down from father to son under the guidance of 
the Church, and, therefore, derived ultimately or in the last 
instance from tradition. 

This principle was uppermost in the methods of the scho- 
lastic theologians. Hence their respect for tradition. Now the 
Modernists despise the scholastic theologians on account of their 
philosophy ; they despise them, too, on account of this method, 
this respect for tradition, and all the more so, since modern 
thought pretends to break away from all tradition and follow 
pure, unaided reason alone. The Modernists insist on positive 
theology, and extol it to the detriment of scholastic theology, 
and they have no use for tradition. 

Modernism, despising tradition, breaking away from the past, 
associates with so-called modern thought And modern thought, 
not being in harmony with tradition, is not in harmony with 
the faith handed down to us in the Gospels. Hence Modem- 
ism is ashamed of the "foolishness'' of the Gospel. Accom- 
modating himself in manner of thinking to modern thought, the 
Modernist curries the favor of the popular idols of the day. 
He, therefore, ignores revelation and so substitutes his reason 
as his guide in dogma. Thus all dogma must pass in review 
before him, and he eliminates what does not fall in with his 
vagaries. 

But, as the Holy Father himself says in his Encyclical, the 
Modernists display such activity and such unwearying capacity 
for work in behalf of their unworthy cause, that it is a great 
source of pain to see them waste such labor in their eflFort to 
ruin the Church, when they should have bent all their energies 
for her service. Misguided zeal has bred in the Church some 
of her bitterest enemies. So with the hope of making converts, 
the Modernists minimize the teachings of the Church, they yield 
to the caprices of a material world and make concessions op- 
posed to the unity of the faith. 

The Holy Father certainly diagnoses the causes of Modern- 
ism very thoroughly when he accuses the Modernists of pride, 
of an ignorance of scholastic philosophy, of lack of appreciation 
for the Fathers and tradition. He discloses additional causes 
when he accuses them of an unprincipled spirit of liberalism 
born of an overweening desire to be on terms of intimacy with 
the materialists of our day ; and when he points out that zeal. 



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650 The Causes of Modernism [Feb. 

unattended by the light of a supernatural faith, leads to the 
darkness of unbelief. 

From the very first moment of her existence to the present 
day the Church, the Spouse of Jesus Christ, has had her op- 
ponents. Her worst enemies, however, have been those she had 
nursed at her own breasts. The Church, the kind Mother, de- 
plores the waywardness of her rebellious children. She is, how- 
ever, ready to pardon them if they repent and return to the 
spirit and profession of that faith of which she is the custo- 
dian. 

Let me recall to your minds the case of the great F^nelon^ 
the Bishop of Cambrai. '' He was learned ; he was the foremost 
scholar in French literature. Even to-day his writings are re* 
garded as models of elegance. He was full of zeal for God's 
glory, firm in his convictions and courageous in defending what 
he considered right.'' Unlike the Modernists, he was humble 
and respectful of tradition and submissive to authority. Holy 
and learned man that he was, yet he was misled by some fa- 
natics, and defended most vigorously by voice and by pen 
against the great Bossuet a doctrine afterwards condemned by 
Pope Innocent XII. When he heard of his condemnation by 
the Pope, did he criticise the Pope's decree, and read into it 
what was not in it? Did he make distinctions or claim mis^ 
understanding? This is notoriously the manner of procedure 
begotten by the pride and false independence of the Modern- 
ists. No; ''that truly great man read his own condemnation 
from the pulpit. He set fire with his own hand to a pile of 
his own books. Out of his own wealth he constructed a re* 
monstrance of gold, the base of which was a facsimile of the 
condemned book placed under the feet of Jesus Christ; so that 
every time he gave Benediction he proclaimed his own humil- 
iation and submission." 

We must never forget that faith is a gift. St. Paul reminds 
us of this when he says: ''Not that we are sufficient to think 
anything of ourselves as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from 
God." 



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A LETTER TO THE KING. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

|ASSERS-BY used to stop at the low gate to look 
at John Quinn's garden. It was, indeed, in strik- 
ing contrast to those of the slatternly neighbors. 
It was packed as full as it could be with flowers 
and vegetables. All through the spring and sum- 
mer and autumn the flowers made little mosaics of color. There 
were fruit, apples, pears, plums, gooseberries, currants, raspber- 
ries. The vegetable beds were full all the year round. In the 
fine weather a canary hung from an apple bough and sang his 
shrillest. He had for neighbor a parrot which was the delight 
of the children. The little paths were marked put neatly with 
white stones. At the bottom of the garden, quite away from 
the cottage, the hens had homes and enclosures of their own. 
There were a couple of hives of bees in a green corner. There 
was a summer-house. A tall mast stood on a tiny grass-plot 
and fluttered the Union Jack. There was a pigeon cote hang- 
ing on the end gable of the house. 

A garden of delights, and the house was no less delightful. 
Rose Quinn was a shrewd, thrifty, clean, tidy woman, who was 
the envy, the dread, and yet the sheet-anchor of her neighbors 
in illness or distress. 

She kept her house spotlessly. When the sun came in by 
the south window the brass candlesticks on the chimney-piece, 
the dish covers on the walls, the copper lustre jugs on the 
dresser, the pots and pans, winked again. All the plates and 
dishes showed clean faces, as did the pictures on the wall where 
sacred personages and saints mingled with Irish patriots and had 
for neighbors the king and queen. In the place of honor above 
the mantel- piece was a large framed photograph of John's old 
ship, the Knight Commander. Below it hung Sir John Fisher, 
cut from an illustrated paper and framed in a border of shells, 
and John's old Captain, now Admiral Seeley. 

Rose's grate was as brightly polished as the rest. The red- 
tiled floor, newly ochred every day, was in pleasing contrast to 



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652 A Letter to the King [Feb., 

the white walls. Everywhere about the room were the ingenu- 
ities of the sailor-man, as well as the wonderful things John 
and his sons had brought home from foreign parts. The chil- 
dren of the neighborhood thought it a heavenly place. When 
Rose was amiably inclined she was not averse from showing the 
shells, the ivory carvings, the sandal wood boxes, the old man 
and old woman in the weather house, the glass ball with the 
snow storm inside it, the instruments of the Crucifixion and the 
Cross itself miraculously sealed up in a bottle of water, the 
thousand and one curiosities that were so wonderful to the chil- 
dren. 

The neighbors used to talk about Rose behind her back, ask- 
ing each other rhetorical questions as to what was the good of 
all that cleaning and whether the woman thought she was going 
to live forever ? A special object of their ridicule was the mat 
outside the door, on which people had to wipe their feet before 
being admitted to Rose's kitchen. They shook their heads over 
John and said they pitied him. Sure there couldn't be any real 
comfort with a woman who was always cleaning up. Widow 
Hagerty's opinion seemed to find general endorsjement. '' It's 
all very well to be clane," she had said, '^but for myself I'd 
like a little place that wasn't too clane. Claneness is terrible 
cowld." 

Rose's neighbors dreaded her for the sharp edge she had to 
her tongue. She was a little woman with pale reddish hair, and 
pale blue eyes which her neighbors called green when she had 
been scolding them. She had been a very pretty girl when John 
married her, with that evanescent beauty of complexion which 
often accompanies red hair. 

When she opened out on the neighbors a spark would come 
in the green eyes. She had very little patience with the was- 
trels and slatterns among whom she lived. The worst of it was 
they couldn't do without her. She was the only one who knew 
anything about illness, or the rearing of children, and she was 
as good in an emergency as the parish nurse herself. While the 
sickness was urgent Rose was as silent as she was efficient. 
But all the time her eyes roved to and fro, taking everything 
in ; and when she was free to speak, she spoke to good pur- 
pose. She would reduce even the most redoutable matron to 
tears ; in fact she was so thoroughly feared that she had never 
yet met the man or woman who would stand up to her. 



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I908.] A LETTER TO THE KING 653 

"Twas no wonder she druv her boys away from her," the 
neighbors said when they smarted under the memory of the 
things she had said to them. 

This, however, was quite unfair, for Rose's menfolk swore by 
her, and the other women knew it, even when they pretended 
to pity them. 

She was the mother of four sons. Three of them had fol- 
lowed their father in taking to the life of the sea. They were 
A.B's on the Knight Commander^ like their father before them. 
The fourth had not followed them only because his mother's 
love for him and his for her kept them together. They were 
all dear, but Jack, the youngest, was also the dearest, and Rose 
could never have spared him. 

Jack and his father both worked at the rope- making factory, 
which was a little farther up the stream by which the collec- 
tion of cottages was built. But the sea had the same fascina- 
tion for Jack that it had had for the other brothers. Mrs. Quinn 
used to say of her boys that, from the time they could toddle 
alone, every wind that ruffled every pool of water used to set 
them longing for the sea. 

Jack never grumbled that he must be the home-keeping one* 
He worked cheerfully at the rope factory, but every moment 
of leisure that he had he was down with the fishermen on the 
shore, out with them in their boats, sometimes with some of the 
young gentlemen from the Club-House in their little yachts. 
The sea drew him as irresistibly as it had drawn his brothers. 
He was a born sailor. He had sat at his father's feet and learnt 
everything that old salt had to impart. The gentlemen from 
the Club-House knew that there was no better hand in a yacht, 
especially if the wind got up, than young Quinn. He had re- 
fused many invitations to go on more or less lengthened cruises, 
although his eyes longed to go. His love for his mother kept 
him, and in time there came his love for Mary Kelly. 

Perhaps the love for Mary had always been there. They 
had sat on the same stool at the infant school, and even then 
Jack had taken Mary's part against aggressive infants. They 
had gone blackberrying hand-in-hand. They had looked for 
frauglians — i. ^., bilberries — in autumn together. They had never 
seemed to tire of each other's company. What could be more 
natural than that the affection between them during childhood 
and youth should have become love in due course? 



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654 A Letter to the King [Feb., 

Mary was a refined, delicately pretty girl, who looked just 
a little above her station and had manners to suit her looks. 
She was a great favorite with the nuns at the convent school ; 
from monitor she had become a regular teacher. The nuns had 
taught her acomplishments. She could play the piano, had a 
smattering of French, could embroider and paint a little in wa- 
ter-colors; she could also cook and make her pretty frocks; 
but of these latter things Rose Quinn took no notice. 

It was perhaps natural jealousy that made Rose take so con- 
temptuous a view of the girl's accomplishments. 

'' She'll be like her mother before her, a streel, only a gen- 
teel one,'' she said angrily to her son when he came to her 
with happy confidence to tell her that Mary had said yes to 
him. 

She knew as well as any one, better indeed, for she had for 
some time been watching Mary with the eyes of jealousy, that 
Mary was a good girl at home, and had done her best for her 
dragged- down mother and the long family of children. She 
knew perfectly well that Mary had accomplished a little revo- 
lution in that cabin which hung above the stream, a place so 
miserable to start with that reform seemed impossible. She 
knew it, and the sense of her own injustice only made her 
angrier. 

'' I suppose you expect," she said tauntingly, '' to bring 
Judy Kelly's daughter into my clean, tidy house, and to make 
me the old woman in the corner. I tell you, Jack, you'll never 
do it. As long as I live I'll stand against you and her." 

He looked at her, quite pale from the shock of her anger, 
which had never before been directed against him, and for a 
moment the look in his eyes nearly brought her to her senses. 
Then he turned on his heel, and she remembered that he was 
the image of his father, and that his father had been a terribly 
obstinate man when roused out of his slow gentleness. 

" I never thought of bringing my wife under your roof," 
he said, and walked towards the door. But at the threshold he 
paused and turned round. 

''Is that your last word," he asked, ''that you'll stand 
against her and me ? " 

For a moment the mother's heart shook within her. Then 
her jealousy swept over her furiously. He cared nothing about 
his mother. Nothing mattered to him but Judy Kelly's daugh- 



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i9o8.] A Letter to the King 655 

ter. She remembered many bitter, irrelevant things ; how Patsy 
Kelly had been drowned just beyond his own doorstep, having 
stumbled into the stream when he was coming home one night 
from Sweeny's public house, among other things. 

''Bring me home a decent girl/' she said, ''and Til be talk- 
ing to you. The child of a drunkard and a streel. It's little 
I thought what I was rearing you for." 

But the end of the speech was spoken to a silent house. 
Jack had gone out leaving her alone. 

It was noon-time when this took place. The long hours 
of the afternoon wore by silently, in a stillness so profound 
that the ticking of the wag-by-the-wall clock, the buzzing of 
a fly in the window-pane, the snoring of Jack's terrier on the 
health, sounded disproportionately loud, at least to Rose's cold 
and excited fancy. There was plenty of noise outside. There 
was not a day in the year when the little cluster of cottages 
was not more or less noisy. But she had closed the door, and 
had seemed to close herself in with silence and fears. 

As she sat darning Jack's stockings by the sunshiny window 
her hands were damp and cold with the apprehension of her 
thoughts. Now and again in the quietness she felt her heart 
throb like a living thing. She had never before said a harsh 
word to Jack. Jim and Bill and Paddy, his brothers, had of- 
ten and often got the rough side of her tongue. Nor had it 
meant anything to them. They were slow and gentle and pa- 
tient like their father. Once beyond the clacking of her tongue 
they forgot it. Not so Jack. Jack had been the one to take 
things to heart, and she had known it. He had come in that 
morning quite sure of her sympathy in his joy. She recalled 
the incredulous amazement with which he received her first 
violent words, an amazement which gave way at last to a bitter 
and hurt resentment. Why couldn't she have held her tongue ? 
After all there was nothing against the girl. She recognized 
to the full the unfairness of blaming her for her father's and 
her mother's faults; she had half a mind to kneel down and 
pray and repent. But she would not ; and presently the softer 
mood was replaced by one jealous and irrational. 

It was the longest, slowest afternoon she had ever spent. 
When the click of the garden gate sounded she got up and 
put away the stockings. Her moods had been changing all the 
afternoon. The hard one had the ascendency as she went for- 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 42 

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656 A LETTER TO THE KING [Feb., 

ward to open the door. How dared Jack look at her like that, 
she who had always been the kindest of mothers to him. 

She drew back the bolt and let the door swing open with 
a lowering, angry face. Then her face changed, and her heart 
began its painful throbbing once more. It was her husband, 
and alone. Jack and he had always come together. Where 
was the boy now? 

For the moment she had no more thought than that he 
had absented himself in anger, was with Mary perhaps, or — 

John's gloomy face put a stop to these surmises. Behind 
the gloom there were grief, weariness, indignation. 

'' Jack's gone ! " he said, answering the question on her lips. 

" Gone I Where is he gone ? " 

"You gave him your tongue this afternoon. Rose, woman. 
If you meant to do it, you should have begun long ago. You 
never denied him anything. He's gone to Portsmouth to join 
the other three. There's none o' them left now to look after 
us in our old age. Who's going to dig the garden, I should like 
to know ? " 

"To Portsmouth? Why should he go to Portsmouth ? Isn't 
it enough for the king to have three of my sons ? " 

" The king has nothing to say to it It's your own temper. 
Rose. He was as bright as he could be this morning. What- 
ever you said to him knocked him about terribly. Then — 
Mary Kelly 'ud have nothing to do with him." 

" Mary Kelly 1 Nothing to do with my son 1 " Rose said 
with a flash of the old spirit 

" She's not going to marry a man whose mother thinks ill 
of her. Between ye two women ye've played the mischief with 
the poor boy. I'm not blaming her, mind. I brought her word 
Jack was gone, and she went as white as a sheet. Why wouldn't 
she refuse to take him, till his mother asked her?" 

Rose went away to a little inner room, and closed the door 
behind her. At this moment she could bear no more. 

The long summer days went by in what seemed to Rose a 
deadly monotony. John was away all day. She missed terri- 
bly the brisk foot on the gravel path, the bright face in the 
door. Jack had a way of running home for a word with his 
mother — with Mary, too, no doubt — while the other men smoked 
their pipes after the dinner-hour at Spillane's. 

She worked with a tenfold energy, but her power of accom- 



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i9o8.] A Letter to the King 657 

plishment was less. She had repelled the neighbor's sympathy, 
and now it was offered no more. They respected the closed 
door, the forbidding back which Rose turned to the world when 
she worked in the garden. It was wonderful how in Jack's ab- 
sence the weeds made headway, wonderful how the hedges grew 
ragged, the grass dishevelled, how untidiness and disrepair seized 
on everything. 

To be sure John did his best, but John was getting old. 
People said he had aged suddenly when Jack went away. When 
he came home from work he was better content to sit and smoke^ 
with the head of Grip, Jack's old terrier, on his knee, than to 
do anything more strenuous. Grip was a trouble to Rose too. 
He was always listening for a foot, turning his eyes on her 
with a dumb question that made the poor woman suffer acutely. 

No letter came from Jack, no such loving message as would 
have lit up the lonely present with hope for the future. The 
other boys wrote home at long intervals; they were no great 
scholars and letter-writing was a pain to them. Jack was all 
right. He was serving on the Admiral's ship, not on the Knight 
Commander. He was as expert as anybody in a very little 
time. He hadn't had much to say when they saw him. 

Once there was a message, but for John, a tender message, 
as though the young man's obdurate heart had failed him. But 
of Rose not a word. Not a line from Jack himself, although 
he was a much better scholar than his brothers. 

Rose rarely went out now, never unless necessity called her. 
Once or twice she had seen Mary Kelly's tall figure approach- 
ing her, and had turned back to her own house to avoid meet- 
ing her. She would watch from behind a window curtain Mary 
pass with her chin in the air. Mary's pride was at least equal 
to her own. But, despite her spirit, Mary was looking badly. 
That chin now, which had been so round and white, had shrunk 
and showed a thinness of the neck. Sorrow had dimned her 
eyes and her pretty bright color. She was much thinner than 
of old, and walked with a more lagging footstep when Rose's 
eyes were not upon her. Sometimes her head drooped as though 
the great mass of corn-colored plaits it carried were too much 
for it. 

To be sure she worked harder than ever. Her mother had 
had a worse winter than usual with the rheumatism, and was 
in bed half her time. And Mary worked like three people to 



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6s 8 A LETTER TO THE KING [Feb., 

earn her little salary at the convent, and to keep the cabin over 
the thriftless mother and the children, who were so round and 
rosy, despite their privations. 

One year, two years, passed. Jim and Paddy and Bill had 
each had their few weeks of holiday, had fluttered the girls im- 
mensely with their picturesque sailor garb and their sun-browned 
comeliness. Each had a good report of Jack to make in his 
taciturn manner. Each in his turn carried a message from Jack 
to Mary Kelly. There was no message for the mother. She 
had a jealous knowledge that smote her to the heart of the 
messages which were carried elsewhere. After each of these 
visits Mary noticeably picked up, regained something of her old 
comeliness, her old springing step. 

The time came when Jack was with the Naval Brigade be- 
fore Ladysmith. When the news first arrived that he had gone 
to the front there was a half rapprochement between the two 
women. Mary, passing by the Quinn's cottage, stood for a 
barely perceptible fraction of a second looking at Jack's mother. 
She had something in her breast which was her talisman against 
life and death, yet it could not keep her from asking herself 
why she had let him go. Rose advanced a step or two. She 
knew that Mary had had a letter. John had had one that had 
contained no mention of her. She advanced an imperceptible 
distance. Then jealousy stabbed her sharper than a sword. She 
turned her back on the girl and went into the cottage. 

After that there was a dreary time of watching and waiting 
for the two women. Rose was no scholar and was very shy 
about revealing the fact, and John was getting half-blind. The 
anguish which Rose endured while John's finger crept slowly 
down the war-news night after night, the more intolerable wait- 
ing through the days till John should come home to read for 
her these odd hieroglyphics which might mean so much to her, 
were cruel. And to be sure Mary Kelly could tell at the first 
glance if Jack was safe, if one might breathe a sigh of relief for 
oneself with a sigh of pity for the many whose sons' names ap- 
peared in that dreaded list. 

To be sure the garden and everything about it had become 
sadly changed from what it was when Jack was at home, al- 
though Rose worked indefatigably, worked till her back could 
hardly straighten itself, till her limbs ached and her head swam. 
She was planting cabbages one mild, fine spring day, when she 



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i9o8.] A Letter to the King 659 

heard the sound of rushing feet close by, and some one flung 
the little gate open and made straight for her. It was Mary 
Kelly, but so wild, so disordered, that she was almost unrecog- 
nizable for the quiet, refined girl of everyday life. She had a 
newspaper in her hand which was flying open in the March 
wind. 

** He's hurt," she cried, " he's hurt. He's been struck by a 
piece of shell. He's in hospital." 

Apparently she had forgotten the injuries she had suffered 
at Rose's hands, and had come to her as the one other being 
on earth who loved Jack as she did. 

Then the something really fine and high- minded which gave 
Rose's character its distinction appeared. 

''We have to bear it together," she said, and passing an 
arm about Mary's shoulders she led her within the cottage and 
closed the door, to the great disappointment of the neighbors 
who had followed in Mary's wake, and were coming as near as 
they dared, considering Rose's formidable name. 

In the sad vicissitudes of the days that followed the two 
women clung together. Sometimes there was no new^ at all; 
sometimes the news was of a varying shade of blackness. It 
was some weeks before the first glimmer of hope came, and 
those weeks had made Rose old and Mary a spectre of her for- 
mer comeliness. 

But at last there was hope, and when the hope once came 
it grew stronger and brighter every day. In fact Jack mended 
so rapidly that in barely two months time from the date on 
which he had received his wound he was reported as dismissed 
hospital and returned to active service. But by that time the 
worst of the war had spent itself and Jack was soon coming 
home. 

Long before that, however, the most complete reconciliation 
had been effected between Jack's mother and Mary. They had 
become the closest and dearest of friends. Reconciliation was 
hardly the word, when Mary would not listen to Rose's abasement 
of herself. " Sure there's nothing to forgive between us," she 
would say, ** and if there was, wouldn't I have to be forgiven 
for taking him from you ? " 

Another strange thing happened that spring. Mrs. Kelly 
had a letter from her brother in America, a brother unheard 
of for many years. He was coming home. He had made money 



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66o A LETTER TO THE KING [Feb., 

and was going to buy the farm on the slope of the mountains 
where he had been born, if it was possible to buy it. He was 
going to add to its narrow bounds. He was a widower with- 
out children, and he wanted his sister and her children to live 
with him. 

It would have been a bad lookout for Matthew Brady if 
Mary had not been training up the children her own way ever 
since she had been of an age to make the diversion from her 
mother's slatternliness. The little girls were at the convent 
school, the boys were with the Christian Brothers. Their faces 
were so polished with soap and water, their hair so sleek, their 
clothes so well washed and brushed and so carefully mended, 
that none could have supposed they were the children of streel- 
ish Judy Kelly. The children had begun to put Judy on one 
side in an affectionate manner. She had grown so used to be- 
ing given a chair in the sun, while the children washed and 
cleaned, that she had almost forgotten to grumble over the 
scandalous misuse of water and scrubbing brushes that was like 
to give her her death of cold. 

Meanwhile, what was to become of Mary when the family 
moved up to the mountain farm ? It would be too far for 
Mary to come and go to Rose as she had been used to. Since 
Biddy and Katey had proved so useful about the house, Mary 
had been a good deal with Rose, helping her with one thing or 
another. That summer the garden bloomed resplendent with 
sweet peas, and carnations, with holly- hocks and stocks and 
lilies and cabbage roses. For, to be sure. Jack might soon be 
expected home. He was sure to get leave after his long ab- 
sence. He knew now that Mary and his mother were recon* 
ciled, and he wrote long, loving letters to one woman as well 
as to the other. 

Then — it was about June — they had a great disappoint- 
ment. The Admiral's ship was going to the Rock — to Gibraltar 
instead of to England, and, of course. Jack was going with her. 
There was no knowing when he would have leave now, when 
he would be able to come home and marry Mary. And to be 
sure if he could come home itself, wouldn't he have to go back 
again and serve his time ? It would be only a honeymoon and 
he would have to go back again. 

The day this letter came Mary sat in Rose's cottage, sad 
and silent. She was making her wedding garments listlessly. 



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i9o8.] A Letter to the King 66 i 

The delight seemed to have gone out of her task. Sure, good- 
ness knows if she'd ever be married. Goodness knows but Jack 
might die or she might die ; or she might be an old maid and 
uncomely before they could be married. 

Suddenly Rose, rubbing listlessly at the brass candlestick, 
turned around, with a sudden bright spot of excitement in 
either cheek. 

" Sit down, Mary Kelly," she said, '* and write a letter to 
the king. Write it from me, Rose Quinn. By all accounts he 
was terrible fond of his own mother, an' he's real good-natured. 
Sit down there, girl, and write." 

Mary's alarms were overcome. She sat down and wrote at 
Rose's dictation a letter to the king. 

To the King df England^ Buckingham Palace^ London. 

Your Gracious Majesty: You have three of my sons 
already serving you on the Knight Commander^ and you're 
kindly welcome to them as long as you want them. But my 
Jack, that was the little one, joined last April was two years, 
through having some words with me, being of a hasty dis- 
position, which I've long since repented. He is on the Dianeme 
coming home from the Cape to Gibraltar. He was ever and 
always a good boy, if your Majesty will make inquiries about 
him. His father and myself are growing old, not a boy to 
look after us, and I never had but the four boys, and your 
Majesty has the whole of them. Besides, there's the little girl 
he was to marry. If your Majesty would send us home Jack, 
there isn't a night or day we wouldn't pray for you. 

Yours respectfully. 

Rose Quinn. 

It was only Rose's will power that made Mary write the 
letter, which she quaked over with a vague fear that it might 
be high treason. 

The letter was duly despatched, and Rose was just begin- 
ning to be anxious as to whether it had reached the king or 
been intercepted by somebody or other, when one day a very 
fine gentleman in a very fine carriage drew up at the garden 
gate. 

** Are you Mrs. Rose Quinn ? " he asked, taking off a hat, 
which Rose described afterwards as having such a lovely shine 



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662 A Letter to the King [Feb. 

that it must have been made in heaven — in due time that hat, 
which was only a smart topper, came to have a coronet sur- 
rounding it in Rose's memory of it. ^* I am glad to tell you, 
Mrs. Rose Quinn, that his Majesty has received your petition, 
and has ordered that your son be discharged from his duties, 
and sent home to you. He also wished, through me, to present 
you with a little gift in consideration of the fact that you have 
given so many sons to his service.'' 

Mary came in a little while later to find Rose sitting staring 
still at the crisp Bank of England note on the little table, un- 
heeding the buzz of gossip outside the closed door, for the 
neighbors were so wildly excited by the grand carriage and 
the visit of its occupant to Rose that they were peeping in at 
the windows and lifting their children up to report what Rose 
was doing. It wouldn't have happened in the old days, but of 
late Rose was less formidable. 

A week later Jack himself came walking down the street, 
quite recovered from his accident, and looking as brown and 
comely and radiant as ever intending bridegroom looked. 

His old place at the Rope Works was open to him. A 
great part of the king's gift had gone in buying the cottage 
next to his father's. Already the dividing hedge was gone. 
The cottage was painted and papered and had muslin curtains 
at its windows. The young couple were to live in the new 
cottage and the garden was to be a common one. It would 
have been a dangerous experiment in the old days, but not 
now, when Rose and Mary understood and loved each other. 

In time that visit of the beautiful gentleman who was the 
king's messenger is likely to rank among the apocrypha of the 
village. In fact, some of the children and old women believe 
that he was St. Patrick, a belief if not exactly shared by Rose, 
is at least not displeasing to her. 

Any of these summer evenings, if you should chance to 
pass by the two cottages, as pretty as a picture in the flowery 
and fruitful garden, you might chance to hear John Quinn the 
third saying his small prayers preparatory to being put to bed. 

" And now, my honey-jewel, say : * God bless the King ! ' " 
you may hear Mary's voice say. 

The small loyalist repeats the prayer in a language which 
might be Volapuk; but his mother and grandmother seem to 
understand it all right. 



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THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA. 

BY CORNELIUS CLIFFORD. 

INSTANCES in argument are dangerous things; 
but if one might be permitted to prescind for an 
understanding moment from the problem of the 
Papacy, which suggests difficulties not quite so 
perplexing and of an entirely different order of 
thought, it might be urged without irony that the real crux of 
Catholic Christianity has in every age been found to lie chiefly 
in its priests. For, whether we like to admit it or not, we 
Catholics are, for good or for evil, largely priest- made. We 
are baptized by priests, taught by priests, shrived and coun- 
selled by priests, married by priests; our very souls are fed 
by their indispensable ministrations; and not even the most 
careless of us will venture to undergo the " ceremony of death " 
without having a priest for mystagogue by his side. It is their 
thoughts that give meaning in all the acuter crises of life to 
our thoughts; their obediences tend inexorably to become our 
own. What wonder, therefore, that the priest should be both 
a sign and a portent; a thing to be scrutinized, if the claim 
of Catholicism to be a Way is not to be accounted idle and 
vain ? 

Now the very first thing that strikes one when he attempts 
to view this symbol and instrument of our faith, not in sepa- 
rate attitudes and posturings, as the devotee beholds him, but 
as he is in himself and altogether, is the paradox, we might al- 
most say the riddle, of his complex personality. There need 
be no question here of vice or of the more grievous forms oi 
sin. We are dealing with the priest of current, every-day ex- 
perience — a creature, not always unlovable, who aspires, how- 
ever illogically, to be an elaborate compost of many evangeli- 
cal virtues; an embodiment in little of those austere ideals 
providentially framed for us by the great Catholic reactionaries 
who triumphed at Trent. It is of this type we are speaking 
and of the larger and not ignoble class who look up to him, 
and yet fail pathetically to reach his decorous level. Here is 



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664 THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA [Feb., 

a character, one might say, that almost mocks at analysis, be- 
cause familiarity with it only serves to emphasize the anomaly 
of so much gold overtopping such obvious feet of clay. Yet 
the shock that intimacy seldom fails to give to the thoughtful 
in these matters is only an analogue — ^an instructive and really 
edifying analogue, if one will only approach it in the proper 
frame of mind— of that vaster surprise that awaits the inquirer 
who turns from the priest of our own time to the priest of 
history. There again one meets with the same tale of robust 
faith and equally robust failure; the same synthesis of ethical 
opposites; the same perplexing tangle of contrasts that makes 
up the staple of what the theologian asks us to believe is the 
larger gospel of the Christian Church: the story, namely, of 
our Lord's mystical progress along the crowded highways of the 
world. Here, indeed, is a web woven of many strange tissues. 
Darkness and light divide the warp of it; and through the 
woof there runs a medley of colors that the most life- jaded 
of us will hardly confess to having known on sea or land. The 
cynic may affect to comprehend it; the optimist may assure 
us that it will spell out its own meaning some day before the 
worn shuttle finally ceases to work. But the man of faith, who 
is a devout believer, usually, in the human triumph of the In- 
carnation, is not so easily appeased. He feels it can neither 
be reduced to a formula, nor summed up in a parable ; and the 
only lesson he can bring himself to read into or out of the 
jumble according to his prepossessions, is the perennial lesson 
of Christ's inscrutable patience, and the reverence with which 
his Father seems to wait upon the self- determinisms of man's 
will. 

In this '' mystery of iniquity " the priest, let us avow it with 
candor, plays no negligible part. We are right, no doubt, in 
maintaining that because the nobler among his kind more than 
outnumber the base, his achievements, on the whole, must re- 
dound to the glory of God and the cause of religious truth. 
The presence of such men in history as the late Cur^ d'Ars, 
for example, means something to human character; and it 
means good. We cite this extremely challengeable case ad- 
visedly ; because we think that neither with a certain notable 
section of our English-speaking fellow-believers, nor with the 
serious- minded Protestant world at large, has the force of the 
instance been estimated at its real worth. 



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i9o8.] The Priest in Caricature and Idea 665 

But if Catholicism may be said to be strong through such 
accumulated obediences, especially in an era of spiritual revo- 
lution like our own, it must be remembered, too, that the mis- 
deeds of not a few of the priestly order in times past, to say 
nothing of certain " offences and negligences " still patent in the 
present, have made its position to many honest minds almost 
as correspondingly weak. A little evil is bruited a long way 
in this carping world, if it is known to have worn for a while 
the linen of the saints. In allowing this much we are implicitly 
restricting the question to the personal morality of the priest; 
but he has a corporate and representative side to his character 
as well. He is, in a sense, the source as well as the symboh 
of the institution known in history as ecclesiasticism ; a thing 
distinct from, and opposed, in the judgment of many, to the 
less questionable blessing of the concrete Christian faith. In 
his ecclesiastical capacity also, then, the priest, as every student 
of history knows, has much to answer for. 

A thoughtful writer of these days, whose secularistic tend- 
ency has already attracted a good deal of notice, because of a 
certain suppressed fervor of quasi-religious conviction that ac- 
companies it, has summed up the general indictment on this 
score so well that we can hardly do better than transcribe his 
objection here. The objection, it will be observed, loses none 
of its force for seeming to identify the bane of the priest with 
the larger bane of the Catholic Church. Our author remarks: 

That Church is now commonly regarded as one of the great 
civilizing agencies of the world ; and I have no desire to dis- 
pute its claims. I^et all that is urged for it in this respect be 
granted. I^et it be admitted that it evolved order out of 
chaos ; that it civilized barbarism ; that it fostered the virtues 
of charity and peace in an age of universal war ; that it kept 
alive the tradition of philosophy, and culture, fostered the 
arts, disciplined the mind, and inspired the spiritual life. 
Let all this be admitted, and nevertheless it is true that 
the evil wrought by the Catholic Church is so incalculable, 
that a sober and impartial historian would hesitate to pro- 
nounce whether, even to an age of barbarism, it was more of 
a blessing than a curse. Consider its record. If it has 
preached peace, it has also filled the world with war ; if it 
has saved life, it has also destroyed it ; if it has raised the 
spirit, it has also degraded it ; if it has kindled the intelli- 



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666 THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA [Feb.^ 

gence, it has also extinguished it. Deliberately and in cold 
blood, in pursuance of a policy, it has tortured the souls and 
burnt the bodies of men. Deliberately it has struck at the 
root of virtue by evoking and fostering slavish fear and de- 
sire, by promising a material heaven and threatening a ma- 
terial hell. Deliberately it has invited men to lie, and pun- 
ished them tor adhering to the truth. Deliberately it has 
arrested, so far as it could, the nascent growth of science> and 
thwarted the only activity by which man may alleviate his 
material lot and set himself free for the triumphs of the mind 
and the spirit. 

In saying this, I am stating simple matters of fact, such as 
no competent historian will dispute. And the point I want to 
make is, that the Good and the Evil of the Church have both 
proceeded from the same principle, from the principle of 
ecclesiasticism. Because the Church claimed to possess a 
revelation, therefore it conquered the world, and therefore 
also it harried and tortured its conquest. Because it rele* 
gated reason to a secondary place, therefore it produced 
Dante and Aquinas, and therefore also it persecuted Galileo 
and burnt Bruno. Because it appealed primarily not to the 
intelligence of men, but to their fears and desires, therefore 
it imposed upon them an authoritative moral order, and 
therefore also it invited anarchy when the order was super- 
seded.* 

The passage recalls, if it does not altogether rival, an equally 
eloquent, and much more famous, attempt on the part of the 
late Stuart Mill to prove the essential malevolence of nature. 
Like that famous indictment, also, it fails — not because the 
author speaks vaguely and with a suggestion of sounding and 
depressing generalities, that one fears may be true, but because 
he deals with a mass of facts, and deals with them very badly. 
He misarranges his summary, and then he misreads it. There 
is not a citation in the whole disedifying list which cannot be 
backed up by a particular fact of history ; yet the general in- 
ference is so false that many a "competent" historian will im- 
pugn it, for the plain reason that the "facts" are not quite as 
*' simple" as he seems to imagine. In each one of them the 
*' ecclesiastical" priest may have played his part, and played it, 
we grieve to say, in any but a Christ-like spirit of forgiveness 

• Religion : A Criticism and a FweccLst, By G. Lowes Dickinson. New York : McClure, 
Phillips & Co., 1905, pp. 13, 14. 



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I908.] THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA 667 

and pity. What does it prove ? Simply this, that in the sorry 
business of official persecution, as of personal sin, the priest 
may be said to have but added to that evangelical inheritance 
of scandal which is rightly felt to be at once a witness to the 
Church's indefectibility and a stimulus to her instincts for self- 
renewal ; while the lesson of his moral obscurantisms has gradu- 
ally educated the wiser among our apologists to an accepted 
discipline of shame. We are more candid than our fathers, 
and are not as concerned as they were to deny whatever makes 
for the ill -repute of the Catholic name. Is it because the 
deeper significance of history has been brought home to us in 
this age, and taught us, as the Roman Breviary seems to do, 
to look otherwhere for the proof of our consistency and our 
strength ? 

In whatever sense we may feel impelled to find an answer 
to that question, the fact admittedly remains that the shortcom- 
ings of a priestly minority have been frequent enough, even in 
the post- Reformation Church, to have reacted upon the body to 
which they belong. The result is that the whole clerical order 
of some of the most flourishing portions of Western Catholicism 
suffers to-day from that most curious of surviving disabilities — 
an ostracism, namely, which is partly social, partly religious, and 
partly intellectual, and which is all the more difficult to attack, 
because it is the specious outcome, in great measure, of many 
generations of successful misrepresentation and caricature. 

It is a trite enough experience in the history of Catholic 
thought for its apologists to be obliged to deal with misrepre- 
sentation. That is only a part of the unrelenting irony of 
things; an issue, it might be called, of the general fortune of 
religious war, which drives men as unmistakably to the insin- 
cerities of debate and the cultivation of an elaborately devout 
disingenuousness, as actual warfare develops in them a spirit of 
malevolent strategy. Fortunately, however, it may be said that 
acrimonies of this sort only tend to become acute, when they 
are domestic and intraliminal. Men and brethren of the same 
creed are in this not unlike family litigants who will greatly find 
quarrel in the straws of their tribal honor or its supposed ex- 
ecutory devises. For marriages and money separate kinsfolk; 
and tithes and tonsures and points of ecclesiastical precedence 
sunder those who have been bom anew to become co-heirs with 
Christ. In these junctures men argue without mutual under- 



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668 THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA [Feb., 

standing. They grow angry ; they indulge in recrimination ; 
they withdraw into opposed camps, where they invent tales 
about one another which they come in process of time to be- 
lieve in. So is religious travesty engendered in an uncharitable 
world. It is a common phenomenon; and the kind of passion 
it invariably begets in the sectarian soul we call by the sinis- 
ter, but significant, name of odium theologicum. It is peculiar 
to no creed. One may detect evidences of it in modern as in 
ancient Judaism ; the Mohammedan tribes of Morocco and the 
Sudan are not strangers to it ; the discontented millions of In- 
dia are kept in civic equipoise and rendered fairly good sub- 
jects of a remote Kaisar^uHind^ because their conquerors have 
learned to make a humane use of such irreligiously religious 
centrifugalism. 

The representation we speak of in connection with the priest, 
however, is of an entirely different complexion. It is different 
in origin, different in method, different, it might be urged, in 
spite of many debatable counter- considerations, in its peculiar 
ethos and spirit. It is much less acrimonious, for one thing, 
and is not incapable of decorous laughter. It is nearly always 
genial in manner, especially in these latter days ; and ever more 
uniformly moderate in tone. Indeed, it might be said to sug- 
gest a certain covert and semi-intellectual type of disdain; a 
hauteur of the religious conscience, which, like the actual hauteurs 
of posturing men and women everywhere in an over-sophisticated 
world, is twice comical for being so unchallengeably naive and 
so imperturbably welUbred. If one were asked to describe it 
further, one might say that it was a belated and somewhat il- 
legitimate blend of seventeenth century intolerance and latter- 
day liberalism, whose sole issue in these times was an amiable 
but sterile propensity in favor of those half-truths which are 
crueller in the hurt they do to the cause of whole truths, or 
truth at large, than so many vindictive lies. Half-truths, in- 
deed, have fed the bantling from the beginning; but how far 
back his parentage goes, only the patient explorer of the by- 
paths of literature can tell. It may possibly distress the Catho- 
lic whose sense of history is so untutored and child-like that 
he unhesitatingly reads into the events of the past all the ortho- 
dox emotions of the present and is forever confusing unchange- 
ableness of dogma with that other unchangeableness which is 
only a passing inertness in the atmosphere of sentiment and 



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I9C8.J The Priest in Caricature and Idea 669 

opinion that dogma invariably tends to beget, to learn that the 
caricature of his own priesthood, which lurks like a grotesque 
dream in the religious consciousness of Protestantism to-day, is 
a derivative, in some sense, of the Middle Age. 

That wonderful thirteenth century, which is said to have 
given Catholic Europe its cathedrals and its universities, which 
prepared the way for Dante's Vision^ and which added so ap- 
preciably to the political splendor of St. Peter's See, also gave 
us the fabliaux^ the lais^ the pastourelUs, the drinking songs of 
the Scholastic world, the untraced Reineke FuchSy the ribaldries 
of Ruteboeuf« the satires of Adam de le Halle. It is a curious 
literary brood for an age of faith to have produced ; yet, as we 
shall see when we come to contrast its genial coarseness with the 
scurrilities of the more rancorous Reformation period, the faith is 
indubitably there, and the spirit of it is great, lending point both 
to lampooners and lampooned. Every rank and order of visible 
Catholicism is laid fearlessly under toll ; but it is the priesthood 
that pays heaviest of all. From . the Pope to the poorest 
*' Massing " priest, each several sinner of them is travestied 
without compunction, according to his offence, or lashed with 
whips of more than orthodox scorn. 

It was among the French, the Gens Francorum inclita^ the 
most orthodox, as they were, even in that formative period, the 
most intellectual of the peoples of western Europe, that the lead 
was taken in this work of unreflecting, but corroding, carica- 
ture; and England, Germany, and the Italian peninsula were 
not slow to follow. The movement — for it really amounted to 
that — acquired still further significance as the towns began to 
grow and their prentice populations to acquire civic importance. 
The transition, through Boccaccio and the lampooners of the 
Friars, who seemed to spring up everywhere during the next 
few generations, to the spirit that became articulate in Rabelais 
or that found vent of another sort in the indecencies of the 
Epistola Obscurorum Virorum^ was an easy one. Salimbene's 
curious ChronicU^ which had been produced as far back as the 
year 1280, and St. Catherine of Siena's Book of Divine Doctrine^ 
which was dictated to Fra Raimondo nearly a century later, 
furnish even the most charitable student with a curious com- 
mentary upon the condition of affairs so faithfully reflected in 
the literary currents of the time. If the latter witness be objected 
to, on the score of her too exalted devotion to the clerical ideal, 



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670 THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA [Feb., 

the same can hardly be said of the easy-going Franciscan. Like 
the robust and unquestioning Catholicism it so paradoxically 
embodies, Salimbene's reel of tales is perfectly candid, perfect- 
ly transparent, and disconcertingly detailed. Let us also add 
that it is perfectly naive. It is the record of an essentially 
vagabond mind that knows how to move us alternately to ^iron- 
der and laughter; and sometimes to a medley of more evasive 
emotions, compounded largely of incredulity and tears. Never- 
theless there is one quality that surely redeems it from the 
imputation of nastiness ; for, from first to last, there is not the 
faintest trace in it of a *' snicker,'' nor any evidence of a pru- 
rient disposition to lower the level of the priestly ideal. That 
twice sinister tendency was to be the outcome of a much more 
modern age. Meanwhile, as we have already stated, the change 
in mood and tendency was a facile one. We can mark its 
course through our own literature, from the healthy crudities of 
the earlier Robin Hood ballads to the more dour presentments 
of Piefs PloughmatCs Vision and Creeds with its picture of An-- 
tichrist making a kind of archiepiscopal visitation of a great re* 
ligious house, all the monks going out to him in procession and 
receiving him with great pomp and ringing of bells, as their 
father and lord. It is a strange ecclesiastical progress assur- 
edly; but it is not yet, as the average critic is too ready to 
suppose, either Lollard or Protestant. Idleness may go out at 
the Devil's bidding to make an assault on Conscience and take 
a thousand prelates in his train; but the spirit that conceives 
the horrible suggestion is still loyal to the priestly idea. The 
genius of Geoffrey Chaucer intervenes for a happy interval and 
alters the note, but not the content, of the indictment; yet 
Chaucer, too, like the obscure secular priest that wrote the Vis- 
ion, is, we feel. Catholic to the core. If the Canterbury Pil- 
grims are depicted in motley, it is not a doubting Wycliffite 
that describes them ; but a soul in love with the clean* and 
. Christ-bought sacramentalities of the Church. 

It must be admitted, however, that adolescent Protestantism, 
when it did wake to its powers, soon caught the trick of cari- 
cature from a generation of satirists that would have turned 
with contempt from the notion of a purely teaching and non- 
mystical priest. Before the sixteenth century was well into its 
fourth decade a new and terrible meaning was read into the 
old lampoons. The materials for a religious revolution had been 



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I908.J THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA 671 

gathering, as they were destined to gather two centuries and a 
half later for another and more logical change of front. Henry 
the Eighth may have sincerely desired to remain Catholic in 
temper and creed, while breaking with what was confidently as* 
sumed to be the mere political supremacy of Rome ; but there 
was a momentum in the movement he had started in the deg- 
radation of the clergy, and the suppression of the more tempt- 
ing monastic foundations, which it was difEcult even for his 
despotic hand to stay. The reign of violence that had to be 
checked by the passage of the famous Six Articles has been 
described for us by a justly popular historian whom no Angli- 
can scholar will be likely to accuse of undue leaning towards 
Roman ideas. The stream of libellous pamphlets issuing from 
the new sectaries on the continent had begun some years pre- 
viously, and was being steadily directed into the most effectual 
channels by a group of Lutheranizing prelates who knew how 
to wait upon events. The secular clergy, of course, were the 
chief objects of attack in these underground publications; but 
neither were the religious spared. The late J. R. Green writes : 

The suppression of the lesser monasteries was the signal 
for a new outburst of ribald insult to the old religion. The 
roughness, insolence, and extortion of the Commissioners sent 
to effect it drove the whole monastic bodj' to despair. Their 
servants rode along the road with copes for doublets and tuni- 
cles for saddle-cloths and scattered panic among the larger 
houses which they left. Some sold their jewels and relics to 
provide for the evil day they saw approaching. Some begged 
of their own will for dissolution. It was worse when fresh 
ordinances of the Vicar-General ordered the removal of ob- 
jects of superstitious veneration. The removal, bitter enough 
to those whose religion twined itself around tlie image or the 
relic which was taken away, was yet more embittered by the 
insults with which it was accompanied. . . . Fresh or- 
ders were given to fling all relics from their reliquaries, and 
to level every shrine with the ground. The bones of St. 
Thomas of Canterbury were torn from the stately shrine 
which had been the glory of his metropolitan church, and his 
name was erased from the service books as that of a traitor. 
The introduction of the English Bible into churches gave a 
new opening for the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of royal 
injunction that it should be read decently and without com- 
ment, the young zealots of the party prided themselves on 
VOL. Lxxxvi.— 43 



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672 The Priest in Caricature and Idea L^cb., 

shouting it out to a circle of excited hearers during the ser- 
vice of the Mass, and accompanied their reading with vio- 
lent expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English 
primer to church with them, and studied it ostentatiously 
during matins. Insult passed into open violence when the 
Bishops' Courts were invaded and broken up by Protestant 
mobs ; and law and public opinion were outraged at once 
when priests who favoured the new doctrines began openly 
to bring home wives to their vicarages. A fiery outburst of 
popular discussion compensated for the silence of the pulpits. 
The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of complaint, 
were ** disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every tavern 
and ale-house." The articles which dictated the belief of 
the English Church roused a furious controversy. Above all, 
the Sacrament of the Mass, the centre of the Catholic system 
of faith and worship, and which still remained sacred to the 
bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility and pro- 
faneness which pass belief. The doctrine of transubstan- 
tiation, which was as yet recognized by law, was held up to 
scorn in ballads and mystery plays. In one church a Protest- 
ant lawyer raised a dog in his hands when the priest elevated 
the Host. The most sacred words of the old worship, the 
words of consecration, ** Hoc est Corpus," were travestied 
into a nickname tor jugglery as ** Hocus-pocus." It was by 
this attack on the Mass, even more than by the other out- 
rages, that the temper both of Henry and the nation was 
stirred to a deep resentment ; and the first signs of reaction 
were seen in the Act of the Six Articles, which was passed 
by the Parliament with general assent.* 

But no subsequent counter- effort, either of persecution or 
hazardous propaganda, could purge out the leaven that had 
taken hold of the English character under the stress of these 
terrible events.. The clergy of the old regime had suffered most. 
Some of them, a scandalously notable, yet not actually large 
number of them, it would seem, had sinned greatly ; but it was 
the system, rather than the individual, that was chiefly to blame. 
Clerical human nature is no worse than average human nature; 
and even were we without the evidence afforded by a fuller 
study of the State papers, we still should not need the plead- 
ing of Abbot Gasquet and the group of fair-minded, modern 
scholars associated with the Cambridge school of historical re- 

• History of ike Bn^lish People, Ch. yii*. $ i. 

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I908.] THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA 673 

search to enable us to form a just estimate of the facts. The 
mischief was done, however; the priests of the old regime were 
henceforth to be described in terms which have since passed 
into the vocabulary of the great non- Catholic tradition. They 
were lazy, self-indulgent, and avaricious, for the most part, and 
instinctively opposed to the happiness of religious mankind. 

What Mary, according to her vision, tried to do and failed, 
the Armada likewise missed and left in sorrier case. It was an 
era of strange but vigorous births ; and where so much was 
new men speedily forgot what was best in the old. The con- 
spiracy of events that helped so significantly during the next 
generation to ensure the political success of the Act of Settle- 
ment under Elizabeth, created the mental atmosphere that made 
for development and permanency. The thoughts of English- 
speaking mankind began to be shaped to a Protestant pattern. 
In spite of the heroism with which the victims met them, the 
disabilities began to tell. Religion which, for all its civic rela- 
tionships and state entanglements, had in times past been con- 
sistently held up as something ecumenic and mystical and ultra- 
mundane, was now made to appear insular, semi- naturalistic, 
and worldly-shrewd. The priest, as its official and daily func- 
tionary, holding his jurisdiction by a title that no earthly crown 
could impart, became a twilight and unfamiliar figure in English 
life ; a creature of subterfuges and disguises, dreading, appar- 
ently, the honest glare of day. Everything, indeed, seemed to 
work to his disfavor. What Cecil and the testframers had 
astutely aimed at, a group of scholarly and unselfish exiles, 
shaping by uncertain channels the policy of the Roman See, 
contributed still further to emphasize. If the elusive and never 
satisfactory form of ecclesiasticism by which he was governed 
during the next two centuries and more kept alive in him the 
quiet courage of a martyr, it also tended to denote him, when 
he appeared at all, as that worst of expatriates, a plotter and 
intriguer against the hard-won liberties of his home-loving kin. 

Nor was that all. The literature that largely colors, where 
it does not shape, the stock of ideas common to the English- 
speaking races of both hemispheres to-day, was growing up 
in the long interval; and its characteristic note, as Newman 
has reminded us, was unalterably, uncompromisingly Protestant. 
Shakespeare, it is true, may be a curious, but not inexplicable, 
exception, standing in this, as in everything else, magnificently 



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674 THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA [Feb., 

apart; Crashaw and Dryden may furnish other instances in re- 
buttal ; but the fact remains that the great body of our classical 
writers, down to the very close, it might almost be said, of the 
Victorian period itself, is a subtly biassed and anti-Catholic 
body, rude with prejudices, and often with brutalities, that 
must give pain to every intelligent upholder of the ancient 
creed. 

It hardly falls within the scope of the present essay to at- 
tempt, even roughly, to classify these imputations against his- 
toric Catholicism, or to show how inevitably, like the dead flies 
in the Scriptural unguent, they detract from much that is other- 
wise soothing and of good effect, even upon the more recon- 
dite taste and incorrigibly spiritual standards of the Catholic 
conscience in these matters. But if the Church at large fares 
ill in English literature at large, the priest fares worse ; and his 
character, as depicted in the great Protestant tradition, is not 
a pleasing one to contemplate. For what is the sum of his 
presentations ? No one book will exhaust the portrait ; but the 
composite result, so to call it, is forbiddingly, if at times some- 
what ridiculously, dark. In romance and poem and political 
pamphlet alike, in simile and metaphor, he is a strange com- 
pound of vices, nearly all of them petty, some of them revolt- 
ing, and many more simply impossible. He is despotic, over- 
bearing, crafty, plausible, hypocritical, avaricious; a great legacy- 
hunter, a daring fabricator of lies, thick-skinned in honor, a 
sanctuary beau among women, a sycophant among men, a dis- 
turber of families, a kill- joy among the innocent, a shrewd 
angler for flattery and place, lazy, restless, energetic, busy as a 
mediaeval devil and neariy as ubiquitous, ascetical, and sensu- 
ous in a breath, a mighty drinker, a devout trencherman, a 
slave of the Pope, a tool of the Jesuits, a secret emissary of 
the Inquisition ; and, if there be any other vice, cardinal or 
diabolical, that has been astutely overlooked in all this shining 
catalogue, seventeenth century Puritanism, either at home or in 
America, or, for that matter, Victorian Anythingarianism, as 
set forth in a score of poems and novels of undoubted sincer- 
ity and unassailable literary repute, will supply the needed in- 
stance. Nor is it in separate and distinct embodiments merely 
that the travesty is discoverable, but in the vague and intang- 
ible use of illustration and epithet, in the misty by-product 
known as atmosphere, that much of the traditional falsehood is 



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I908.] THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA 675 

kept actual and alive for the many that read and never sus- 
pect. Some of the most honored names in modern English 
literature — to say nothing of the ** harmless drudges " that make 
our dictionaries and works of reference — might be cited in sup- 
port of this contention ; if the educated reader has not already 
made out a mental list of his own. Browning, Swinburne, Long- 
fellow, J. H. Shorthouse, and Charles Reade ; Thackeray, Froude, 
Macaulay, Kingsley, Sir John Seeley, Ruskin, Mill, Carlyle; — 
we purposely restrict ourselves to such authors as may be said 
to have been an influence at some time or other during the 
past fifty years — there is not one of these that has not offended ; 
not one that has not idly flung his stone. 

Reticence, we are assured, is a virtue to-day ; and sobriety, 
even in caricature, is a canon for the art of the time ; but not, 
apparently, when historic, or even present-day continental Ca- 
tholicism is in question ; and most certainly not when priests be- 
come the facile theme. Newman used all the resources of his 
personal prestige and all the gifts of his incomparable powers 
of rhetoric, more than half a century ago, to laugh the gro- 
tesque propensity down; but he failed. The list of instances 
we gave above is a fairly long one, and more than fairly rep- 
resentative; for the least obvious sinner in it can be convicted 
out of his own scripture with due courtesies of chapter and 
verse; and yet it contains only a tithe of those that might be 
named. One would have thought that the blow dealt to hered- 
itary and contented bigotry in the Lectures on the Present Po^^ 
sition of Catholics in England^ in 185 1, would have opened the 
eyes of the thoughtful to the injustice of the traditional cari- 
cature of Catholic institutions and ideals. The discourses were 
masterpieces in the art of effective irony. They were noble in 
tone; level and convincing in argument; straightforward in 
their indignant lucidity; and they carried with them to an 
astonishing degree, only directed now to newer and more pop- 
ular uses, the ring and the irresistible magic of the old style. 
Half of England hung upon them; all the world read them; 
but what difference did it make in the end ? With the excep- 
tion of Carlyle and of Lord Macaulay, the list of offenders we 
submitted above is one that has grown up since Newman's 
protest was made. Browning, it is true, had written The Con- 
fessional and the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister before 1845 ; 
but he published Bishop BlougranCs Apology in 1855. Charles 



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676 THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA [Feb., 

Reade gave what he felt to be his great masterpiece to the 
public in 1 86 1. It was, significantly enough. The Cloister and 
the Hearth. Mill uttered his famous sneer about the " wife's 
influence in Catholic countries " being '* another name for that 
of the priest" in an article on ''The Enfranchisement of Wo- 
men," which appeared in the Westminster Review in the July 
of the very same year in which Newman delivered his Lee- 
tures ; the words were printed again, this time in a book of 
essays, in 1864. John Inglesant came out in 1881 ; and, though 
this generation is not likely to see such another master of prose 
as the late Mr. Shorthouse was, we may be perfectly sure that 
we shall see more than one unsuspecting imitator of his half- 
Quaker, half-Anglican bias. 

Prejudices die hard; but they die. Contact with the actual 
— which is God's way of helping Truth — kills them, as by a 
quiet excess of daylight, in the end. 

Behind the incongruities, tragic or grotesque, that are so 
inscrutably involved in this parable of the priest in caricature, 
beneath all the variations, the uncertainties, the griefs, the hero- 
isms, the follies, too palpably human, of its history, there lurks 
an idea that is worth a good man's study ; an idea so separate, 
sacrosanct, and unique, that one may wisely give hostages to 
time for the sake of it, and then boldly blazon its central mean- 
ing to the world as one of the supreme tests, perhaps the holiest 
test, of the enduring obediences of Christianity. It is the idea 
of the priest as he is in himself: a Way^ through Penance and 
the Mysteries of the Altar^ to the Father, Having to do daily 
with mysteries, he is himself a mystery; being that further 
Christ whereof the Apostle speaks; a miracle of the Spirit's 
fashioning; an untared field of wheat; a soul set upon a can- 
dle-stick ; an unfallen Lucifer ; an angel for high embassies and 
awful functions, as becomes one who is called to be a gospeller 
of the New Testament; an epitome at once of the humanisms 
and the self-abasements of the Incarnate Word. To set forth 
this idea in words is no easy task; though the Church does it 
daily in action. But if one must find a formula in which to 
sum up its logical content, yet not so as to ignore the inevita- 
ble corrections furnished only too abundantly by history and 
life, one can hardly do better than adapt to present purposes 
the account that the Fathers of Trent gave when, in the teeth 
of much actual scandal, and with minds serenely unperturbed 



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I908.] THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA 677 

by the apparent counter-evidence of the Apostolic ag^e, they 
affirmed substantially, that *' Holy Ordination " is something 
more than a human invention or product of history; that it is 
•* not in vain that bishops say : * Receive ye the Holy Ghost '/ be- 
cause it is, in the strict sense of the word, a Sacrament of the 
New Law, instituted by Christ, imparting an indelible character 
to the recipient, giving him the power to forgive sins, and 
clothing him, above all lesser men, with the charisma which en- 
ables him to consecrate and offer the Body and Blood of the 
Lord."* 

On a subject so large and beset with so many difficulties, 
Scriptural, archaeological, and religious, that pronouncement may 
be said to embody (even for our own times, when the problems 
involved in it are being eagerly debated from a fresh point of 
view) the clearest and most candid summary of what will al- 
ways be accounted a dark matter. While it gathers up in brief 
the traditional teaching of Catholicism upon the essentially in- 
ward and mystical character of its chief ministers, it leaves the 
historical development of the idea of a restricted priesthood and 
its precise sacramental relation to the Apostolic episcopate of 
the New Testament untouched. Interesting as the undefined 
point may be to ecclesiologists and historians of dogma, it is 
of slight importance to the spiritual life of the faithful at large; 
and no amount of controversy is likely to make it actual. It 
rose to a certain prominence in St. Jerome's time, and provoked 
that plain-spoken Father to some curious utterances. Since 
Tridentine days it has acquired, from time to time, a quasi- 
scholastic interest, due, in appreciable measure, it would seem, 
to the somewhat bizarre genius of Vasquez, and more notably 
to the studies carried on by the great Jansenist scholars of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The essays contributed 
to the subject more than a generation ago by Bishop Lightfoot, 
and afterwards by Principal Hatch, were, in spite of the breadth 
of learning they revealed, too manifestly actuated by a charac- 
teristically Protestant desire to discourage a growing preference 
for sacerdotalism in a certain section of the Anglican Church 
to make them wholly pertinent to our present concern. 

It is the idea of the priest, then, as emphasized at Trent, 
that has been the inspiration of everyday Catholicism from the 
beginning. It has done this, moreover, in two distinct ways, 

^S Can.,xxiii. Stst., 1563; cf. Denziger, 838-843. 



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678 The Priest in Caricature and Idea [Feb., 

each of which may be said to have contributed to the devel- 
opment of the Christian life. It has enforced the principle of 
obedience in every stratum of Christian society; and it has 
kept alive the accrete charities and graces of sacramentalism, 
without which obedience would have degenerated into mere 
tyranny, or never risen at best above a hard militarism, with 
all the hurts and limitations that so unlovely and so un-Christ- 
like an ideal must, of necessity, have entailed. For the priest, 
as Catholicism understands him, is no mere pedagogue of the 
conscience, enforcing rules and going before our Lord's disciples 
as a mere prophet or prayer- leader in the Way. He is set 
apart for such indispensable work, it is true, because in his 
normal state he comes to mankind as one that is sent. There 
is a true apostolicity about him. He speaks as one having au^ 
thority^ and is intrusted with power over a designate portion 
of the mystical body of Christ, either as pastor or caretaker. 
The distinctions introduced later into Catholic Europe to em- 
phasize certain applications of this idea to mediaeval or even 
to modern society, leave this master consideration untouched. 
But while his will is panoplied with such jurisdiction, his heart 
and soul and conscience are clothed with something inconceiv- 
ably more Godlike still. He is a personality chosen, anointed, 
and irrevocably set apart from ordinary flesh and blood by a 
solemn imposition of hands, in the name of the Church, to 
have power henceforth over the real, but sacramental. Body of 
Christ. The separation seals him and stamps his very person- 
ality with an impress, or character of the soul, which is as 
much holier than the impress of baptism as the sacramental 
Body of the Lord is more sacred than the mystical womb out 
of which he was born again, through water and the Holy 
Ghost, to become a new creature in the sight of God. This is 
the true character and blessedness of his order; and through 
it he becomes an effective witness and instrument of the In- 
carnation much more infallibly than the mysterious vessels of 
the altar at which he serves tend to become a witness and in- 
strument to the faithful of his higher and holier self. 

Is it surprising that Catholicism should have cherished such 
a type of man, saved him from commonness by an austere dis- 
cipline of celibacy, and watched over the purity of his mind 
and heart with a jealousy comparable only to the concern with 
which its Pontiffs have watched over the purity of Scripture 



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I908.] THE PRIEST IN CARICATURE AND IDEA 679 

itself? How easy the vast burden of precedent in his regard 
becomes, when appraised by such dear prejudices of value! 
How inevitable the peculiar and sometimes cramping quality of 
his education I His asceticisms, how reasonable ; his dress and 
grave demeanor, how needful 1 The very idiosyncracies of such 
a life, it might almost be said, the celibate manner, the set 
features, the often inscrutable air, the little oddities of voice 
and glance and gesture, acquire a dignity of their own and are 
accepted as things consecrate and mysterious, because of the 
primal unction of his election and ordination. Not in vain 
were his hands tied in that great ceremony ; for, by an act of 
renunciation which finds its meaning, as well as its defence, in 
the self-elected bondage of the Passion, he ,must go through 
all his days as one maimed and disfurnished of half his man- 
hood for the sake of the holier virility his ministrations will 
beget in others through Christ. If in the eyes of the world he 
seems a poor creature, yet to the eyes of the Church, whose 
treatment of him almost amounts to a cult, and whose sense of 
him is like a perpetual touchstone of interior religion, he is the 
most august character on earth ; for he is clothed with God, 
is strangely linked in his more representative aspects, as by a 
kind of moral transubstantiation, with the Humanity of his Son, 
and is drenched daily with the sanctities of Calvary. That such 
a man should still be a Way to the Catholic soul, in spite of all 
the evil wherewith the world and his own conscience revile him, 
is a miracle as great as Christ or Christianity ; for it is in his 
person that these twin embodiments of the one Mystery meet 
indefeasibly for witness; and we know, surely, that their wiU 
ness is true. 

Setan Hall, South Orange, N. J. 



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flew Boohs* 

The editors of the International 

THE WESTERN SCHISM. Series again show their good judg* 

By Salembier. ment in selecting their subject * and 

the author who is chosen as its 

expositor. The great Schism of the West — to employ a term 

which usage rather than the term's correctness has consecrated 

— is one of the great episodes in the history of the Church. 

To that melancholy period, when Christendom was divided 

against itself, and rival parties, and rival claimants to the office 

of Supreme Pontiff, exhibited more conspicuously the frailty 

of human nature than the spirit of Pentecost, hostile writers 

have appealed as to an unanswerable proof against the claim 

of the Church to apostolic continuity and holiness. 

The shades of that tremendous picture have been darkened 
by Protestant historians; and, at least since the Protestant 
Reformation, as a result of the exigencies of polemical warfare, 
many Catholic writers have wasted their time in seeking to ex- 
cuse or palliate the conduct of prominent personages, and rather 
neglected to set forth, in its imposing splendor, the testimony 
which the entire crisis bears to the divine strength which en- 
sures the endurance of the Church. For seventy years pontiff 
was arrayed against pontiff, kingdom against kingdom, clergy 
against clergy, and every great party on either side was split 
up by minorities that supported the opposing faction. As the 
struggle proceeded, spreading desolation throughout Europe, 
and bringing in its train a condition approaching to anarchy, 
the body of the faithful in every land, with the Catholic instinct 
for unity, implored their leaders to make every sacrifice in or- 
der to restore peace once more to the household of the faith. 
Yet for years every effort at compromise or peace was brought 
to naught through selfishness or ambition. 

When confusion was at its worst; when three rival Popes 
were excommunicating one another; while the hostility of 
the three camps was strengthened by all the forces of national 
rivalries, and, as the result of the confusion of minds, propa- 
gators of false doctrine found the times unusually propitious, 
then, if the Church had been but a work of human policy, as 

* Th€ Grtat Schum of tht Wtst, By L. Salembier. Translated by M. D. New York: 
Benziger Brothers. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 68 1 

Macaulay, in his famous passage, has called her, her doom would 
have been at hand. To relate this struggle, extenuating nothing 
regarding the maleficent factors of the case, is to set forth, it 
may be said, a peremptory inductive proof that in the consti- 
tution of the Church there is a power, not of men, which makes 
for unity and immortality. This proof M. Salembier, who is a 
professor in the Catholic University of Lille, has unfolded in a 
form suitable to the general reader, and yet exact enough to 
merit the approbation of the professional historian. He dis- 
charges his task in that spirit of sincerity which it was one of 
the late Pope's greatest services to the Church to commend ef- 
fectively to Catholic historians. While he keeps back nothing 
of the disagreeable truth, he takes pains to present the consol- 
ing facts which more than counterbalance the evil. One of his 
strongest sections is that in which he dwells upon the fact that 
even during the period when confusion was at its height, in 
both jurisdictions, the Church's work went on amid the great 
body and brought forth fruits unto sanctification. 

Upon the great question of the struggle — who was the right- 
ful Pope? — M. Salembier adopts the opinion which, thanks to 
recent investigation, almost all scholars adopt to-day as practi- 
cally certain. After the death of Gregory XL, in March, 1378, 
a conclave assembled in Rome, consisting of four Italian, five 
French, and seven Limousin cardinals. This body elected the 
Archbishop of Bari, who was crowned as Urban VL As M. 
Salembier conclusively shows, these electors were under no co- 
ercion; they subsequently ratified their choice, and, in various 
ways, acknowledged Urban as the duly elected Pontiff. Con- 
sequently he and his successors, Boniface IX., Innocent VII., 
and Gregory XII., were the true successors of St. Peter down 
till the pacification established by the Council of Constance in 
141 7 by the election 'of Martin V. The sudden change in Ur- 
ban's character immediately after his election, his violent meas- 
ures, his refusal to accept any advice, and his repeated out- 
bursts of reckless temper — traits which St. Catherine of Siena, 
the staunch supporter of his claims, begged him, for the love 
of Jesus Crucified, to mitigate a little — were the entirely insufH- 
cient reasons which prompted a majority of the Cardinals who 
elected him to coalesce afterwards with the Avignon cardinals 
who had not taken part in the Roman election. This coali- 
tion on September 20, at Fondi, elected Robert of Geneva to 



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682 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

the papal chair. He assumed the title of Clement VII.» and 
the great Schism was begun. Clement died, and his followers 
elected, as his successor, the Cardinal de Luna, who took the 
title of Benedict XIII. In detailing the various subsequent 
phases of the struggle, in which France played an important 
part, the withdrawal from Benedict, the proceedings of the 
Council of Pisa, whose attempt at pacification, by declaring the 
two rivals deposed, and by electing Alexander V., resulted in 
establishing three claimants instead of Iwo, the author dwells 
upon the baleful influence which these events afterwards exerted 
in the growth of Gallicanism in the French Church. He even 
says that the act of France in breaking with Benedict "paved 
the way for the despotic proceedings that Napoleon would af- 
terwards carry out with regard to Pius VII." Unless we are 
to interpret this statement in a very loose sense, it savors of 
the post hoc $rgo ptopter hoc argument. For Napoleon's policy 
was born, not of Gallicanism, but of the Revolution; and he 
troubled himself very little, indeed, to justify his despotism by 
canonical precedent, or by appeals to political procedure under 
the house of Valois. 

Some portions of this work are not smooth narrative, and, 
consequently, not easy reading. The writer's method of touch- 
ing on minor incidents interrupts the general flow of the story. 
But the reader will be amply repaid for this demand on his 
attention, by the acquaintance he gains with the complicated 
dealings of the various parties. Here and there, too, one may 
notice some vacillation in M. Salembier's judgment of some 
phases and personages. For instance, he tempers his estimates 
of Clement VII. and of the successor of Alexander V., John 
XXIII., with a measure of mercy which he withholds from 
Benedict XIII., whose good faith seems to have been at least 
as strong, and whose general character was at least as credit- 
able, as that of John XXIII. Most writers agree rather with 
Von der Hart that, if in Benedict we have a '' lachrymabik 
ixemplum^^ John XXIII. offers a " miserabile spectaculum** and 
the latter showed no less hatred than the former for the direct 
successor of Urban's successor, Gregory XII., whose noble con- 
duct M. Salembier worthily extols. 

The lesson of this great struggle, M. Salembier sums up 
with judicial moderation : 

An epoch of decadence, say some ; a century of renaissance, 



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1908,] I^EW BOOKS 683 

say others. A mixed period, we will say, like all the ages of 
history, but one in which the world-stream carried on in its 
troubled waters less gold than sand and slime. 

Those who expect to find in every period of history an ever 
brilliant proof of the divinity and sanctity of the Church, are 
sometimes liable to cruel disappointments. At certain eras, 
the fact is clearer to the eye of faith than to that of reason. 

In a given age, even in a Christian age, we do not always 
find the Church showing herself in all her glory, without spot 
or wrinkle, as the bride of Jesus Christ. Still less do we find 
her as the Church universally venerated and obeyed. Rather 
must she be compared to the cloud, sometimes dark and 
sometimes light, which led the Hebrews in their journey 
towards the land of promise. 

The history of the Church, like that of her Divine Master, 
has a divine and a human side. At certain eras it is the 
former that shines forth ; in the age that we have studied the 
second is more in evidence. The earthly existence of the 
Society founded by Jesus Christ sometimes affords matter for 
criticism and furnishes a pretext for unbelief or strife ; but 
belief in her divine authority surely stores up merit in the 
sphere of faith, and ever keeps a crown in reserve for the 
moment of victory. 

The Catholic historian who discharges his task in the spirit 
of M. Salembier is the man who provides the effective anti- 
dote to the poison distilled by hostile writers on ecclesiastical 
history; for, to quote the words of Leo XIII., ''studied in this 
fashion, the history of the Church in itself affords a splendid 
and conclusive proof of the truth and divinity of Christianity.'' 

A copious and partially classified bibliography is to be 
found at the end of the volume. The quality of this work, as 
well as that of the preceding numbers of the series, indicates 
that the editors of the International Catholic Library are do- 
ing an invaluable service to the Church in the English-speak- 
ing world. 

The International Catholic Truth 
CONTROVERSY. Society has issued a new edition 

of McLaughlin's Is Om Religion as 
Good as Another?^ under the editorship of the Rev. Dr. Lam- 
bert. The indifferentism which, nearly twenty years ago, Father 

» Is Omi RtUgwn as G^od as AnotJurf Edited by Rev. L. A. Lambert, LL.D. Brooklyn, 
N. Y, : International Catholic Truth Society 



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684 N£^w Books [Feb., 

McLaughlin so ably refuted has not diminished since; so, his 
excellent little pamphlet is still a timely book. The editor has 
improved the original by supplementing to it some pages taken 
from the little book of similar scope. Does it Matter Muck What 
I Believe? by Father Otten, S.J. There is no doubt but that, 
to-day, when everybody reads, and almost everybody concerned 
is too busy, or too apathetic, to read large books on religious 
subjects, the short, well-written, popular tract is of much more 
service for the diffusion and defence of Catholic truth, than the 
great, formal, controversial, or theological tome, and it would be 
a superficial view of the matter to fancy that very much less 
scholarship and ability are required to succeed in the former 
than in the latter line of authorship. Besides possessing a 
thorough knowledge of Catholic theology, any one who under- 
takes to present it effectively to the non- Catholic world to-day 
must thoroughly understand the mentality to which he ad- 
dresses himself, and possess the knack of divesting doctrine of 
its technical clothing, and, without sacrificing accuracy, present 
it, with forceful logic, in popular language. 

No person has devoted himself with more success to this 
work than Father Otten, whose industrious pen now presents 
two new pamphlets,* nowise inferior to his former productions. 
The first one. The Catholic Church and Modern Society^ contrasts 
the respective positions of the Catholic Church and the various 
non- Catholic denominations, as effectual opponents of the na- 
turalism and all-dissolving scepticism of the age. The other 
booklet is a concise but complete exposition of the sacramental 
system and the part that it plays in Catholic life. Father Ot- 
ten, unlike too many former controversialists, understands the 
psychological fact that to attack directly a man's cherished be- 
liefs is more likely to confirm his antagonism than to force him 
to surrender. 

The surest way to vanquish error is to present the truth. 
Father Coppens publishes a short historical sketch f of the es- 
tablishment of the Reformation in Germany, Great Britain, 

• Tht CatholU CAurtAoMd M^dtrm SocUfy, Tlu Sacramtntal Lijt 9j HU Ckmck. By 
Rev. Bernard J. Otten, S.J., Professor of Philosophy in St. Louis University. St. Louis : B. 
Herder. 

t The ProUsUuU RejormaHoM, How it Was Brvtight Ahomt m Vctrwus Lamds, By Rev. 
Charles Coppens, S. J. St. Louis : B. Herder. 



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i9o8.] NEW Books 685 

Switzerlaody and the Scandinavian Peninsula ; with a brief 
glance at its fortunes in Ireland, France, and the Netherlands. 
He introduces his subject with a chapter on abuses in the 
Church. He shows how Gregory VII. brought about reform in 
his day; and, the inference is, in due time God would have 
brought about, through the medium of legitimate authority, a 
reform of the abuses that existed in the beginning of the six- 
teenth century. Therefore the disastrous rebellion of the Prot- 
estant reformers was not the work of God. Courteous and 
moderate in tone. Father Coppens ought to make an impression 
on non-Catholic readers. One is surprised that he has not 
strengthened his position, as he might easily have done, by 
precise references to non-Catholic historians ; for Protestants will 
not accept, without challenge, an account of the Reformation 
from a Catholic pen ; and the purpose of this little book is 
scarcely to convince sincere Catholics that Luther, Knox, Cal- 
vin, Henry VIII., and Elizabeth were enemies of the Church 
of God. 

Under the guise of a tale,* the main characters and facts of 
which, the author assures us, have been drawn from life, a lady 
with a facile pen, and a command of good, easy English, re- 
lates the conversion of three High Church people — a clergy* 
man, a young lady, and a naval officer. Plot there is none, 
and the narrative is very loosely thrown together. The greater 
part of the book, and it contains about four hundred and 
fifty pages — consists of dialogue and conversation, in almost 
uninterrupted flow, in the course of which nearly every point 
of faith and practice on which the Catholic Church is in 
opposition to Anglicanism is persuasively defended and ex- 
plained. The writer is familiar with the prejudices and distor- 
tions which pervert the viewpoint from which Protestants regard 
Catholic doctrine and discipline. The naval officer's conversion 
is brought about chiefly through his association with mission- 
aries during his sojourn on the Chinese station, where he has 
an opportunity to witness the heroic self-sacrifice of the mis- 
sionaries and the fruits of Catholic faith among their neophytes. 
In this portion of the story, which is richer in action than the 
other parts, as well as in her description of some domestic 

^Back m tk€ FiflUs. A Tali of Tfuctarian Timgs. By Elixabeth Gagnieur .(Alba). 
Montreal: Sadlier. 



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686 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

scenes at home, the tirriter gives evidence that, had such been 
her purpose, she could have produced a tale that, through the 
interest of the narrative alone, would hold the reader's at- 
tention. As it is, the book is of a kind to interest deeply and 
assist any person of culture who, from the outside, is turning 
a longing but uncertain look towards the Church. 

When there is only too much evi- 
SPIRITUAL LITERATURE, dence that we are witnessing a 

widespread decline of Christian 
faith, there is encouragement and hope in the fact that, on the 
other hand, there never has been, since the Reformation, such 
an interest as exists to-day in the great mediaeval saints and 
mystical writers of the Catholic Church, especially in St. 
Francis and his followers, in Thomas ^ Kempis, and the en* 
tire school of Mount St. Agnes. The scholarly edition of the 
entire works of k Kempis, issued by Dr. Pohl, of Bonn, has 
been eagerly welcomed. The demand for it has induced Dom 
Vincent Scully to prepare an English translation * of the vol- 
ume which consists of the Meditation on the Incarnation and 
the Sermons on the Life and Passion of our Lord. The great 
characteristic of these, as of all the writings of k Kempis, is 
a deep, tender, childlike love of our Lord. The translator, who 
has rendered his text into thoroughly idiomatic English, has 
enriched the volume with a highly instructive general and crit- 
ical introduction. 

The Dominican, Father M^zard, who knows his St Thomas 
from alpha to omega, has produced, in Latin, two compact 
little volumes of meditations which, he may justly claim, form 
a compendium of the great Doctor's teaching on religion and 
the ascetic life.f Father M^zard has searched all the works of 
St. Thomas for passages suitable for pious meditation and 
arranged them in the form of brief meditations for every day 
of the liturgical year. The words of the original are retained 
and, usually, references are given to the sources. Only one of 
the meditations — that on the Immaculate Conception — is not 

*A Mtditatum on the Incamatian efCkrut, Sermons on the Life and Passion of our Lord, 
By Thomas k Kempis. Authorized Translation from the Edition of Dr. Pohl. By Dom V. 
Scully. St. Louis : B. Herder. 

\MeditaHones ex Opetibus St. ThonuB De^omptm, Auctore P. D. Mdzard, O.P. Tom. 
I., II. Paris: Lethiellieux. 



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i9o8.] New Books 687 

taken from St. Thomas. Needless to say, then, that there is 
not a line of empty phrase-making or fanciful futilities in the 
entire collection. Every sentence contains a thought which car- 
ries true to head and heart. 

Another treasure of the middle ages, that is now for the 
second time presented to English readers^ is The Dialogue of 
St. Catherine of Siena.^ The Dialogue was dictated to her 
amanuensis by St. Catherine while she was in a state of ecstasy. 
Much of it, as may easily be guessed from the circumstances 
of its composition, is obscure and mysterious. Yet its general 
drift is perfectly clear. Catherine traces with a firm hand the 
way by which the Christian is to pursue righteousness and at- 
tain to God. With a profound knowledge of the human heart 
and of the conditions which prevailed in society during the 
troubled, distracted age in which she lived, she draws the pic- 
ture of the vices which she lashes. At other times she dis- 
courses with wonderful insight and fervor on the secrets of the 
spiritual life — prayer, obedience, the attainment of perfect love. 
Though a great part of these revelations were given with a 
special view to the deplorable state of society in ecclesiastical 
and general life that prevailed during the Great Schism, the 
Dialogue has, nevertheless, a permanent value, and will soon 
become a favorite with those who study it — for it is to be 
studied, not merely to be read. The translator has prefixed a 
short but sufficiently detailed sketch of St. Catherine and her 
times, which helps greatly to a proper understanding of the 
book. He has added, too, an edifying and touchingly reverent 
account of the death of the saint by an eye-witness. He has 
done his work with so much skill and good taste, that one is 
all the more surprised that he should have fallen into the mis- 
take of giving to the chapter on Catherine's death a title which 
evokes profane and strangely foreign associations. 

Yet three other volumes of meditation, deserving of com- 
mendation, remain to be noticed. One is a new edition of the 
meditations translated from the Italian by the late Bishop Luck 
of New Zealand, chiefly for the use of religious, f The volume 
was highly commended, on its first appearance, thirty years ago, 

* The DiaUgue oftht Straphic Virgin Catherine of Siena, Translated from the Italian by 
Algar Thorold. New York : Benziger Brothers. 

t Short Meditations for Every Day in the Year, From the Italian. Translated by the 
Right Rev. John £. Luck. O.S.B. New Edition. New York : Benziger Brothers. 
VOL. LXXXVL — ^44 



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688 NEIV BOOKS [Feb., 

by Cardinal Manning, and has since become well known among 
many religious congregations. 

Another,* also from the Italian, contains twelve meditations 
on the Sacred Heart. The meditations are very suitable for 
use at public novenas or sodality meetings. 

Finally The School of Death;\ for which also we are indebted 
to an Italian author, consists of thirty meditations on death. 
Each meditation is developed with a view to inculcate some 
particular virtue or duty. The reflections are brief, pointed, 
and well arranged. 

No more timely book could appear 

DECISIONS OF, THE HOLT just now than one answering clear- 

SEE. ly, frankly, and fully, the question. 

What is the value of, and what is 
the obligation imposed by, pronouncements of the Pope and the 
various Roman congregations ? The question in more specific 
form is, with increasing frequency, addressed by members of 
the laity to their spiritual guides, who, owing to the unsatis- 
factory treatment which the subject has received in many of 
our theological text- books, are frequently embarrassed to find a 
precise, accurate answer. A professor in the Jesuit seminary 
at Hastings, England, the Rev. Lucien Choupin, S.J., has just 
published a treatise t which, for method, clearness, precision, 
and sincerity, leaves nothing to be desired. In the opening 
chapters Father Choupin deals with pronouncements which are 
infallible — the nature and scope of infallibility, its object, and 
the nature of the adhesion which the faithful must give to such 
teaching. He next proceeds to discuss the authority of suck 
pontifical encyclicals and constitutions as do not share the guar- 
antee of infallibility, and consequently cannot demand an act of 
faith, properly speaking, in their contents. Yet these, he shows, 
impose on all the faithful a weighty obligation of another kind. 
As examples of this class, he cites the encyclicals of Leo 
XIII. He next examines ^he value of congregational decisions 

•Meditations oh the Sacred Heart. From the Italian. ByC. Borgo. S.J. New York: 
Christian Press Publishing Company. 

f The School of Death, From the Italian. Translated by the Rer. George Elson, I.C. 
New York : Benziger Brothers. 

X VaUurs des Decisions Doctrinales et Disc^iinaires du Saint SiiSge, Par Lncien Chonpia. 
Fans : G. Beaucheone. 



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i9o8.] New Books 689 

doctrinal and disciplinary, with special consideration of the In* 
quisition and the Index. Here Father Choupin is conspicuously 
clear; and lays down the principles by which a good many 
difficulties, which are by no means satisfactorily treated by many 
writers, are disposed of. 

The dogmatic decrees of the Holy Office, he shows, may be 
confirmed in what is called the ordinary form. In that case 
such a decree remains an act of the congregation, and does not 
become an act of the Pope. If the decree is confirmed in forma 
spicifica^ by the Pope, it becomes an act of the Pontiff. Does 
it then become an act of the Pope speaking infallibly ? It may, 
or it may not accordingly as the Pope does, or does not, ex- 
press his will to exercise his prerogative of infallibility. The 
sense of a doctrinal decision emanating from the supreme au- 
thority, but not guaranteed by the prerogative of infallibility is 
that it is prudent and safe (sur) to regard a given proposition 
as erroneous, etc., or, conformable to Scripture, etc., in the 
present state of science. Such a decision demands an internal, 
iatellectual assent. Still it is not infallible nor irreformsble. 
The truth or falsehood of the proposition in question is not set- 
tled. If, therefore, as rarely occurs, we find solid reasons in 
favor of a condemned opiaion, or against one that has been thus 
approved, we are humbly and respectfully to present them to 
the competent authority which will duly weigh them, and, if 
necessary, may revoke its former ruling. 

Father Choupin does not offer any example of a congrega- 
tion or the supreme authority revoking an erroneous decision in 
this manner. But when, shortly afterwards, he proceeds to ex 
amine the case of Galileo— which he treats with perfect hon- 
esty, he applies the principles which he has laid down. 

Reviewing the famous case, he cites the text of the two 
condemnations — that of 1616 and that of 1633. The latter 
declares that the opinion that the sun is the centre of the uni- 
verse, and does not move from East to West, and that the earth 
moves, and is not the centre of the world, is contrary to the 
Holy Scripture. It afterwards designates this opinion as error 
and heresy. What is the value of this decree? It is useless, 
declares Father Choupin, to deny that the heliocentric theory has 
been condemned as heretical. Useless also to pretend that the 
Pope has not intervened in the act of condemnation. But he 
approved the decision only in the ordinary form; consequently 



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690 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

his infallible authority is nowise engaged in the question. The 
fact, then, is that both the tribunal of the Holy Office and that 
of the Holy Inquisition, Father Choupin says, were deceived 
in declaring that the Copemican system is false in philosophy 
and opposed to the Holy Scripture; it is neither one nor the 
other. It is true that these congregations derive their powers 
from the Pope, but even if they did act under orders from the 
Pope, his infallibility is not therefore compromised, since he 
confirmed the decisions only in the ordinary form, and not in 
forma sfecifica. If this valuable distinction had always been 
kept in view by zealous apologists, opponents of the Church 
would not have been so frequently entertained with the spectacle 
of defenders of truth trying to prove that two and two do not 
make four. 

As Father Choupin observes, in conformity with, and in de- 
fense of, his own method against possible criticism, ''the best 
tactics to defend the Church is truth. The difficulty is neither 
to be disguised nor exaggerated. We must appreciate things 
at their just value.'' In dismissing the subject he draws atten- 
tion to the fact that less than two hundred years after the 
condemnation, that is in 1822, the Holy See permitted to be 
printed in Rome books teaching that the earth moves round 
the sun; and the edition of the Index which appeared in 1835 
no longer exhibits in the list of condemned books those which 
teach the heliocentric theory. It is not to be expected that a 
Roman Congregation will explicitly admit that it has blundered. 
To do so would be the ruin of its authority. But when, with- 
in the comparatively short period of two hundred years, it re- 
verses its policy in deference to the unanswerable arguments of 
science, who can reasonably contend that Rome is the enemy 
of scientific progress ? 

Father Choupin treats in detail the Syllabus of Pius IX. 
The history of that document is traced, and each of its propo- 
sitions explained by reference to the context of the pronounce- 
ment in which it first appeared — a method of interpretation 
which, in many instances, modifies considerably the apparent 
import of the proposition as it stands detached in the Syllabus. 
The author's judgment on the doctrinal value of the Syllabus is: 

If we cannot say with certainty that the Syllabus is an ex 
cathedra definition, or that it is guaranteed in all its parts by 



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i9o8.] New Books 691 

the infallibility of the Church, it is at least, without contra- 
diction, an act of the Sovereign Pontiff, a doctrinal decision of 
the Pope, authoritative in the universal Church, and, there- 
fore, entitled to the obedience and respect of all the faithful. 

It is to be regretted that this work is in French ; an Eng- 
lish translation would, we are sure, be welcomed. 

Appreciating the educative value 
PROVERBS AND PHRASES- of a good collection of proverbs, 

''the wheat which remains after a 
whole world of talk has sifted through innumerable minds/' 
and offended by the vulgarity or indecency of much that is to 
be found in extant collections^ the author of the present com- 
pilation* offers a book of proverbs to which no exception can 
be taken on the ground of impropriety. He has brought together 
a large number from various languages. But the collection is 
by no means complete. We miss many of the most sparkling 
gems of proverbial wisdom, not alone from foreign nations but 
from the vernacular. In compensation, there is a large number 
of popular quotations from classic authors, ancient and modern, 
which can hardly be ranked as proverbs, or even as proverbial 
sayings. 

A successful candidate for the de- 
LITERARY CRITICISM. gree of Doctor in Philosophy at 

the Catholic University of Wash- 
ington, has, with happy results, taken as the subject of his 
obligatory dissertation a point in the development of the early 
English drama.f The precise scope of his study is thus de- 
fined by himself: 

With a view of ascertaining one line of family resemblance 
(in the early dramatic forms, the liturgical drama, biblical 
cycles, and moral plays) I propose to indicate in the earliest 
attempts at dramatic expression in England the playwright's 
effort to present on the stage the activity of the human 
faculties — reason, will, and perception — as seen in their moral 
bearing on the individual's life in the light of mediaeval 
Christianity. 

An academic dissertation that will satisfy an exacting exam- 

* Proverbs and Proverhial Phrases. By C. F. O'Leary. St. Louis: B. Herder, 
t Character Treatment in the Medueval Drama, By Timothy J. Crowley, C.S.C. Notre 
Dame, Indiana : Ave Maria Press. 



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692 NEW Books [Feb., 

ining faculty must avoid the picturesque, and devote itself to 
dry scientific analysis. Mr. Crowley has, however, triumphed 
over the limitations imposed upon him by the conditions which 
called forth his study, and has succeeded in presenting his sub- 
ject attractively, with a wealth of knowledge of the literature of 
and insight into his problem, so that he may be read not alone 
for instruction but also for entertainment. 

Among a collection of papers by Mr. Baldwin,* most of which 
have already appeared in The Atlantic Monthly or elsewhere, 
are four or five that are good examples of sound literary criti- 
cism of that old-fashioned type which, with good taste and a 
knowledge of life as well as of books, exhibited sound common 
sense, displaced now-a-days too frequently by crude psycbolo- 
gising, or ambitious attempts at philosophic generalization. In 
'' My Friend Copperfield " the question of whether or not Dick- 
ens is to be classed as a realist is ably discussed. The influence 
of Sterne in French literature Mr. Baldwin traces especially in 
Xavier de Maestre's delightful little story Voyage Autour de Ma 
Chambre, Essaying to determine what is the secret of John 
Bunyan's undying power, Mr. Baldwin rejects the common opmion 
that Bunyan formed his syle on the Bible. Bunyan, he holds, 
did not form his style from books at all. 

In the last analysis, Bunyan's style is as unliterary as pos- 
sible, as uninfluenced by literature, as true to the ways of 
common spoken speech — in a word, as oral as any that was 
ever put into a book. It is the speech of a genius ; but it is 
still common speech. It is common speech transmuted by an 
intense originality. As the artistic expressive instinct of 
other authors uses their literary inheritance in ways so indi- 
vidual as to show their own creative originality, so Bunyan 
used the popular oral inheritance. There is his originality. 
He used the common speech ; but he used it as it had never 
been used before. He talked like Tom, Dick, and Harry; 
but he talked as they could never dream of talking, in that he 
talked like himself. 

Are you among the aspiring throngs whose ambition it is 
to enter on the highly remunerative career of writing short 
stories for that munificent Maecenas, the popular magazine? If 
you are, then, in the language of the personal column, you will 

• Essays Out of Hours, By Charles Sears Baldwin. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 

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igoS.] New Books 693 

find it to your advantage to read Mr. Baldwin's study on that 
form. 

A volume of Shakespearian <ititicism * which, on its first ap- 
pearance in 1870, received the high approbation of Edwin Booth, 
and yet never became as widely known as it deserved, is now 
republished. It is the Review of Shakespeare's Tragedy of Ham- 
let, by the late George Henry Miles. A poet and a dramatist 
himself, with the gift of eloquence and striking originality^ 
Miles put all his powers, including his faculty for unbounded 
admiration and idealization, into this essay. For him Shake- 
speare is the prince of literature, and Hamlet is the child of 
Shakespeare's predilection upon whom he lavished all the riches 
of his genius. Miles repels with scorn the theory that Hamlet 
was a weakling : 

There is never a storm in Hamlet over which the '* noble 
and most sovereign reason'' of the young prince is not as 
*' visibly dominant as the rainbow," the crowning grace and 
glory of the scene. Richard is the mind nearest Hamlet in 
scope and power ; but it is the jubilant wickedness, the tran- 
scendent dash and courage of the last Plantaganet that rivet 
his hold on the audience ; whereas, the most salient phase of 
Hamlet's character is his superb intellectual superiority to all 
comers, even to his most dangerous assailant, madness. 

With wonderful insight into the technique of the dramatic 
art, Miles reviews all the chief scenes and speeches of the 
tragedy, and marshals, in favor of his view, argument after ar- 
gument, till they assume a cumulative force which is almost ir- 
resistible. If sometimes one suspects that he discovers meanings 
in a situation, a phrase, or an ellipsis in the elaboration of the 
action — and, in his eyes, Shakespeare is never so elliptical as 
he is here — which seem to be read into the text, nevertheless, 
whatever opposite view one may have hitherto adopted, must 
henceforth justify itself against these arguments urged with so 
much eloquence. Let us hear him urge his theme on the crucial 
point of Hamlet's seeming vacillation regarding the killing of the 

king : 

With inimitable skill, the mighty dramatist details precisely 
the forfeiture of soul from which Hamlet, except in one wild 
tumult of delirious wrath, steadily recoils. Hamlet's hands 
are tied by conscience and faith; Laertes has practically 

'^A Revuw of HawUet, By George Henry Miles. New Edition. New York: Long- 
mans, Green & Co. 



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694 iVlfffT Books [fa., 

neither ; has a talent tor blasphemy ; delights in daring the 
gods to do their worst ; would be glad to cut a throat in the 
church. Yet how pitifully dwarfed is the son ot Poloninsb^ 
side the son of the Sea-King I How he quails before the 
royal pair that in Hamlet's grasp were powerless as sparrow 
in the clutch of an eagle ! It seems as if Shakespeare M 
anticipated the demand for more dash in his hero, and pI^ 
sented the type of a fast young soldier only to exalt the 
grandeur of the too misconstrued prince. Those who point to 
Laertes' prompt action to revenge his father's death, in cob- 
trast to Hamlet's delay, forget that Hamlet's father was 
thought to have died a natural death. Hamlet had nopn^ 
to verify his suspicions; his only witness was the Ghost 1 
Beside the measured, principled retribution of Hamlet, the re- 
venge of Laertes is vulgar, cowardly, and criminal; his ana- 
themas but the coarse mouthings oi a school boy. 

Miles sees in Hamlet superb intellectual strength and a 
strong and tender conscience which guides the whole course of 
the prince's conduct. And, he argues, the secret of the tragedy? 
hold on men is that it mirrors forth the struggle between pas- 
sion and conscience, and the sharp antithesis between fate and 
providence; and throws across the action of life the deep shadow 
of the world to come. 

It is the only play of Shakespeare's in which our interest ia 
the central figure is compelled to extend itself beyond the 
grave. When Lear, Macbeth, or Othello dies, our connec- 
tion with them is dissolved ; their mortality is the onlj 
thing that concerns us. Whereas, in Hamlet, we find oni- 
selves gazing after him into that undiscovered country b^ 
whose bourne no traveller returns. . . . Hamlet is »« 
directly on trial for the loss of his soul, but the question of 
eternal loss or gain is constantly suggested. The cnticai 
awe and popular love it (the play) never fails to awaken ctf 
only be attributed to that rare but sovereign charm witfi 
which the highest human genius can sometimes invest a ^^ 
ligious mystery. There is a poetic compulsion that alter tn« 
fatal defeat of so blameless a youth, alter a career oi snch a^' 
exampled, unprovoked agony, there should be in distinct pc^* 
spective, the ineffable amends of a hereafler. 

There is more education in this book than is to be found ^ 
many specimens of what are called, through courtesy or blan 
presumption, courses of English Literature. 

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I908.] NEW BOOKS 69s 

The past decade has seen innumer- 

THE WELDING. able novels and plays dealing with 

By McLaws. the Civil War. Some of them told 

their story dramatically and well; 
others painted memorable portraits of one or two of the great 
men of the period ; there was at first a distinct purpose to lay 
bare the horrors of a slave-holding community from the North- 
ern viewpoint — and of late tfarere has been a growing tendency 
to turn the other side of the shield and portray the more gener- 
ous and beautiful characteristics of the much-suffering South. 
To review, wide-eyed and open-minded, the whole stupendous 
problem ten — twenty years ago, would have been an impossi- 
ble thing; even now it is a thoroughly difficult matter — thrice 
difficult within the artistic limitations of the novel. Yet Miss 
McLaws has attempted no less a task, and has achieved it most 
creditably.* In the life-story and love-story of David Twiggs 
Hamilton — born son of a Georgia cracker, later page in Con- 
gress and captain in the Confederate army — we are face- to- face 
with conditions before and during the war. We listen to the 
memorable debates of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun; when, be- 
fore the Congress of 1849-50, ''the national skeleton, slavery, 
threatened to break from its confines" and blacken with its 
grim shadow the whole face of the land. 

It may be noted just here that Miss McLaws writes from a 
standpoint unique and particularly favorable to her purpose — 
the standpoint of one whose head is with the North and aboli- 
tion, but whose heart is unalterably loyal to the South. With 
infinite patience and admirable tact she traces the further tang- 
ling of the threads, the futile compromises, the rising fever of 
enmity on both sides of the line. David Hamilton was no ** fire- 
eater," with the wiser and saner heads of the South he ab- 
horred secession. Yet, when the blow was struck, he stood 
ready to shed his blood for Georgia. ''That is just the point 
whereon the North and the South fail to understand each other," 
he writes to his Northern sweetheart. " We, the people of the 
South, are citizens of our States, the Northern people are citi- 
zens of the Union." To-day we see how this failure to under- 
stand brought about the inevitable dissolution ; and how, in the 
wisdom of God, the Nation was welded from the ruins of the 
Union. 

• The Welding, By Lafayette McLaws. Boston : Little, Brown & Co. 



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696 New Books [Feb. 

The more personal side of the narrative is constantl7 inter- 
esting, and we heartily congratulate Miss McLaws on her work. 

The library of ascetical and mystical literature * which is beings 
published by Herder, of St. Louis, is one which we recom- 
mend most enthusiastically and earnestly to priests. The vol- 
umes, from a material point of view, are tastefully and durably 
bound in leather; the paper is of the best; the type clear and 
the printing well-done. The publishers have spared neither 
time nor money in the production of the volumes, and surely 
they merit the financial support of those in whose interests the 
work is done. Moreover, the price is surprisingly low, when one 
considers the workmanship and the fact that the volumes are 
printed entirely in Latin. 

The matter of the books before us show that the library 
will embrace, as Cardinal Fischer in his preface states, the most 
valuable contributions to spiritual literature, with which every 
priest ought to be familiar. And there is special fruit, as the 
Cardinal continues, to be gained by reading these works in the 
Latin tongue. 

The two volumes already issued include the MemoriaU ViUB 
SacerdotaliSf by Claudius Arvisenet; the classical treatise De 
Sacrificio Misses^ by Cardinal Bona; and the Manuale Vitm 
Spiritualis, by Blosius. The editor of the series. Father Lehm- 
kuhl, S.J., promises to publish in subsequent volumes treatises 
of St. Francis de Sales ; Ven. de Ponte ; St. Thomas Aquinas ; 
St. Theresa; and many others. 

Our thanks are due to the publishers for putting within our 
reach works of such special value, and again we recommend 
them heartily to every priest. 

A collection of familiar Irish songs and airs is presented in 
Irish Songs \ by N. Clifford Page, who edited the songs and 
arranged the piano accompaniment. The airs are both old and 
new; and modern Irish songs are included. 

* Biiliothtca AscetUa MysHca. Series OpenimSelectorum quae consilio Card. Fischer 
denuo edenda curavit A. Lehmkuhl S.J. Memoriale VUa Sacerdotalis, Auctore C. Arvi- 
senet. De SacfiJUio Misset, Auctore Cardinal Bona. Manuale Vit€B S^ritucUis, continens 
L. Blosii Opera Selecta. St. Louis : B. Herder. 

\ Irish SoM^s. By N. Clifford Page. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company. 



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jforeign periobicals. 

The Tablet (23 Nov.): Francis Thompson is said to have been 
a '' Catholic poet in a sense so complete and significant 

as the student of his life may find to be unique.'* 

The Tablet is pleased to note the ''noble and dignified" 
attitude assumed by The Dublin Review at this trying 

time. Another authoritative article from the Osserva^ 

tore Romano is quoted as saying that ** even though there 
might be in Newman's works some pages or sentences 
which were not absolutely in conformity with the mind 
of the Encyclical itself, it is altogether absurd to try to 
argue from this that Newman personally is condemned as 
a Modernist." 

(30 Nov.) : The writer of the Literary Notes speaks in- 
cidentally of the Catholic Encyclopedia as a work which 
may haply help to unite the scattered forces of Catholi- 
cism. By virtue of the latest Motu Proprio the Bibli- 
cal Commission now ranks as a new Roman Congregation. 
(7 Dec.) : Quotes address delivered by Abb^ Gaudeau to 
the Catholic Institute of Paris. He affirms that the re- 
cent Encyclical must be considered an infallible docu- 
ment. Gratification is expressed over the results of 

the Roman examinations ; English- speaking students made 

an unprecedented record. The Roman correspondent 

states also that the elevation of Mgr. Kennedy to the hier- 
archy is a well-merited recognition of his zeal in raising 
funds for the American College. The College of Car- 
dinals has received two new members, both Italians, Mgr. 

Gasparri and Mgr. de Lai. Newman, as a poet, is 

contrasted with the late Francis Thompson; the Cardi- 
nal is said to be the seer of faith; Thompson the singer 
of contrition. 

(14 Dec): Rev. H. C. Castle, C.SS.R., contributes a sup- 
plementary study to Wiseman on the Sixth Chapter of 

St. John. ^The first steps in the beatification of Pius 

IX. have been taken at Rome. The processes of two 
other well-known servants of God have also been ad- 
vanced. Mother Barat and Ven. Mother Postel. The 
Silver Jubilee of Cardinal Rampolla's episcopal consecra- 
tion was celebrated recently. The Bishop of Newport's 

Advent Pastoral is given in full. It is an explanation of 

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698 Foreign Periodicals [Feb., 

the Encyclical, ''Pascendi Gregis." All Catholics are 
urged to study their religion, for, the Bishop says, "It 
is a rare thing to find Catholics in these days who have 
any grasp of the length and breadth of their own re- 
ligion." 

(21 Dec): The cruise of the American fleet to the Pa- 
cific cannot fail to prove a magnificent object-lesson to 
the world of the strength and enterprise of the Ameri- 
can Republic. The death of the Very Rev, Wm. 

Canon Greaney is noted. 

The Month (Dec): Rev. Sydney F. Smith's article, entitled 
"The Revision of the Vulgate," gives a brief history of 
the several revisions of the Vulgate and an exposition of 
the principles on which the new revision will be carried 
out. It discredits the assertion of Rev. H. J. White, in 
his article on the Vulgate in Hasting* s Bible Diciionary^ 
that Papal authorization for the revision of the Vulgate 
is intended to prevent private investigation for further 
improvement of the text. The article enumerates the 
different sources from which the material for the revision 
is to be drawn. It also mentions the fact, lately an- 
nounced, that Abbot Gasquet is President of the "Re- 
visory Committee." " A Comparative Study of Blessed 

Edmund Campion and Cardinal Newman," by Rev. Tho- 
mas Wright, draws attention to characteristic features 
common to both lives. Thomas Dale, in *' Latent Ca- 
tholicism in Certain Oxford Writers," claims that the 
writings of Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, and Browning have 
been most influential in leading the thinking element of 

Protestantism into the Catholic Church. " The Blessed 

Sacrament and the Holy Grail," by Rev. Herbert Thurs- 
ton, calls attention to the apparent impetus given to the 
devotion to the Blessed Sacrament as a result of the 
legend of the Holy Grail. 

The Expository Times (Dec.) : Prof. Sayce begins a new presen- 
tation of the archaeology of the Book of Genesis. 
F. W. Lewis protests against what he calls the critical 
habit of comparing St. John's Gospel with the Synoptics, 
to the disparagement of the former. He asks whether 
any one has as yet shown that the portrait of Christ 
given by the first three Gospels is complete, and main- 
tains that to make Mark a standard whereby to judge 

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I908.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 699 

the Gospel of John is a begging of the question. 

Gregory's Canon and Text of the New Testament is re- 
viewed by Rev. James Moffatt, who finds in it very much 
of real merit and very little deserving of adverse criti- 
cism. The work is not written exclusively for scholars, 
nor burdened with quotations in foreign languages. 

International Journal of Ethics (Jan.): The Moral Development 
of the Native Races in South Africa, by Ramsden Balm- 
forth, states that the theological and moral concepts of 
a civilized people are apt to be meaningless to a race 
yet undeveloped, and consequently that successful mis- 
sionary propaganda demands a concomitant educational 

propaganda. John A. Ryan discusses the morality of 

Stock Watering. Stock Watering is typical of almost all 
the improper practices of corporations. It is typical, be- 
cause it is essentially an attempt to get excessive and 
unjust profits on capital. It has its origin in the greed 
that is not satisfied with reasonable returns. To this 
desire for excessive profits, is due all that is formidable 
or worth considering in the current opposition to cor- 
porations. Chester Holcombe, compares Oriental Ethics 

with Western Systems. Ira W. Howerth writes on 

the Social Ideal. 

Le Correspondant (25 Nov.) : An anonymous contributor describes 

the Sinn Fein agitation. M. Leblond is of the opinion 

that the success of France's colonial policy in North Af- 
rica depends almost entirely upon the quality of educa- 
tion given the natives. For this reason he contends 
that it is the duty of the French government to give 
every encouragement to the missionaries who are the 
natural educators.— —M. Enlart's Manual of French Ar^ 
chceology is criticised most favorably by Louis de Som- 
merard. 

(10 Dec.) : The Church is not the enemy of science, con- 
cludes Mgr. Mignot. She does not accept every un- 
fledged hypothesis ; but she has never refused to recog- 
nize the attested discoveries of scientists. An account 

of the life and works of Albert Sorel, the eminent dip- 
lomatic and political historian, is contributed by M. de 
Laborie. The necessity of instituting a sweeping re- 
form in the management of European libraries is the 



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700 Foreign Periodicals [Feb., 

theme of an article by A. Britsch. Fenelon Giboa 

criticises the recent report on the liquidation of the sap- 
pressed congregations, made to the President of France. 
Its statements here and there are false, and, on the whole, 
the report is inaccurate. 

£tudis (5 Dec.) : M. de la Taille has a picturesque critiqae of 
Modernism in his lecture upon the recent EncyclicaL 
He rakes the philosophy of the Modernists with classi- 
cal allusion, and defends the Pope's order for a return 
to St. Thomas' philosophy, by pointing to the present 

revival of Gothic architecture. M. Sortais has a paper 

on Michael Angelo and the history of the artist's tur- 
bulent relations with Pope Julius II. M. Paul Dudon 

has an article on the problem of recruiting the French 

clergy. 

(20 Dec.) : A paper on the philosophical remains of the 

late poet. Sully Prudhomme, is the first in this issue. 

The article on Michael Angelo is concluded Most 

interesting to Americans is the review by M. d'Ales of 
the new Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. I. The writer finds 
no words strong enough to express his appreciation of 
the American enthusiasm which brought forward so mon- 
umental a work. 

Annates de Philosaphie Chritienne (Dec.) : L. Leleu continues and 
concludes his article on *' Mysticism and its Relations with 
Ontology."— -A. Godard gives a lively, running sketch of 

the history of the popes at Avignon. C. Huit begins 

a dissertation upon Platonism in France in the eighteenth 

century. In the course of a review of a work on the 

early life of Lamennais, by A. Feug^re, Maurice Masson 
writes some sympathetic pages on the psychological and 
temperamental side of the personality of the ever- to-be- 
pitied Lamennais. M. Masson thinks that a remembrance 
of Lamennais' early ill- health, his characteristic melan- 
choly of soul, and his unsatisfied longings for personal af- 
fection is indispensable to an understanding of his later re- 
bellion.^— -C. Dessoulavy reviews Mr. Campbell's volume 
on The New Theology with more tenderness than we have 
seen it treated by any other opponent. He attributes the 
wide notoriety of the book largely to the rarity of the 
spectacle of a synthesis of liberal theology proceeding from 

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igoS.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 701 

a minister of the Gospel, and he seems to indicate a sus- 
picion that Mr. Campbell, with deliberate choice, adopted 
the method of liberalizing theology in order to hold a con- 
gregation that would have melted away from him had he 

preached orthodoxy. G. Del tour reviews M. Chauvin's 

work on The Ideas of M. Loisy on the Fourth Gospel. He 
takes M. Chauvin severely to task for his method and his 
bias. The only proper way to answer M. Loisy is, first to 
penetrate into his mind, and grasp the ensemble of his ex- 
egesis. It is futile to attempt to refute his conclusions 
by aligning against them a motley throng of opinions 
from various scholars. 

Revue du Clerge Franfais (i Dec): The editor rejoices over 
the success of the past twelve years of the Revue^ and 

its prospect for the future. M. Lepin examines, in 

detail, the narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus, witk 
a view to proving that Loisy's thoroughly allegorical in- 
terpretation is generally forced and frequently fanciful. 

L. Maisonneuve concludes his study of the theory 

of miracles, examining Le Roy's ideas on their constitu- 
tion and apologetic value. He finds that Le Roy's views 
on this matter do such violence to tradition and to phi- 
losophy that they are untenable. Le Roy's errors spring 
from his Hegelian idealism. M. Maisonneuve thinks it 
unfortunate that Catholic thinkers should try to reconcile 
dogma with the '' dialectics, the autonomies, and the cat- 
egories" of Kant, which alone made possible the ''de- 
lirium" of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. ^J. Turmel 

criticises rather sharply the work of O. Blank on the 
teaching of St. Augustine on the Holy Eucharist. Tur- 
mel evidently thinks that the traditional explanations of 
St. Augustine's apparent unbelief in the Real Presence, 
are disingenuous, if not dishonest. 

Stimmen aus Maria- Laach (28 Nov.): A. Baumgartner. S.J., 
contributes an article on the poet Joseph von Eichen- 
dorff apropos of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. 
He discusses his works and shows his influence in the 

development of Catholic literature in Germany. J. 

Bessmer, S.J. finishes his treatise on ''Docility of Faith." 
H. A. Krose, S.J., discusses the results of the Ger- 
man census of 1905 with regard to religious confession. 



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702 Foreign Periodicals [Feb., 

While the Catholic population, in proportion to the Frot- 
estant, had increased very little since the founding of 
the empire, in the years 1900-1905 the Catholic propor- 
tion noticeably increased ; but this was due largely to im- 
migrants from Russia, Hungary, and Italy. Unfortu- 
nately many of these immigrants, who settled chiefly in 
Protestant parts, are being lost to the Church through 
zealous Protestant propaganda. Thus in the little king- 
dom of Saxony alone, since 1900, not less than 5,772 

Catholics have been induced to apostatize. Chr. Fesch, 

S.J., in " The Conclusion of the Schell Affair," points 
out in what doctrines Schell's errors lay, and how these 
are to be avoided. 

(i ;Jan.): H. J. Cladder, SJ., speaks of the Encyclical 
'' Pascendi " and Modernism, showing that the letter of 
the Pope does not impede the progress of knowledge, 
but rather the false philosophy on which Modernism is 

based. St. Beissel, S.J., in an article, *' Modern Art 

in Catholic Churches," illustrates the favorable attitude 
always taken by the Church towards new forms in art 

and style corresponding to the taste of the ages. ^V. 

Cathrein, S.J., in a paper on '' Protection of Animals and 
Christian Obligation," answers accusations made by Prot- 
estant ''Societies for preventing cruelty to animals." 

J. Bessmer, S.J., has an article, "The word of God," in 
which he discusses the errors and methods of the Modern- 
ists, and especially of Loisy. 
Revue Pratique d^ Apologitique (i Dec): In the opening article 
M. Lebreton discusses [the study of Christian origins. 
Against those who minimize the value, or fear the re- 
sults, of these historical inquiries, he maintains the ne- 
cessity and helpfulness of a thoroughly scientific investi- 
gation of the concrete facts on which Christianity rests. 
In the second part of the essay he deals with the ob- 
jection that we Catholics cannot study these questions 
calmly and impartially, because our deepest interests are 
too much bound up with their answers, and also be- 
cause our answer to every important question is deter- 
mined in advance. He grants that the orders issued by 
Church authorities sometimes call for sacrifices on the 
part of scholars, but he maintains that those sacrifices 



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I908.J FOREIGN PERIODICALS 703 

are, in the long run, beneficial. M. Touyard gives a 

brief sketch of the times in which Amos lived, dwelling 
particularly on the political, social, and religious condi- 
tion of Israel. The second part of his article is a study 
of the prophet himself. H. Les^tre treats of the his- 
toricity of Samson and his adventures. 
(15 Dec): M. Guibert develops an argument for the ex- 
istence of .God from the scientific facts that the usable 

, energy of the world is constantly decreasing, and that 

life has a beginning. M. Touyard concludes his study 

of the prophet Amos by a summary analysis of his teach- 
ing. ^A third article consists of a discourse delivered 

by Cardinal Mercier, at the University of Louvain, on 
the recent Encyclical and Philosophy. 
La Civilth Cattolica (7 Dec): Contains the Latin and Italian 
text of the " Motu Proprio " of Pius X., upon the de- 
cisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, giving the 
censures and punishments decreed against those who dis- 
obey the prescriptions against the errors of the Modern- 
ists. A sketch of St. John Chrysostom viewed from 

1907 — the fifteenth centennial of his death — and in the 
light of the saint's three great characteristics — his love 

^ of solitude, his hatred of dignity, and his wonderful 

^ preaching. " Modernistic Philosophy," an examination 

of the philosophy of the Modernists, in which the writer 
states that '' to Modernism — except by way of misnomer 
— is wrongly attributed the name of Philosophy or the 

' epithet Philosophic." 

(21 Dec): "The War Upon the Catechism" is an at- 
tack upon the " Masonic- Radical- Socialistic " movement 
in Italy to exclude the Catechism from the lay schools. 

"Nietzsche and Immorality," an examination of 

Nietzsche's Philosophy with reference to the "Study of 
the Moral Problem" treated in previous issues. 
Studi Religiosi (Sept.-Dec) : Professor Minocchi, the editor, 
announces the suspension of his magazine with this is- 
sue. Running through the seven years of its life, he de- 
scribes its aims, struggles, and the causes which have 
now induced him to withdraw it from the field. It has 
stood for progress in religious science, but with the ad- 

■' vent of the Encyclical "Pascendi," finding himself at a 

VOL. LxxxYi.— 45 ^ 

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704 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb. 

loss to distinguish between what is modern and what is 
''modernistic/' he sees no alternative but dignified re- 
tirement.— The present crisis of Catholicism in Ger- 
many is described — the history of the Schell affair; the 
Congress of Wurzburg; the crisis proper. 

Razon y Fe (Dec.) : The complete Latin text of the Encyclical 
''Pascendi" is followed by an explanatory article from 

the pen of L. Murillo. ^J. M. Aicardo writes of the 

religious poetry of Lope de Vega. Ruiz Amado con- 
cludes his discussion of the needs and reformation of the 

Spanish educational system. Pablo Pastells gives a few 

pages from the history of the sixteenth century struggle 
between the Spaniards and Portuguese over the Philip- 
pines. Pablo Hurnandez, in an article about the ex- 
pulsion of the Jesuits from the Paraguayan Missions, 
clears the Portuguese minister, Carvalho, of the charge 
that he fathered the opposition to the Jesuits.— —Julio 
Furgds describes two relics of Moorish art discovered at 
a comparatively recent date — one the partly decipher- 
able epitaph of some distinguished Moor; the other a 
handsome metallic vase. 

Theologisch Practische Quartalschrift (Jan.): Rev. Albert Weis, 
O.P., contributes the first of a series of articles on ''The 
Christian Basis." It is absurd to broaden the applica- 
tion of this term so as to make it incompatible with the 
idea of a church organization or system of doctrine, as 
many wish to do. "Christianity really exists only in 
the form of the Church and was never realized in any 

other way." Rev. Georg Wagnleithner presents for 

catechists an outline of lessons from the catechism, with 
examples from the Holy Scriptures, for inculcating in 

the youth a love of purity. Dr. Vinzcnz Hartl writes 

of the present-day exegetical questions in their relation 
to popular education. He sketches these questions briefly, 
with the solutions offered by Von Hummelauer. The 
present questions, compared with those which agitated 

men's minds in the past, are* far less weighty. B. 

Eyckmans, S.J., writes of an institution founded by the 
Jesuits in France and Belgium for the purpose of giving 
to workingmen a chance to make a short spiritual retreat 
under intelligent direction. 



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Current Events* 



The military system of France is 
France. not so popular as the advocates of 

efficiency would wish. In oppo- 
sition to the advice of the highest officers, and against the ur- 
gent recommendation of the Minister for War, the Chamber of 
Deputies has voted for the reduction of the period of military 
service for reservists. The motive of the members of the As- 
sembly was the desire to please their constituents ; but the fact 
that a shortening of the term of service will please them is 
significant. 

The sentence passed upon M. Herv^, that he should be im« 
prisoned for a year and pay a fine, shows, however, that attacks 
upon the army are not to be made with impunity. Attacks 
upon religion may be made and no voice is raised in protest. 
The army and its discipline, however, are too sacred for a word 
to be said against them. Without discipline where would be the 
army ? and without the army where would the country be ? 
Safety still depends upon force. That this should be the case 
proves how little progress has yet been made. 

M. Herv^ is not the only one who has made attacks upon 

the army. He is an outsider; within its ranks the same spirit 

has shown itself. In various regiments stationed in the south 

a number of soldiers manifested an anti-militarist spirit, shout- 

' ing, ''A bas Tarm^e,'' they refused to obey and sang, after 

arrest, anti-militarist songs. They were sentenced to long terms 

of imprisonment. How widespread this spirit is no one knows. 

Even in the schools it has made its appearance. The father 

^ of a boy has been allowed damages on account of the unpa- 

( triotic teaching given by a teacher who was a follower of M. 

i HeTv6. 

( It took six weeks to pass through the House of Deputies 

^ the Briand Bill for the devolution of Church property. The 
supporters of the Bill declared that its opponents acted in an 
f obstructive manner; but the fact is that the bill is of such a 
i confiscatory character that among even the Radical Republi- 
; cans it is looked upon as dangerous to the rights of property ; 
i and even their hatred of the Church could not persuade them 

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7o6 Current Events [Feb., 

to support it. Consequently, the majority in its favor was only 
177. The Senate has not yet passed judgment upon it. 

Very little is heard of the promised social reforms which 
were so much to the front at the opening of Parliament The 
imposition of an income tax, which formed an important part 
of this legislation, has proved so unpopular that other means 
of raising money have been adopted. 

The death of the Minister of Justice has led to the trans- 
ference of that Portfolio to M. Briand. The latter, however, 
while relinquishing the headship of the ministry of Education, 
still retains that of Worship — although, as the state connection 
with Worship has ceased, it is hard to see what room there is 
for such a ministry. 

What was hailed by some writers 
Germany. in the newspapers as the dawning 

of a new era of ministerial respon- 
sibility to Parliament has proved merely one of the political 
expsdieats rendered necessary by the continental system, which 
makes a minister depend upon the co-operation of a number 
of small parties. As a rule, these parties approximate some- 
what closely to each other in their aims and principles; but 
Prince Billow's bloc is made up of extremists, who in internal 
affairs have almost nothing in common. The main rallying points 
are the external policy and a common hostility to the Catholic 
Centre and to the Social Democrats. The smothered hostility of 
certain spokesmen of the National Liberal party, one of the 
constituent elements of the bloc^ having burst forth in outspoken 
criticism, Prince Biilow gave a clear intimation that he would 
resign if they did not come into line. This they have done 
after some little hesitation. All that has been recognized is 
the expediency for co-operation. Prince Btilow no more looks 
upon himself as responsible to the Parliament now than be- 
fore. This step forward has still to be taken, nor is there any 
immediate prospect of its being taken. 

The Prince's hope for the success of his government, as he 
himself declared, is in being able to settle certain practical ques- 
tions by the mutual co-operation of parties opposed to one 
another in their principles. These principles they are not to be 
called upon to abandon. The Conservatives may remain Con- 
servatives, but must lay aside reaction — at all events for the pres- 
ent. Liberals must hold in check the excrescences which find 

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i9o8.] Current Events 707 

favor in the streets. The doctrinaire spirit must be laid aside ; 
self-renunciation practised; party egoism curbed. He looked 
forward to the combination of the old Prussian Conservative 
energy and discipline with the broad-minded Liberalism of the 
German spirit While there would remain uplifted heads in 
Germany yet they would be anointed with a goodly drop of 
democratic oil. 

The practical questions upon which Prince Btilow hopes for 
agreement include proposals for the amendment of the laws of 
public meeting. Under the present law the police officeri the 
representative of the government, sits by the side of the chair- 
man of the meeting ; and if anything is said which meets with 
his august disapprobation, by the simple expedient of putting 
on his helmet the meeting is dissolved. The new proposals rec- 
ognize the fact that all men, and not merely officials, are, ac- 
cording to the scholastic definition, rational animals, and should 
therefore be treated as such. It will not, if these proposals 
become law, be enough for the officer to put on his helmet, but 
he will have to open his mouth and give his reasons before 
the meeting is dissolved. But, as he remains the sole judge 
as to the goodness of these reasons, not much is gained. No 
step forward, however, is to be despised. While this relaxation 
of arbitrary action will please the Liberal element in the bloc^ 
the Conservative element is to be conciliated by the provision 
that only the German language is to be spoken at public meet- 
ings. This is looked upon as an outrage by the Poles, by the 
Alsatians and Lorrainers, and by the Danes on the borderland, 
and has caused a great outcry. 

Other proposals of the government include a mitigation of 
the existing savage and demoralizing law of lese majestiy which 
imposes heavy penalties upon all who make remarks which are 
looked upon as derogatory to the Emperor or any member of 
his family, and encourages the odious practice of espionage. 
The Bourse laws which prohibit, and, in our opinion, rightly 
prohibit, certain practices of which Wall Street is fond, are to 
be altered in deference to the desire of dealers in stocks and 
shares. Certain social ameliorations are also promised. The 
main preoccupation of the government is to find the means of 
raising more money. The deficit of the past year and the 
plans for the increase of the fleet make this an urgent necessity, 
while the difficulty is so great that no satisfactory solution of 

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7o8 Current Events [Feb., 

the problem has yet been found. The misguided persons who 
have apprehensions of the foreign policy of Germany feel some 
little consolation from this fact. 

The policy of Germanization of the alien races, which is the 
motive for allowing no other language except German to be 
spoken at public meetings, finds a more emphatic expression in 
the bill which has been laid before the Prussian Diet to expro- 
priate against their will, and to deprive of their lands, the Poles 
in Prussian Poland. This proposal has excited great resent- 
ment, not only among the unfortunate inhabitants of Posen, but 
also among the members of the same nationality in the Austrian 
Empire. These constitute in the Austrian Reichsrath a not 
uninfluential body, and their indignation was so great at what 
they compared to a mediaeval plundering raid, that they set 
aside all the rules and regulations of international comity which 
forbids the interference of one nation's parliament in the affairs 
of any other country. A solemn protest was made against 
the proposed expropriation, in which not only Poles took part 
but the other branches of the Slavs— Czechs and Slovenes, 
Serbs and Croatians, Old Ruthenes and Slav Social Democrats. 
The discussion was ruled to be out of order; but, as the Slavs 
constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of Aus- 
tria, the indignation which is felt by so many may have an ef- 
fect upon the foreign policy of Austria and lead to a still fur- 
ther weakening of the Triple Alliance. 

With reference to France and Morocco Prince Btilow has in 
express terms recognized that the French government had no 
choice but to take the measures which it has taken in self-de- 
fence, and that no infringement had been made of the Act of 
Algeciras. On their part the declarations of the Prince are 
recognized by the French Press generally as satisfactory; but 
there are not wanting, however, some who express the desire 
that the deeds of the Germans should be brought into fuller 
harmony with these declarations of their Chancellor, and attri- 
bute the troubles which have arisen in Morocco to the belief 
entertained by the Sultan that the Powers were divided — a be- 
lief based upon the action of certain German agents. 

The German Emperor's visit to England and the warm wel- 
come which he received from not only the Court but the peo- 
ple have, in the opinion of the Chancellor, dissipated the cloud 
of misunderstanding which, for so long a time, has thrown its 

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i9o8.] Current Events 709 

shadow over the relations between the two countries. The re- 
sult of this visit and of the other visits which have been made, 
and of the agreements which have been entered into, afford 
strong grounds for the hope that peace is well secured for an 
indefinite period. There are always possibilities of war — but 
there is no probability of a European war in the near future. 

The enlargement of the ship- building programme, of which 
mention was made last month, has by no means satisfied the 
wishes of the German Navy League. It has published an ap- 
peal for a still greater increase, an appeal which has met with 
the condemnation not merely of members of the Centre, but 
also of the Conservative Right. A still more important blow 
has been dealt to the League in consequence of the election of 
General Keim to the office of President. This election has led 
to the resignation of the head of the Bavarian branch, the heir 
to the throne, Prince Rupert. Large numbers of Bavarians wh« 
were members of the League have followed the Prince's exam- 
ple. In Baden also there have been numerous secessions with 
the approval, it is said, of the Grand Duke. It was General 
Keim, it may be remembered, who took, in the last general 
election, aggressive action against the Catholic Centre and tried 
to raise the furor Protestanticus, Numerous secessions were 
threatened at the time, but a compromise was made by which 
these secessions were averted. The election of the offending 
general has re-opened the whole question. It is rumored that 
the Emperor himself is against the general. If this should be 
the case his retirement might take place, and the dissolution of 
the League be avoided. The influence which the Navy League 
possesses is all against the maintenance of peace ; for this rea- 
son no great regret can be felt that this influence should suffer 
diminution. In the opinion of some of the North Germans, too, 
the Navy League has gradually become pernicious, inasmuch 
as it incites the North and the South against each other, and 
persistently fosters mistrust abroad. Its agitation was the source 
of the constant irritation which threatened to put Germany at 
enmity with the whole world. 

The second trial of Herr Harden has resulted in the rever- 
sal of the judgment of the lower Court. The evidence given at 
the second trial seems to have' made it certain that Herr Har- 
den was mistaken both in regard to the practices of the ac- 
cused and of the existence of a Camarilla. 



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710 CURRENT EVENTS [Feb., 

In several important respects mat- 
Aiistria-Himgary. ters have gone well with the Dual 

Monarchy. The Treaty which 
regulates the commercial relations between Austria and Hungary, 
which, as has been already mentioned, has been concluded be- 
tween the two governments, has now received the necessary 
sanction of the two Parliaments, and this long-standing subject 
of contention will be no longer a matter of controversy. That 
Hungary should have acquiesced in an arrangement by which 
an increased quota is paid by her towards the common ex- 
penses, and which perpetuates the dual system against which 
the Independence Party now ruling has for so long set itself, 
seems to indicate a return to saner and more moderate counsels. 
The adoption of this wiser course towards Austria may, how- 
ever, be due to the results of the attitude which the Magyars 
have taken towards the Croats and the other non-Magyar races. 
It was only by a manoeuvre that the bill ratifying the treaty was 
got through the Hungarian House. The obstructive tactics 
adopted by the Croats rendered a full discussion impossible. 
The Croats have been led to take this course on account of 
the oppressive measures to which they have been subjected — 
measures which they claim are a breach of the compact under 
which, since 1868, the relations between the two nationalities 
have been regulated. The Hungarian Premier has declared his 
intention of crushing all opposition, and has threatened to dis- 
solve the Croatian Diet over and over again until he succeeds. 
Accordingly, when the Diet met in the middle of December, 
before it could proceed to business, the Ban, amidst cries of 
'' Down with the Magyar lackey," read a Royal Rescript dis- 
solving the Diet. Thus a new conflict has been inaugurated. 
Meanwhile the Universal Suffrage Bill, to introduce which the 
present Hungarian Ministry was formed, is still withheld. The 
fact is, the Magyars are more intent upon securing and main- 
taining their own supremacy than upon anything else; and yet 
they desire to be looked upon by the world as the choice de- 
fenders of liberal institutions, and are deeply grieved when, in 
the light of their own actions, their claim is questioned. 

Nationalist passions are also rife in the Austrian Parliament. 
Obstruction is regarded as a legitimate way of proceeding and 
has been practised by a group of Ruthenians. Balked by aa 
ingenious ruling of the President, the indignation of one •f 



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i9o8.] Current EVENTS 711 

their number was so great that, having broken his desk in two, 
he hurled half of it at the head of the offensive ruler. Sad to 
say the missile grazed the skull of one friend and struck the 
temple of another, missing the President altogether. The session 
of course was closed, and great shame expressed that such a 
scene should have been possible in an Assembly which was the 
first to be elected by universal franchise. 

In view of these quarrels between the various races, which 
have lived for so long side by side under the same ruler and 
yet in constant conflict, the question cannot help arising why 
no force strong enough to bring about unity has been found. 
And when this country's (America's) unity is considered — a 
country so much larger in extent and so much greater in popu- 
lation, with a larger variety of races within its bounds — a further 
question arises: What is the cause which has produced a more 
perfect union in the one case than in the other. 

The Third Duma still exists, and 

Russia. as it has proved itself amenable 

to the government's control there 

seems to be no immediate prospect of its dissolution. The 

supporters of the government have had the distinguished honor 

of being invited by M. Stolypin to a reception as a token of 

mutual confidence and in recognition of the fact that both he 

and they were the creatures of the autocrat, from whom all 

authority flowed, and upon whom their existence depended. 

^ These principles seem to be accepted by the majority. This is 

the way constitutional government is understood in Russia. 

» There is, however, an opposition which does not accept these 

principles, but this opposition is, in the eye of the government, 

( made up of revolutionists. 

' Acquiescent as is the Duma^ it has not been without its 

I scenes. One of the members, who by a mere lapsus lingua 
compared M. Stolypin's neck- tie to the Mouravie£f collar, mean- 
ing thereby to indicate an analogy in their respective methods 
of combating revolutionary excesses, was suspended for the 
maximum number of sittings. The rage of the Right was so 
1 great as to make them storm the rostrum. Comparisons are 

I drawn in the press between the rowdyism shown by the Ex- 

I treme Right and the orderly behavior of the Extreme Left. 

I The trial of the ex-Deputies who signed the Viborg mani- 



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712 Current Events [Feb., 

festo may, perhaps, have had a moderating influence upon the 
members of the existing Duma. Sic transit gloria mundi. The 
autocrat's power, it is evident, is not yet abolished. Although 
seventeen months had elapsed since the meeting at Viborg, 157 
members of the first Duma were arraigned for inciting the popu- 
lation of Russia to disobedience and resistance to the law. The 
accused declared that they had acted in obedience to their 
solemn duty to the nation, as a protest against the sudden 
brutal dissolution of the Duma. With the exception of two, 
all the accused were convicted and sentenced to three months* 
imprisonment and the loss of all political rights. 

The trial of the ex- members of the first Duma is only one 
of many trials which have been taking place in Russia. Muti- 
neers at Vladivostock, inciters of pogroms at Kie£f, members of 
the second Duma accused of being implicated in a plot against 
the Tsar, the General commanding at Port Arthur, have all 
been brought to the Bar. 

The bureaucrats have arrived at the conclusion that the revo- 
lution is at an end. The present rigime^ with its subservient 
Duma, is to be consolidated by the aid of the army and the 
police. Hopes are entertained that the peasants have given up 
any aspirations after self-government. So bright is the pros- 
pect in bureaucratic eyes, that steps in a backward direction, 
of a still more absolute character, have been taken ; and it is 
feared that still more will be taken. The school organization, 
which was formed in Poland immediately after the October 
manifesto for the purpose of enabling Polish children to receive 
instruction in their own language, has been dissolved by the 
Governor- General of Warsaw. This despotic act was unpro- 
voked. During the two years it has been in existence 30,ooo 
children have been educated at the schools of the organization, 
and it had been the means of fostering a feeling of confidence 
and hope of just treatment. These hopes are now dashed t% 
the ground. 

Finland also is again in dread of an assault upon her re- 
cently restored rights. Rumors have been about that the pres- 
ent governor is to be recalled, on account of the too great re- 
gard which he has had for these rights. So far, however, noth- 
ing more has been done than the appointment of an aider and 
abettor of the notorious Bobrikoff as Deputy Governor- General. 
It is said that under pretext of manoeuvres an army corps is 

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I908.] CURRENT EVENTS 713 

to be sent into the Duchy. And so the Finns are, with good 
reason, becoming anxious. 

On the field of politics many surprising changes take place. 
That Russia and England should join their diplomatic forces, 
and that this combination should be in support of a constitu- 
tional rigime in Persia, in opposition to its hitherto absolute 
ruler, is perhaps as remarkable an event as has ever taken place. 
But this is what the last few weeks have witnessed. For some 
little time a constitutional government has been established; 
the Shah, however, does not find it at all to his tastes. It 
limits him in many ways, particularly in his pleasures, which 
are of such a character as would not bear description. Accord- 
ingly, he attempted a coup d*etat^ but, unfortunately for him, he 
has no army, and could only array in support of his efforts a 
number of hooligans and roughs. Strange to say the love of 
liberty has permeated through and through the inhabitants of 
Persia, and all the force of the country is on their side. The 
Shah, however, seems to have entertained hopes of Russian sup- 
port. Perhaps in former days he would have received it. But, 
in consequence of the recent agreement with Great Britain, the 
two countries were bound to act in unison, and their common 
action was in support of the now-established constitutional r/- 
gime. Hence the efforts of the Shah proved futile, and Persia 
still possesses a constitution. 



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THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 

WHAT is the outlook for religious journalism ? In answer to this question 
the Sunday 'School Times publishes the following summary, indicating 
the importance of the religious paper in the past and what it is likely to he 
in the future : 

Twenty years ago there were 581 religious periodicals in the United 
States; this year (1907) there are 804 ; 36 of the 804 have an average circu- 
lation of 100,000 or over. Of this 36, it is possible to trace, from published 
reports in N. W. Ayer & Son's American Newspaper Annual^ the varying 
circulations of 36 during the last few years. The total number of religious 
papers to-day is almost half as large again as it was twenty years ago. The 
100,000 class to-day is nine times as large as it was twenty years ago. The 
largest circulation to-day is seven times as large as the largest of twenty 
years ago. These facts do not look as though the field of the religions pa- 
per had disappeared yet. But the total number of religious papers has been 
slightly decreasing in the last five years. 

We can set it down that religious papers are not in the business of enter- 
tainment, though many legitimate secular papers are. The religious paper 
can make little appeal to the lighter or the purely secular side of people's 
interests and sensibilities ; in any such attempt it is wholly outclassed by the 
journalism that finds a chief field there. The religious paper has a clear 
title to the field of the deepest interests of men and women. And this field 
will go out of existence when the art of reading and the kingdom of God are 
done away with. Not before. 

• « • 

Miss Valfrid Palmgren, the young Swedish woman who spent three 
months in this country in the study of American libraries, is taking back a 
most enthusiastic report of ourcirculating system. She was sent here by her 
government, leave of absence having been given to her for the purpose 
from the Royal State Library at Stockholm, where she is assistant librarian. 



The voracious readers of the latest novel, whether good or bad, should 
stop to think at times on the folly of their conduct. Perhaps the following 
description from a keen critic may assist the chronic novel readers to do 
some beneficial thinking for their own mental improvement. The criticism 
is taken from the New York Evening Post of June 15, 1907 : 

Sentimental novelists would not know what to do without the weeping 
heroine, but in French fiction the weeping hero has the place of honor. 
This may be partly due to classical tradition ; for even the romancier of the 
Boulevards remembers pius iCneas and the oft repeated sic fatur lacrimans. 
Yet in most cases the tears of the hero are not manifestations of distress, nor 



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i9o8.] THE Columbian Reading Union 715 

even of emotion. They are merely part of the dramatic setting, like the 
^ocal color of a magazine story. Some situations in French fiction do, in- 
deed, make the plentiful use of tears seem not too unnatural. In Daniel le 
Sueur's last novel, for example, the reader can but sympathise with the 
group of weeping men who gather at the Morgue in search of a friend who 
had been stabbed in the back. But even this masculine emotion is often 
self-conscious and hysterical; as when the afflicted person calls attention to 
himself by exclaiming, je pUure ; or when, like the distressed villian in ome 
love story, he begs the heroine to notice that he is shedding tears. 

The thousands who have read Octave Feuillet's Romance of a Poor 
Young Man will recall the scene when the here's hard-hearted father, at the 
death-bed of the hero's mother, relented, ran to her, and, with heart-rending 
sobs, pressed the poor, martyred body to his breast. The poor young man 
himself underwent hardships without a tear, but cried at trifles. He wept 
when he ate a crust of bread which his sister gave him. When the rich hero- 
ine was about to be married to the wrong man, the hero retired to his room 
and mopped his eyes with a handkerchief which had once belonged to her. 
He did not shed tears when he fell into the lake and was nearly drowned, nor 
when he broke his arm ; but when his incognito was discovered, and he was 
forsaken by the young woman, he declared: '^ I fell on my knees before the 
place where she had stood, and then, striking my forehead on the marble, I 
wept, I sobbed like a child." 

Gaboriau, who professed to admire Spartan virtues, was nevertheless 
compelled to turn on the water-works frequently. In one stirring' stor/, 
when the disguised detective discovered the heroine trying to poison herself 
with charcoal fumes, great tears rolled down the good man's cheeks, as he 
murmured in a choking voice — The heavy father in the same novel, who was 
also a count, was surprised by his daughter when his eyes were filled with 
tears. Her surprise must have been greater than his, however, for she saw 
tears, great tears, which, flowing along his dyed beard, became tinted, and 
fell like drops of ink upon his shirt-front. 

There are, of course, French novelists who do not appreciate the beauty 
of emotional display. Their characters show restraint ; the authors do not 
feel the pulse of the people. But there is one author, little known to most 
Americans, Jules Mary, whose tales of murder, love, and madness are very 
affecting, not to say harrowing. After reading one of them, we instinctively 
wipe our eyes, or brush imaginary tears from our shoulder or coat-sleeve. A 
trap is laid by the author. His characters, when they first appear, are not 
such as should be moved easily ; yet before the denouement is reached they 
are, to a man, weeping. No one escapes. There is the wicked nobleman in 
Un Mariage de Confiance. We are lulled into security as we read about him 
in the opening chapter: He burst into a sonorous laugh which uncovered his 
gums and a row of teeth white as milk, pointed as those of a cat. But in the 
second chapter we find him weeping because the heroine is pretty. The 
matter-of-fact Dutch husband, who is the successful rival of the wicked no- 
bleman, finding that the latter has made love to his wife, rolls on the carpet 
at the feet of his father-in-law, his strength exhausted, needing to weep but 
not being able, sobbing without tears, until at length, moisture appearing in 



Digitized by^OOQlC 



7i6 THE Columbian Reading Union [Feb., 

his eyes, he cries like a child. There also is the hero in Un Cavp dt Revol- 
ver who had one of those robust natures peculiar to mountainous regions. 
The reader had hoped that his low voice might not be one which trembled 
with emotion ; but it was not to be. Indeed^ in his case, weeping seemed te 
be a very upheaving process — probably because of his robustness. Fre- 
quently, a contraction compressed his throat and prevented him from speak- 
ing. He saw the woman he loved subjected to severe cruelty, but he did not 
whimper. When, however, she afterwards called to him and said : ''Weep 
not, you shall have these flowers," he felt a stifling sepsation mount from his 
heart to his throat. His clenched hands beat the air, and he rolled on the 
floor, crying with a hoarse voice. 

The/Mjv dHnstruciion^ who in real life is a prosaic, unfeeling person, is 
the very Niobe of French fiction. In one story such a magistrate, while en- 
gaged in uncovering a crime, discovers that his fianc6e's relatives are impli- 
cated. First, his emotion was so strong that he was forced to sit down; sec- 
ond, he was oppressed by the tears of joy which mounted to his eyes; and, 
third, his voice trembled so that he could not speak ; and at length a sob in- 
terrupted him ; he bit his lips till the blood came, clenched his fists until the 
nails pierced the palms of his hands. 

In English novels a wan smile expresses grief; a supercilious curl of the 
lip, showing his even teeth, denotes anger ; a sardonic laugh is the sign of 
villany. But in French romances, when hero or heroine, detective or crimi- 
nal, Polish count or Irish governess, begins to speak in a broken voice, or 
there is a sign of tears, let the reader go to a safe spot and prepare for the 
worst. M. C. M. 



Some little while ago, at a meeting of the Philothea Society, held at the 
home of Mrs. Schuyler Neilson Warren, New York City, Miss Agnes Rep- 
plier read one of her essays, '' The Choice of Books," first published in Tbk 
Catholic World of October, 1906. Miss Repplier explained that not only 
had the pressure of work made it difficult for her to prepare something new, 
but also, as a friend assured her, " because a thing is published it does not 
follow that it is read." The latter remark may be, in a measure, humor- 
ous, but it is also, unfortunately, a luminous commentary on the lack of 
appreciation and study by Catholics of good Catholic literature. 

If the Philothea Society, which is doing praiseworthy work in this direc- 
tion, succeeds in arousing Catholics to a practical appreciation and support 
of representative Catholic writers, among whom Miss Repplier is a worthy 
type, it will have achieved a glorious and fruitful work for God, for the 
Church, and for souls. 

Reading the essays of Agnes Repplier, with their wide range of subjects 
— ^literary, aesthetic, dramatic, social, political — one is led to realize what is 
so often forgotten in anon-Catholic country, 1. ^., that the Catholic Church 
is Catholic^ universal in the most comprehensive sense of the term ; that she 
is the Mother and Protector not only in the theological domain of faith and 
morals, but of truth and beauty wherever found. This is brought home to 
one in the essays of Agnes Repplier. She is essentially Catholic in ever>- 



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I 



1908.] BOOKS Received, 717 

thing that she writes. An inspiring example, both in heart and intellect^ of 
Catholic culture, with its notes of beauty, distinction, and universality, she 
is ^y^xfortiter in r/, suaviter in modo, possessing a critical faculty keenly 
refined, and a saving grace of humor. 

Perhaps the most apt appreciation we may make of Miss Repplier's work 
is to turn one of her own literary criticisms upon herself : 

We realize at once the charm of a Catholic atmosphere, unfretted by 
dispute. To what but Catholicism do these stories owe their inspiration ? 
What else gives them their grace and sweetness ? Yet they are guiltless of 
argument, and wholly unconcerned with the theological convictions of their 
Protestant readers. Rather do they seem to take for granted that the read- 
ing world is as Catholic as themselves ; and it is this intimate directness of 
speech, this smiling disavowal of complications, which makes them so perfect 
•f their kind. It is the attitude of the old chroniclers, Froissart and Philip 
de Commines, who are never hostile and argumentative like modern his- 
torians, because they take no count of opposition. It is with a perfect 
sureness of touch, a serene certainty that admits no shadow of disaffection. 

Thus in her essay, "The Choice of Books," she writes of the delightful 
stories of Mr. Henry Harland. To make such a criticism of another is to 
merit it, in an eminent degree, for oneself. 



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THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

Vol. LXXXVI. MARCH, 1908. No. 516. 

LIBERALISM AND FAITH. 

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CRISIS IN MODERN THEOLOGY. 
BY W. H. KENT, O.S.C. 

|VEN those who are by no means disposed to 
adopt the pessimism of certain French writers, 
who talk of ** two Catholicisms/' must fain con- 
fess that we are apparently passing through a 
period of crisis in which two very different schools 
of theological thought are contending for the mastery. The 
stress of this strife has been specially felt in France, and in the 
field of biblical criticism. But unmistakable traces of its pres- 
ence may be found in many other lands, and the controversy 
covers a wide field of apologetics, philosophy, and historical 
study. 

In the current discussions on these subjects there is, as in- 
deed there has ever been, room for almost endless varieties of 
opinion. And the divisions among our theological writers gen- 
erally bear more resemblance to the multitudinous groups and 
parties in the French Chamber than to the simpler English sys- 
tem. Yet in most of these domestic controversies it is possible 
to distinguish two main schools of thought, though their char- 
acteristic principles admit of divers degrees and shades and va- 
riations, thus giving rise to the various subordinate groups and 
parties. 

And, without attempting to press the analogy too far, the 
two parties may be sufficiently described by the nomenclature 

Copjiight Z908. Thb M18810NABT SociBTT OP St. Paul tbb Apostlb 

IN THB STATB op NBW YOBK. 
VOU LXXXYI.-»46 



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720 Liberalism and Faith [Mar., 

accepted in English politics. On the one side is the venerable 
school of Conservatives — commentators, theologians, philoso- 
phers, and historians, who cling very closely to all established 
traditions. Like their brethren in the world of politics, they 
make authority their watchword, they are all for law and order, 
and are ever ready to invoke the unanswerable argument of 
coercion. They may be likened to the provincial doctors in 
Middlemarck, who '' stood undisturbed in the old ways." And 
on the other hand are ranged the more liberal school of crit- 
ical historians and apologists, who would fain have us adopt 
the latest methods of historical research, dealing with the new^ 
difficulties in a new fashion, and meeting our opponents on 
their own ground and with their own weapons. 

As was only natural, the attention of the public has been 
almost exclusively occupied by certain advanced writers, some 
of whose works or opinions have fallen under ecclesiastical 
censure. And if only for this reason superficial observers may 
possibly suppose that the recent action of the authorities has 
decided the whole question in favor of the more conservative 
party. But those who have some knowledge of the principles 
laid down in such a work as Viva's classic Theses Damnatce 
will readily see the absurdity of this hasty conclusion. Such 
censures must be taken strictly and literally, and the condem- 
nation of excessive laxity is no endorsement of extreme rigor- 
ism. 

On a former occasion it was said, with some truth, that the 
Vatican Council made a clean sweep of the Extreme Right as 
well as the Extreme Left. And in like manner it may possibly 
seem to some of us that if the recent authoritative censures 
are a rebuke to the extremists on one side, they are also in 
some sense a rebuff to the extremists on the other. Be this as 
it may, it is at any rate clear that even if we get rid of ex- 
treme men and extreme opinions we shall still be very far from * 
the solution of the problem and the close of all discussion be- 
tween Conservatives and Liberals. We may, if we like, elimi- 
nate all the opinions of Abb^ Loisy and let all his books be 
buried in oblivion. But this will scarcely put an end to the 
biblical question or reconcile the divergent views of P&re La- 
grange and Padre Schiffini. 

There is no need to enter into any questions of detail in 
regard to the chief points at issue in the discussion, or to argue 



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I908.] LIBERALISM AND FAITH 721 

the case for either party on its own merits. The object of the 
present paper is pacific rather than polemical. For though it 
were a rash and hopeless enterprise to attempt anything like 
a fusion of the opposing parties, it may be possible, at any rate, 
to relieve the tension and lessen the needless bitterness of cur- 
rent theological controversy. 

It must be freely confessed that the discussion of these ques- 
tions is too often something very different from the peaceful dis- 
putations of an earlier age in which each school was ready to ac- 
knowledge the orthodoxy of the other, or the analogous strug- 
gle between two constitutional parties in secular politics. It is 
rather a case in which the Conservative is prone to regard the 
Liberal as a dangerous revolutionary, a rebel in heart, whose 
action within the walls is a graver peril than the attacks of 
open enemies. And, on the other hand, the Liberal in his 
turn is apt to think of his opponents as a party of obsolete 
obscurantists, swayed by prejudice, blind to the needs of the 
hour, and exercising an intolerable tyranny over the younger 
generation of Catholics. Of course here, as elsewhere, there 
are not wanting some moderate men who would fain adopt a 
middle course and stand like the pathetic figure of Falkland 
'' ingeminating peace " between the warring factions. And 
others, again, though taking a more decided line themselves, 
are yet ready to show some sympathy with their opponents, 
and to treat them with courtesy and Christian charity. 

But it would be idle to deny that there are some stern cen- 
sors who feel it their duty to deal with their erring brethren 
in a more rigorous fashion. The literature of the earlier con- 
troversies which raged around the Vatican Council is filled with 
hard sayings and sharp censures of '' Liberalism " and '' Liberal 
Catholics." And the same strident note has often been sounded 
of late in books and pamphlets and articles in periodicals. The 
theme, no doubt, admits of almost endless variations. For the 
erring brothers may be met with mild remonstrance, with dig- 
nified rebuke, with sharp censure, with scorn and ridicule, with 
indignant denunciation. 

But though the notes may vary somewhat according to the 
different degrees of guilt on the one hand, or the peculiar char- 
acter and temperament of the accuser, there are, withal, some 
leading ideas that run through most of these pages of polemical 
theology, and they combine to give us a painful picture of the 



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723 LIBERALISM AND FAITH [Mar., 

Catholics wh« have fallen a prey to the delusions of Liberalism. 
It seems that these unfortunate men are wanting, or at any 
rate weak and waverings in faith. They have little or no rev- 
erence for established and orthodox traditions. They have been 
infected by poisonous infiltrations of Protestantism and Ration- 
alism. They are puffed up by pride, or weighed down by world- 
liness. They are traitors within the walls, ready to make dan- 
gerous and disastrous compromises with the enemy without. 

Let me hasten to add that while, as may be gathered from 
what has been said so far, I cannot accept this as a just ac* 
count of the Liberal position, I have no wish to deny that 
there are real dangers in this direction. For, even apart from 
the fact that we have been warned not only by heated con- 
troversialists but by the voice of authority, the existence of 
some such peril is sufficiently obvious. No one, surely, can 
fail to see that many rash and reckless writers around us preach 
and practice a rationalism which is destructive of all religion 
and all authority. A Catholic engaged in critical research may 
shrink from these excesses, while he welcomes the good work 
done in many fields of learning by Protestant or rationalist 
writers. He may seek, in St. Basil's phrase, to follow the ex- 
ample of the bee and find honey in the flowers without taking 
the poison. He may remember how much the Fathers learnt 
in Pagan schools, and how the Schoolmen owe not a little to 
the wisdom of Jewish and Muslim masters. But it is well that 
he should frankly recognize that there is a danger of being car- 
ried too far by the influence and example of the new world 
around him. Good and evil are strangely blended together in 
the writings of the new masters, and the student's attempt to 
seize and assimilate the good must needs be accompanied by 
some danger of adopting the evil. The danger may be safely 
met by taking prudent precautions. But those who doubt its 
existence will scarcely escape it. 

Much the same must certainly be said of the subjective or 
moral dangers. As Jowett justly reminded some too dogmatic 
Liberals, even the youngest among us is not infallible. And it 
is a safe inference that those who are not infallible will some- 
times be mistaken. With the best will in the world, the student 
who sets out on the scientific search for truth will sometimes 
miss his mark. For much of the best scientific work is, strictly 
speaking, experimental ; and in this field, at any rate, it is true 



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igo8.] LIBERALISM AAD FAITH 723 

to say that a man who makes no mistakes will never make 
anything. The biologist may be at fault on a plain point of 
fact, as Huxley himself mistook the nature and origin of '' Ba- 
thybius." And the most careful historical critic may find him- 
self deceived by some spurious document. And apart from 
such external causes of error, he may be misled by an uncon- 
scious bias in favor of a new theory, by a spirit of party, by 
an exaggerated loyalty to a leader whom he delights to follow, 
or by a natural pride in his own knowledge or in the results 
of his own labors. 

These moral dangers, it may be well to add, are common 
to men of all parties. The pride of heart that makes the hope- 
less heretic is not necessarily or inseparably associated with 
principles of progress and liberty. It is, unhappily, true that 
these things have too often been found together; and the his- 
tory of heresies shows a long list of men who fell away by 
pride in their own learning or acuteness of intellect, hasty re- 
formers who rebelled against the restraint of authority and made 
light of the wisdom of the ages. 

But over against this series of what may be called the ration- 
alizing and revolutionary heretics and schismatics, there are 
others who have erred from an excess of conservatism, men 
whose hasty and unguarded zeal for orthodoxy and for the 
tenets of their own fathers in the faith makes them recoil so 
far from one heresy that they fall into an opposite error. Thus 
a proud and intolerant fanaticism against Nestorianism was the 
origin of the Eutychian heresy. And even when it does not 
have this fatal effect on their belief, pride may still be a very 
present danger to the hunters of heresy. If only for this reason, 
it is well that we should be reminded that the Pharisees were 
the orthodox and conservative party. 

Much the same may be said of the worldliness and laxity 
of morals which, as we all know, is another fruitful source of 
heresy and schism. This laxity and license has often been 
associated with liberalism in religion. 

But have we not heard of the ''two bottle orthodox"? 
And is there any reason to suppose that this combination of 
rigidity of doctrine with laxity of life is peculiar to an obso- 
lete school of Anglicanism ? No moralist, I suppose, would be 
likely to question these general principles, or to claim that the 
writers of any party are free from human frailty. 



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724 LIBERALISM AND FAITH [Mar., 

And it can scarcely be denied that, in point of fact, here- 
sies, as we have seen, have arisen from widely different causes. 
The straitest stickler ior traditional Conservatism may freely 
allow that, after all, it is possible to go too far in this direc- 
tion. Catholics of the Liberal school may yet more readily 
make a like admission on their part, seeing that lapses on this 
side have been more frequent, at least in these latter days, as 
some recent Roman decisions might suffice to show us. And 
indeed this is only what might be expected in an age of Ration- 
alism and Revolution. But it is another matter to admit that 
Liberalism, in the true sense, is something essentially inimical 
to the spirit of faith, that it is due to lukewarmness or indif- 
ference, to some weakness or want of supernatural faith, the 
picB credulitatis affectus. This is so far from being the case that 
it may even be urged with some show of reason that in many 
matters to take what would be called the more liberal line be- 
tokens a deep and enduring faith in Revealed Religion. 

In saying this I have no wish to speak in disparagement of 
the faith of those who take an opposite course and regard all 
that savors of Liberalism with holy horror. On the contrary, 
one may well believe that this excess of caution and conserv- 
atism is due to a genuine zeal for the integrity and purity of 
Revealed Religion, and is a very natural reaction against the 
excesses of the opposite party. In any case, it must be re- 
membered that the mind of man is capable of curious incon- 
sistencies, and it is always hazardous to judge of a man's faith 
from the logical consequences of his policy or his professed 
opinions. But making this necessary reservation, and looking 
at the matter in the abstract, I certainly think that an exces- 
sive caution or an apparent fear of freedom is not the best and 
most obvious sign of a faith that rests on firm foundations. 
This may be illustrated by the analogous case of an attack on 
a man's legitimacy or on his personal character. Here, one 
who welcomes a full and free inquiry without fear or favor, 
would surely show more faith, more confidence in the justice 
of his cause, than one who betrays alarm and endeavors to 
burke or limit the discussion. 

It would be presumptuous to criticise the policy of the ec- 
clesiastical authorities in this matter. And those who are apt 
to chafe at checks and restrictions should remember that these 
things are often necessary, especially in the case of the studies 



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I908.] LIBERALISM AND FAITH 725 

of the young or books that are within reach of the general 
reader. For an inquiry, or an argument that is harmless in the 
abstract, may possibly be a source of danger to some classes 
or to individual souls. And in the eyes of the Church the faith 
of the people is, naturally enough, a matter of more moment 
than the freedom and progress of critical science. But it could 
be wished that those who insist on the need of these safe- 
guards were more careful to avoid giving a false impression, 
as though it were not merely a question of the belief of indi- 
viduals, but as if the faith itself had cause to fear the onward 
march of science. 

Of course we all confess that there can be no real conflict 
between Revealed Religion and the philosophy of sound rea- 
son, or the facts of science and history. But this faith does 
not go very far, if we merely mean that our religion agrees 
with the testimony of history and science — when history and 
science have been first cut and fashioned so as to be in agree- 
ment with our religion. For it is obvious that this much, at 
any rate, might be safely said of any religious system, e. g.^ 
Islam or Mazdeism. And without incurring any suspicion of 
having adopted either of those ancient religions, one may ven- 
ture to say that they will probably prove to be in harmony 
with the history and science and philosophy carefully prepared 
for this purpose by orthodox Mazdean or Muslim masters. 

To the observer, who sees only from the outside, it may 
sometimes seem that Catholics mean no more than this when 
they carefully keep to books composed by pious and orthodox 
persons, and then proclaim that their faith is in harmony with 
history and philosophy and science. But in truth the Catholic 
who has a deep and firm faith in the divine origin of his reli- 
gion means something very much more than this. For he knows 
that whatever may be the case with false or imperfect human 
systems, the religion which comes from God must be in har- 
mony with the real facts of science and with the history that 
really happened; and he has no fear to face the facts. He 
does not ask for an artificial philosophy, or a fettered science, 
or a bowdlerized history. He may rightly recognize the ne- 
cessity that the Church should impose some checks in order to 
safeguard the faith of her little ones. But at the same time he 
is confident that, even among those who pursue their scientific 
and historical studies in unfettered freedom, the results ulti- 



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726 LIBERALISM AND FAITH [Mar., 

mately achieved according to the true principles of science will 
be in agreement with Catholic doctrine-^though they may pos- 
sibly correct or modify some of the passing opinions of fallible 
theological writers. 

Apart from these graver accusations, there is another ground 
on which Liberalism is naturally open to objections and subject 
to sinister suspicions — to wit, that it savors of novelty. For it 
must be confessed that many of the more Conservative school 
are rather apt to regard everything that is new as something 
dark and dangerous ; and one fancies that they must sometimes 
feel perturbed at the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth. 
On the other hand, many of their opponents, partly moved by 
a feeling of impatience with the past and its votaries, will be 
ready to insist that the novelty of the liberal views is really 
one of their main recommendations. But possibly a closer ac- 
quaintance with the work of the old schoolmen and Fathers 
might enable some of us to see the question in a somewhat 
different aspect. 

It will, at any rate, have the advantage of variety in a dis- 
cussion hitherto marked by a somewhat wearisome iteration, if 
I venture to suggest that there is really more of novelty in 
what is commonly regarded as the ultra- conservative position, 
and that many of those who are roundly condemned as dan- 
gerous innovators and revolutionaries are simply following in 
the footsteps of their fathers. This is no mere paradox, but a 
sober statement of fact. If the more liberal writers among us 
are alert to every improvement in current methods of science 
and criticism, if they endeavor to defend or elucidate the an- 
cient doctrines of the faith with weapons or instruments bor- 
rowed from the science and scholarship of their own age, they 
are only doing what was done in earlier days by the great me- 
diaeval masters and the Alexandrine Fathers before them. 

Much the same may be said of another charge which is very 
often brought against writers of the more critical and progres- 
sive school — and not only against the more advanced critics like 
M. Loisy, but against such sober and orthodox scholars as F^re 
Lagrange — i. /., that these misguided men have borrowed ideas 
and arguments from the non- Catholic critics and philosophers 
of Holland and Germany. It may be observed in passing that 
the indebtedness of our Catholic scholars to these external 
sources is sometimes exaggerated; for, even apart from any 



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I908.] LIBERALISM AND FAITH T27 

alien influence, there is a progressive criticism that builds on 
the foundations laid in happier days by such men as Fetavius 
and the French Benedictines and Oratorians. 

None the less, it must be confessed that some of our recent 
writers have availed themselves of the work achieved by non- 
Catholic critics and thinkers^ whose writings undoubtedly con- 
tain grave errors of doctrine, and can only be used with cau- 
tion by Catholic readers. As I have already had occasion to 
remark, we have good reason to be on our guard against dan- 
gers in this direction. But there is really no need to get in a 
panic, or to raise an alarm about foreign 'infiltrations." And, 
to speak frankly, the peculiar line adopted by some of our 
amiable alarmists is strangely at variance with the principles 
and the practice of our best teachers in the past. 

In these days of dogmatic journalism and amateur Inquis- 
itors, it is idle to complain of the censures so freely passed on 
living writers. But one may be permitted to remind the cen- 
sors that some of the very things they condemn in Catholic 
critics of the present day were done without scruple by the 
early Fathers and the mediaeval schoolmen. Happily no foolish 
fear of Rabbinical infiltrations kept St. Jerome from seeking the 
aid of Jewish teachers. No narrow pride of orthodoxy forbade 
St. Basil and Gregory the Theologian to profit by the eloquence 
and learning of Libanius. And in like manner, in a later age, 
St Thomas did not disdain to gather in the words of wisd«m 
uttered by pagan philosophers and their Moslem commentators. 
Are we to treat these old masters as if they were like the 
Scribes and Pharisees who sat in the chair of Moses? Must 
we receive their doctrine and shun their example? 

It can hardly be maintained that the course pursued by our 
fathers in the past has now become impracticable or unavailing, 
that there is no room for further progress, that there is now 
no truth whatever to be found in the voluminous writings of 
those who are laboring outside the fold of Catholic orthodoxy^ 
Hot-headed zealots may be tempted to adopt this attitude of 
uncompromising hostility to all modern criticism and philoso- 
phy. But, unfortunately, this position is perilously akin to a 
theory which has already incurred condemnation. And, even 
apart from this uncomfortable fact, it would be hard to recon- 
cile this philosophical pessimism with sound Catholic principles. 

It reminds one, rather, of the narrow Jansenist theology. 



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738 Liberalism and Faith [Mar., 

which taught that do heavenly grace was given to those out- 
side the fold of the visible Church. For, as Scheeben justly 
observes, the old battle which Jansenists and their opponents 
debated on the field of morals has now been renewed in the 
realms of knowledge. And here, as on the former field, we are 
beset by two widely different dangers— on the one side Ration- 
alism, on the other Traditionalism. Against the first of these 
opposite extremes we have been repeatedly warned of late. But 
there is, to say the least, some little likelihood that the other 
peril may be overlooked or forgotten. And those who are dis- 
posed to indulge in indiscriminate condemnation of the work 
of non- Catholic thinkers and scholars, will do well to consider 
the decrees against Traditionalism and certain decisions of the 
Vatican Council. 

Much more might be said on this point. But possibly these 
suggestions may suffice for our present purpose. In a word, 
they may be enough to show that in these domestic discussions 
among Catholics, the weight of authority is not so entirely on 
one side as some of us are apt to imagine. And even those 
who take what may be called the Liberal line, who are alert to 
all the movements of contemporary science and criticism, who 
have a love for sane liberty and true progress and desire to 
treat outsiders with broad-minded tolerance, may fairly claim 
that they are true to the best traditions of the Catholic schools. 
At the same time, these reflections may help to make it clear 
that the difference which divides the two parties is by no means 
so deep as one might suppose from the heated language of 
alarmists. In its last analysis, it is not a difference in princi- 
ples but in their application to the facts. The most Liberal of 
Catholic writers necessarily has much about him that is in the 
best sense Conservative. For not only does he hold fast to 
the ancient faith of his fathers ; but, as we have seen, his Lib- 
eralism itself is no novelty, for it is in accordance with the 
principle and the practice of the Catholic Fathers and school- 
men. And in the same way it will be found that the most 
staid and orthodox Conservatives among us are by no me^ns 
opposed to the principle of progress. This may be readily seen 
by comparing their opinions and their writings, not with those 
of their more progressive contemporaries, but with those that 
were in vogue two or three centuries ago. In point of fact, I 
fancy that we are all moving, though we have not all arrived 



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I908.] LIBERALISM AND FAITH 729 

at the same stage, and we are not all traveling at the same 
pace. 

A candid consideration of some of these points may possi- 
bly help to relieve the tension of current controversy. For it 
must be confessed that there has been a good deal of needless 
acrimony, largely due, as so often happens, to mutual misun- 
derstandings. It is to some such cause that we must ascribe 
the strange exaggeration of our domestic differences, and the 
pessimism which would divide the world of theology into revo- 
lutionaries and reactionaries. But though a juster appreciation 
of the facts might lessen the differences and improve the char- 
acter of the controversy, it would be idle to look for anything 
like general agreement on these matters. And to speak frankly, 
I cannot think that such a result is to* be desired. There have 
ever been schools and parties in Catholic thought and theology. 
In the age of the Fathers there were the schools of Antioch 
and Alexandria; and the middle age had its Thomists and 
Scotists, Baconists and iEgidians. Why should we desiderate a 
wearisome uniformity which would involve a break with the 
past and make our modern theology something strangely unlike 
the spacious theological literature of our fathers, with its breadth 
and movement and life and liberty ? It were far better to be 
content with the old maxim: ''In certis unitas, in dubiis liber- 
tas, in omnibus caritas." 



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ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 

AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY • 
BY FRANCIS AVELING. D.D. 

Chapter XIV. 

HE sun rose smiling and fair on a fair and smil- 
ing city. Paris hardly knew herself, she was so 
gay and garlanded. The streets had been swept 
clean — so clean that one could have spread one's 
best velvet cloak upon the cobbles without a 
trace of dust. All garbage and mud, the litter of the straw 
merchants, and the scraps and odds and ends that would make 
the way unsightly, had been carefully removed. The houses 
and churches that lined the road from the Forte Fapale to the 
Petit Font, and on, across through the city, to the Pont au 
Change, and on again, passing under the frowning arches of the 
Grand Chatelet, through the town and out by the Porte St. 
Martin, were adorned with festoons of leaves and flowers. Flow- 
ers and leafy branches were everywhere, in the windows and 
over the doors, looped across on ropes from one side of the 
road to the other, and hanging, bright with interwoven bits of 
cloth and painted devices, over the route of the royal progress. 
The bells of Notre Dame were pealing; and all the Abbey 
bells and church bells, bells little and great, bells high and low, 
sonorous and cracked, answered in chorus. 

All Paris was afoot and making its way, with smiles and 
laughter and jests, towards the Potte Papale — Paris; that is to 
say, the University; for the sun looked down this cloudless 
morning, upon three distinct gatherings of human beings; and 
the one at the southern gate was of scholars and students. 

The living units of this first — and they undoubtedly thought 
themselves the most important of all — were converging from 
tv^xy direction upon the Papal Gate. The colleges and the 
friaries, the lodging houses and monasteries and abbeys, within 

* Copyright in United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. The Missionary Society of St. 
Paul the Apostle in the State of New York. 



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i9o8.] arnoul the Englishman 731 

and without the wall, were pouring out their occupants in con- 
tinuous streams that filtered through the crooked channels of 
the lesser streets, and grew and gathered and swelled into one 
great rush as they all came together in the Rue St. Jacques 
and surged towards the great gate. 

The burghers of St Germain's and the inhabitants of the 
newly- building Terre de Laas on the west, the burghers of St. 
Marcel and St. Victor on the south and east, came trooping in 
by lateral gates, still further contributing to the confused mass 
of clerks and friars, monks and University officials, boys, wo- 
men, men, and girls, that were gathering with such great good 
humor to welcome the kings of England, France, and Navarre. 

From the four quarters of the city proper, a smaller crowd 
was coming together at the head of the wooden bridge. This 
was distinctly a courtly and ecclesiastical assembly, more bril- 
liant in color and more grave in feature than that at the Porte 
Papale. Here were the officials of the Old Palace who had not 
gone in the train of King Louis to meet King Henry at Char- 
tres. Here was the Archbishop, with the chapter of his Cath- 
edral, the Cardinal Dean of the Church of Paris and the Can- 
tor, the three Archdeacons, the sub-Cantor, the Chancellor, the 
Penitentiary, and forty-three of the fifty*two Prebendaries of 
Notre Dame, each clothed in the rich ecclesiastical garments 
that belonged to his particular rank and station. 

Besides this gorgeous nucleus, standing together in a com- 
pact body of rich color, there were other dignitaries. Four or 
five bishops with their attendants, a number of abbots and priors 
of the various orders, in white or black habits, and monks were 
scattered about in little groups. 

The prior of the temple, at the head of a little band of his 
knights, rode up into a conspicuous position. 

A metal crucifix gleamed in the sun's rays high above the 
crowd ; and in front of the choir of singing boys and men in 
their white surplices were two lads carrying, respectively, a 
vessel of holy water with the aspergillum, and a smoking 
thurible. 

They were not so noisy as the crowd at the Porte Papale; 
but they were conversing and chatting, none the less, as they 
waited to receive the royal party and conduct the kings to the 
cathedral. 

A third gathering, of considerably larger dimensions than 



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732 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

either of the former, had collected in front of the Grand Cha- 
telet It was composed of the burghers — citizens, traders, mer- 
chants, Jews, apprentices, and master craftsmen, with their 
wives and daughters ; together with a fair sprinkling of country- 
men and women who had come in through the town gates to 
see the pageant. 

While this crowd could not boast the select magnificence of 
the ecclesiastical gathering upon the island, nor all the festive 
youth of the University contingent, it made up for what it 
lacked by the motley variety of dress and feature that it dis- 
played. All the trades — though the trade guilds had not yet 
been formed by the Provost, Stephen Boileau — were represented ; 
for all the town of Paris was gathered together at the Grand 
Chatelet and in its vicinity. Those who came late had to be 
content with a place in the Place de Grive or by the Porte 
Pepin. Dogs were barking and children were wild with excite- 
ment and delight. Proud mothers rocked their screaming babies 
in their arms and lifted them up to see the pretty crowd, a pro- 
ceeding that made them scream all the more. 

The Provost of the merchants, with his subordinate officers, 
was there, solemn and dignified in his dress of state, frowning 
at the screaming children, fussing with the hang of his robes, 
bestowing a smile now and again upon some prominent mem- 
ber of his little kingdom, conscious of his own importance. 

There was a continuous buzz of talk, howling, barking, stamp- 
ing, shuffling, movement 

Those who had had the forethought to bring food were ra- 
pidly disposing of it with laughter and jokes, to the envy of 
their less provident neighbors. 

The sun played upon the concourse, bringing the patchwork 
of color out in strong light — yellow and red and blue and green ; 
furs and cloth, with silks here and there; and ornament of sil- 
ver and ornament of gold ; tall hats and low coifs, and wim* 
pies and flat bonnets; talking and laughtet and snatches of 
song ; garland and green bough and tapestry hanging from the 
windows. 

This was the assembly of burghers in front of the Grand 
Chatelet, waiting to meet their sovereign lord and master and 
his royal guest, Henry III.; King of England 

But to return to the gathering at the Porte Papale. Arnoul 
had . taken his stand near the gate, in the centre of a little 



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igoS.] ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 73J 

group of his friends. As he looked round him, at the vast con- 
course coming together from every side, he saw the strangest 
collection of gala dresses imaginable. There were the Procu- 
rators of the Four Nations standing apart, with their attorneys, 
and the beadles waiting to collect the scholars into orderly 
bands. There was a white- robed group of Premonstratensians, 
headed by their abbot, from the convent in the Rue Haute- 
feuille; and a brown group of Cordeliers with their sandals 
and knotted cords. There were the friars from St. Jacques with 
their black cloaks, and the Carmelites beside them in their 
white ones ; and near by stood a rank of Bernardines from the 
abbey beyond the Bi^vre. Arnoul recognized the two Buckfast 
brothers in this last group. 

And then there were the scholars — tens of thousands of 
them, it seemed to him — in every conceivable variety of cas- 
sock and habit, going in and out among the compact groups 
of the religious, surging backwards and forwards towards the 
flower- bedecked gate, pushing, shoving, laughing, calling out, 
shouting to each other, waving the branches and bunches of 
flowers they held in their hands high above their heads. 

They were a jolly crowd, these scholars of the Four Na- 
tions, ready for any emergency, but doubly ready to welcome 
kings. They would turn out in their thousands for a funeral, 
or for a feast, and swell the ranks of a procession, so that 
when its head was entering Notre Dame its tail was still form- 
ing itself at St. Methurins. But it was not every day in the 
year that they had a chance like this I And so, remembering 
their importance and their privileges, they shouted themselves 
hoarse, and waved their green branches and bright-colored 
cloaks, when they had them, and pushed and jostled each other 
in high good humor, singing snatches of the songs with which, 
roaring their loudest in chorus, they would welcome the royal 
train as soon as it should come into sight. 

The nations were slowly sorting themselves out of the gen- 
eral confusion and beginning to group themselves in the rear 
of their Procurators, when a strident voice broke in upon the 
clamor and babel of tongues. ^ 

''Room I Make room there for the Rector! Room for the 
Deans I Room for the Professors of the University I " 

The crowd parted right and left as the splendidly robed pro- 
cession of University officials made its way, preceded by the 



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734 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

beadles, from the University Church of St. Mathurin. There 
wa& the Rector himself — the Englishman, John of Gecteville — 
and lusty cheers rang out for him from English throats as he 
advanced, gorgeous in his rectorial robes at the head of the 
professorial body. 

In the University he had precedence over bishops and car- 
dinals, and even papal legates; and scholars, masters, monksy 
and friars — though the Four Nations had elected him from 
among the artists and had made him what he was, the Capital 
Scholarum — gave way before him as he passed onward to the gate. 

Then there were the Syndic, the Deans and the Doctors of 
the Faculties; the twelve theologians walking in front in their 
ermine tippets and with their doctor's bonnets upon their heads. 
After them came the Scholasticus of St. Genevieve in his canon's 
robes, severe of visage and mien as one who sat with the Chan- 
cellor of Notre Dame for the examinations of the University 
teachers. 

Robert de Sorbon was there too, and the two Dominican 
professors. And then, as the many eyes of the throng watched 
the passage of the official body, the well-known figure of St. 
Amour came into sight. 

There he was — the thin, angular face, almost ascetic in its 
fierce compression and energy; the high forehead with the pen- 
ciled brows slightly contracted, as they always were, giving him 
an habitual air of pride and obstinacy ; those dark and gleam* 
ing eyes, shining with intelligence and audacity. 

Clad in his doctor's robes of cloth and fur, he walked straight 
along the path made before him through the crowd, looking 
neither to the right nor left, as though seeing nothing of all 
the people whose eyes were bent upon him. 

A Dominican friar spoke under his breath when he had 
passed, calling him blasphemer, mocker, reviler, and consigning 
him with all his party to the depths of the nether pit. 

And then, the procession passed, the crowd surged together 
again. 

Arnoul caught scraps of conversation as he threaded his 
way through the press to take up his stand in the ranks of the 
English, to whom the first place, near the gate, was allotted. 

" They say " — it was a Franciscan speaking — " that the King 
of the English has translated his mother — whom may God as- 
soil! — into the church at Fontevraud." 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 735 

'' That is true/' answered a brother standing by. '^ That was 
before he sent envoys to the king. I saw it myself; and I 
held a lighted taper in my hand as the body of Isabella was 
borne from the graveyard. It was a right pious deed.'' 

'' And Henry was ill at the time/' pursued the first speaker. 

''He was suffering/' the second made answer. ''Therefore 
he went on pilgrimage from Fontevraud to Pontigny, where is the 
tomb and shrine of the holy Bishop St. Edmund. To whom the 
king made vows and many precious gifts for the grace of health." 

"And he received that for which he prayed?" 

" Of a certainty I Was not St. Edmund an Englishman also ? 
You shall see him this day in the vigor of his health such as 
he — " But the rest of the sentence was lost to him. 

The ranks were fairly drawn into order by now. Nations, 
religious orders, scholars, and masters were separated off from 
each other, into groups, waiting for the signal to begin their 
songs of welcome and drop into line in the procession that was 
to escort the royal cavalcade through the University. In the 
windows that overhung the great gathering, all the length of 
the long street, women in bright- colored garments had taken 
up their station. Their eager faces were framed, as it were, in 
floral wreaths. Tapestries and velvets flaunted in the breeze. 

And then the bells of Notre Dame des Champs began to 
ring in the distance — the appointed signal of the approach. 
The crowd surged to and fro — every one straining eyes along 
the dusty road. At last the royal horsemen came in sight; 
and as the kings, riding abreast, passed through the gate, shout 
after shout welcomed them ; and the ringing voices of the schol- 
ars joined in one vast unison of song. 

So the kings passed, with their queens and escorts, with 
compliment and singing and smiles, and to the accompaniment 
of the shouting of their most loyal subjects, the scholars of 
Paris, through the Porte Papale and on to the city. 

King Louis had put on again the silks and velvets, the scar- 
let and the gold, the furs and jewels, that he had laid aside on 
his return from Damietta, and rode beside his royal brother, 
splendid in his noble grace and carriage. King Henry rode 
smiling at his right. After them came the long train of nobles, 
the two sisters, Queens of France and England, the chaplains 
bishops, abbots, esquires, monks, and serving- men, who consti- 
tuted their following. 
VOL. Lxxzvi.— 47 



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736 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

And with the English Nation going before, and the rest of 
the University following behind, with prancing horses trapped 
out in purple and scarlet velvet and in cloth of gold, with jan- 
gling bits and armored knights and retainers, with festoons of 
flowers on either hand and above their heads, amid the tramp 
of twenty thousand feet, and the singing of ten thousand voices, 
and the strains of music and the clash of bells, they passed 
out of the domain of the University into the domain of the 
Church of Paris, lying with its cincture of silvery water beneath 
the shadow of Notre Dame. 

At the bridge head the royalties were received by the ec- 
clesiastical body, cardinals, bishops, and canons, and conducted 
with greet solemnity to the church. Most of the scholars had 
turned back at the Petit Pont, resolved to spend the day and 
night in celebrations and carousals at home; but Arnoul, with 
many of his compatriots, followed in the wake of the kings and 
their court. The nave of the great cathedral church was filled 
to overflowing with the throng, and there was little to see over 
the heads of the people from where he stood. The solemn 
chanting that had taken the place of the scholars' singing con- 
tinued until the procession ceased to move and the blue incense 
clouds rose in the far distance in front of the high altar. Peo- 
ple beside him were craning their necks and whispering, so 
that it was impossible for him to hear, any more than see, what 
was going on at the other end of the gray arched church. 
But he listened and gathered information from those who spoke 
around him. The king had chosen the Old Temple for his 
place of residence. It was big enough surely, for it was capa- 
ble of housing the general chapter of the knights when they 
met. And Louis would remain in his palace in the city. He 
had made offer of it to King Henry. There was to be a great 
feast for the poor at the Temple on the following day. Quan- 
tities of fish and flesh had already been commanded and the 
wine sellers had been carting heaven knew how many skins up 
to the Temple. The king was to visit the Sainte Chapelle — he 
had a great devotion to the saints. The relics there were won- 
derful and without number; besides there was the Crown of 
Thorns. He would give gifts, most like, as at Pontigny. 

So they chatted and speculated until, the brief service over, 
they surged out oi the cathedral again. 

The royal train mounted and rode off in the direction of 



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I908.J ARNOUL THE ENGLISHMAN 737 

the Pont au Change. But the press in the narrow streets was 
becoming excessive ; and the sun was hot. Arnoul, hearing 
rather than seeing the enormous throng waiting on the other 
side of the Grand Chatelet^ made his way out of the crowd 
and turned back towards the University. 

South of the river all was in an uproar. The monks and 
friars had prudently retired into their cloisters; and there was 
no sign of the governing body in the streets. The scholars 
were rushing about shouting and singing where they bad not 
already taken to the dice or drinking; and in some quarters 
the various nations were coming into conflict. But after all» 
seeing that it was a feast day of unparalleled magnificence, it 
went quietly enough for the University of Paris until nightfall, 
when lamps were lighted in the windows and at the street cor- 
ners, and the scholars brought out the thousands of candles 
with which they had provided themselves. And then ensued 
scenes of wildest confusion and indescribable horseplay in both 
Town and University. In the flickering light from the gutter- 
ing candles, clerks and citizens, men and women, boys and girls, 
danced and sang, and drank and shouted. All the day long in 
the city so marvelously adorned, in joy and singing, with flow- 
ers and all kinds of pomps and exulting, had they rejoiced. 
And all through the night and the next day did they continue 
their revelry and riot, until, thoroughly sated with the pleasure 
and fatigue of their feasting, they quieted down again into 
something approaching the usual state. 

Arnoul reached his lodging well towards evening, fatigued 
with the heat and excitement of the long day. But be bad 
no intention of remaining there by himself, while there was so 
much going on outside. He had a mouthful of food, and re- 
arranged his dress, dusty and disordered by the day's jostling. 
Then, catching up the candles he had got ready, he descended 
the long flight of stairs and let himself out into 'the street. 

It was good to be alive, he thought; good to be plunged 
into this seething caldron of life, actual and intense. The rush 
and the excitement of the day had got into his blood, his 
heart, his brain. He was ready to rush into the thickest of 
the crowd, to assert himself, to do as they did — and more. 

For an instant the thought of Guy and of Sibilla flashed 
upon him. His own great projects floated luminous before his 
mind. But he resolutely turned away from them. What were 



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73* ARNOUL the englishman [Mar., 

they, after all ? Life was now I Now I Now I He would live 
now with the rest ! What was the use of trying to coop him- 
self up in a stereotyped form of prejudice and constraint, when 
the hot blood of youth was running, pulsing through his veins? 
His senses and imagination were stimulated to fierce action by 
all the events of the day. His brain whirled in a fantastic 
dance of passions let loose. He saw all things through a rosy 
haze and glamor that enchanted him. The very smoke from 
the guttering tapers, the reek of wine, the hot breath, swept 
across his nostrils as a sweet perfume; and he drank it in, ex- 
ulting that he was alive. It was the present that mattered — 
not the future I What a fool he had been not to see it all be- 
fore as he saw it now I Why had he let indistinct thoughts 
of the Abbot or of Guy sap his vitality as he had done ? No ; 
this was life and he should live it to the full I He was his 
own master! There was no one to gainsay himl 

He made his way to the accustomed tavern. Faces leered 
and smiled at him as he passed. The guttering flames threw 
strange, distorting shadows •ver them. And he smiled back, 
with joke and answering coarseness. These people were living 
too; and they knew the value of life! Wine and dancing and 
song ! How gay they all were — and how happy ! Yes ; they 
were right and the old monks wrong! The true life was to 
enjoy oneself now — without thought for the morrow I How was 
it that he had never realized it before ? The blood surged 
through his veins and the unloosed phantoms of passion made 
riot in his brain. He pushed the low door open, and entered, 
calling loudly to Julien for wine. His voice drew all cyts 
towards the door, where he stood erect, as if conscious of his 
own beauty, with head thrown back and hair falling backwards 
from his temples. His cheeks were glowing and his eyes 
sparkling. with an unusual fire. 

Maitre Louis, playing with two of the scholars and the 
shoemaker, was in the act of throwing the dice. Jeannette, 
Thomassine, and others were watching the game. As with one 
consent they made room for him at the table. He staked and 
threw in his turn — and won. Whenever it came to him to 
throw, he won. Jeannette was leaning over his shoulder now, 
looking on. Her warm breath fanned his cheek. A wisp of 
her hair touched his brow. This was life and living ! To win 
at a throw of the dice and quaff the ruby wine, and hear 



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I9o8.] ARNOUL the E^GUSHMAN 739 

Jeannette whispering in his ear ! If Maitre Jacques were there, 
he might say what he would I He would not resent it. For 
he was alive and thrilling to the finger tips with the full joy of 
living I What was King Louis in the Old Palace, even now in 
the act of exchanging his scarlet velvet for rough gray wool ? 
He had not the secret of life I And who was Henry, holding 
his gallant court in the Temple, compared to him ? A delicious 
sense of warmth crept over his faculties as the wine flowed. 
The scent of flowers stole in upon him, the flowers that Jean« 
nette had carried when the procession passed. The singing and 
the monotonous noise of dancing in the street came subdued 
through the closed door and soothed him. But, above all, the 
feeling that he had thrown o£f all bonds of restraint, that he 
was living for the moment — living fully, passionately, recklessly 
— bathed him in an exquisite sense of personal completeness. 
He was in a sort of ecstasy of self-assertion, giving the fullest 
rein to his emotions, sinking his reason beneath a wave of sense. 
He had clean forgotten all the past. There was no Sir Guy at 
Woodleigh, no Sibilla, no Abbey ! There was only Jeannette 
leaning on his shoulder, and Louis opposite him, and old Julien 
serving the wine 1 This was to be alive 1 

As the hours sped, lawyer Jacques made his appearance with 
Aales. He looked the worse for his rough usage, but he said 
nothing to Arnoul, until the wine had loosened his tongue. 
Then he began as before to make insulting jests. But the boy 
answered him with coarser repartee, turning towards Jeannette 
to watch the effect of his words. She blushed and smiled, nod- 
ding her head at the discomfiture of Maitre Jacques; for she 
was used to the language of taverns and made no pretence at 
being shocked. Besides, she admired this great, strapping Eng- 
lishman, who was so strong and handsome ; and it was a pleas- 
ure to hear him speaking in language that she best understood. 

Jacques himself was surprised. He had no doubt wanted to 
pick a quarrel when he was prepared for it He grumbled and 
muttered under his breath to Aales, looking spitefully out of 
his little ferret eyes at Arnoul, until the dice box was thrown 
aside, and, with a final cup of wine, the party broke up. 

Louis and Arnoul, with the two girls, went out into the 
crowded street 



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740 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

Chapter XV. 

While the events recorded in the preceeding chapters were 
taking place, while Paris was living its gay and roystering life, 
while doctors were busy with their bitter disputes and students 
ready with practical illustrations of the teaching of their masters, 
while the character of Maitre Arnoul the Englishman, as he had 
come to be called, was developing and shaping itself by its 
contact with the lives of his associates, it must not be supposed 
that his Devon friends had forgotten the lad who had passed 
from them and set out with the Lord Abbot for the famous 
schools of the French capital. On the contrary, there were few 
indeed at Buckfast or at Woodleigh who did not often call to 
mind the good-humored, handsome boy who had been so uni- 
versal a favorite with them all. 

First and foremost, there was the parish priest. Sir Guy, 
who, now that his dreams seemed to be actually on the way 
towards realization, always thought and spoke of his younger 
brother as " My brother, the clerk of Paris " — as if such a mystic 
formula of words naturally conveyed to his hearers, as indeed 
it did, with a corresponding glow of satisfaction, to his own 
mind, the limitless height of possibilities to which, in this case 
at least, such a clerkship was inevitably bound to lead. His 
brother's pride in Arnoul was not to be measured by any ordi - 
nary standards. If he was aware of any weakness or defects 
in the lad's character, for him at least they were virtues which 
in the long run, would manifest themselves to his advantage; 
and the good points that every one who knew him at all, from 
Abbot Benet to Roger the fisherman, would have been only too 
ready to attest, became for simple, fond Sir Guy the very sum- 
mits, the mountain peaks, of excellence such as are reached by 
few, if indeed by any, mortals in this imperfect world. 

As the weeks and months drew out, Guy not having Arnoul 
near him to advise, forgot that there was any subject upon 
which his advice might have been necessary or useful; and, 
dwelling on the end rather than upon the means, pictured 
Arnoul already in his doctor's cap, coming back triumphantly 
to his home to accept the honors and dignities that would be 
sure to be thrust lavishly upon him. 

So Sir Guy dreamed and built airy castles for Arnoul to 
live in ; the while the lad, as we have seen, was going to the 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the englishman 741 

bad just about as quickly as circumstances would permit. But 
then Sir Guy knew little or nothing of Paris and his brother's 
doings there;' and so he dreamed on, happy in his ignorance, 
of the glorious career that would bring wealth and honor to 
them both. 

The Abbot, too, had Arnoul often in his thoughts. He 
knew what sort of a place Paris was, far better than Sir Guy 
did ; and he realized, as few but monks can realize, what its 
difficulties and dangers were. But he had the utmost confidence 
in his own judgment and he had also the utmost confidence in 
Arnoul. It did not need his seeing him, as he passed through 
Paris on his yearly visit to Citeaux, to be sure that all things 
were well with him. Had he not had the lad in his own keep- 
ing while he was in the alumnate; and, if need might be, were 
there not the Cistercians at Paris for Arnoul to consult if any 
difficulty should arise ? No, he did not worry ; for he was so 
sure of the boy. Which shows, perhaps, that even a monk and 
an abbot may be mistaken in his reading of a character that 
he thinks he understands. 

Budd, of course, and his good dame, had frequent speech 
with regard to the '' young master.'' Like Sir Guy and Abbot 
Benet, they missed his presence sorely — perhaps more, in their 
simple way, than either of the priests. Paris, for them, not- 
withstanding all that Arnoul had poured into their ears about 
it, was little more than a name; but they knew that he was 
there to gain learning and advancement, and, with Sir Guy, they 
harped always on the day when he should come back to Devon 
possessed of both. 

But there was another who was interested in Arnoul and 
his doings, who though she spoke of him seldom, if at all, had 
him in her thoughts none the less often. This was the Lady 
Sibilla, the daughter of Sir Sigar Vipont. 

Her life, until Arnoul came into it, in the manner already 
narrated, had been a quiet one and uneventful. She had lived 
happily with her father at Morel eigh, troubled only by his fits 
of depression and moroseness, until the memorable day on which 
he had lifted his hand against her. Then a whole series of 
new factors had come into play. It was not that she loved 
her father any the less. Her blind devotion to him was as 
great and, if anything, more tender than ever before; but a 
touch of sadness had crept in to color it. The outburst had 



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742 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

brought Vipont to his senses, for a time, at any rate; and he 
was lavish in atoning for it by every means in his power. 
Still Sibilla could not forget — though she never needed to forgive 
— the awful scene and the fact, so wounding to her pride, that 
servants and strangers had been witnesses of it. Even had she 
been able to forget, she would have been reminded of it every 
time she saw the priest of Woodleigh ; for he, good, blunder- 
ing soul, who would have cut off his right hand sooner than 
willingly cause pain to any living creature, asked her the most 
pointed questions of Sir Sigar every time he saw her. Then 
there was Arnoul. As the days passed, after he had left Eng- 
land, she found herself thinking more and more often of her 
chivalrous protector. His image had burnt itself deep upon 
her memory — his strong, shapely form, his noble brow, his 
thoughtful eyes. How handsome he was ! How strong ! How 
gentle i She had fallen in love with him as a matter of course, 
after the manner of people of the story books, though she did 
not know it. It was only after she discovered that his mem- 
ory was ever growing more present to her and dearer, that she 
began to realize how he had gone to Paris, taking with him 
something more than her precious relic in its golden reliquary. 
When she confessed her love to herself, in the silence of her 
own chamber, the hot blushes rushed mantling to her cheek. 
How noble he was, how true, how brave 1 There was no epi- 
thet too high or noble for him; no word to express the halo 
of romance with which she clothed him. He was her knight! 
He had her gage ! And she was his lady, for whom he would 
do battle 1 What mattered that the golden sun shone bright 
outside her window? What mattered the blue dome of sky 
closing in the mellow coombs that swelled from the bosom of 
the earth to meet it ? A single kestrel hawk hung poised in 
mid heaven. Beneath, in the cool, green woodland, a dove 
called to its answering mate. The pages chattered in the court 
below. The clank of steel came up shrilly from the guardroom. 
She could hear the whirr of the spinning wheels in the women's 
chamber. But she closed her great brown eyes and thought of 
Arnoul de Valletort, breathing his name softly and many times 
over to herself. She could understand, now, the beating of 
her heart when she had spoken to him at the castle gate and 
had bound her guerdon about his throat. It was love — the 
first stirrings of the spark divine within her breast, now fanned 



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I908.] ARNOUL the englishman 743 

into a flame by the dear breath of memory. It was love, the 
more precious to her, in that it was hers and hers alone, shared 
with no soul — no, not even with his. And when her cavalier 
should return, his days of learning over, then fate should weave 
their two lives together in one enduring strand, just as fate 
had first brought them into touch and set her heart on fire. 

When would he come back — and what? Sibilla began to 
speculate and dream her dreams like Sir Guy. He would come 
back to her, not an ecclesiastic but a doughty knight and, 
after a stately and honorable wooing, he would lead her to the 
altar. He would return with honor and renown to win back 
his patrimony or found a great estate for himself in the coun- 
try of his birth. Or if he came back poor, as he had gone, 
what mattered it ? Poverty was no barrier that true love 
could not overleap. Only — her one fear — Sit Guy spoke of his 
clerkship as if Arnoul were already in sacred orders and bound 
with the clerical vows. But she trusted her instinct more than 
Sir Guy's glowing hopes, and put her faith into the keeping 
of her own true heart. 

And so Sibilla spun her romance into the texture of her 
quiet life at Moreleigh and dreamed day dreams; until her 
cheek began to grow so pale and her manner so pensive that her 
father took notice of it. He attributed it to his outburst of rage 
as to a cause, and spoke to her of it in his rough, kind way. 

''What ails you, child?" he said to her one day. "The 
roses are fading from your cheeks with the fading petals in the 
gardens. You are sad, Sibilla, and grieving. Nay, tell me not, 
child"; as she made to answer him — and there was bitterness 
in his tone as he spoke, though his great hand rested lovingly 
upon her little one. ''Tell me not, for I know the cause. I 
do not blame you, child. I do not blame you, but — but — can- 
not you forget ? " 

"Father, Father," she interrupted him, the tears starting to 
her eyes. "You know I have forgotten save when you recall 
it to me thus. Forgotten ? Is there anything that could stand 
between us ? Oh, Father, you wrong my love for you in think- 
ing so. You dishonor your own love for me ! " 

" Still, Sibilla, you are not well. Some secret trouble ? " 

"No, Father; it is nothing. I am quite well. Believe me, 
I am well." She drew herself up to her full height, so that 
the clinging gown she wore fell in graceful folds from her 



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744 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

shoulders to the ground. Her head was thrown back as she 
smiled into his eyes, the lights dancing in the corners of her 
own, and the fresh blush of color showing upon her cheek. 
Her bosom gleamed like faint blushing ivory kissed by the 
sun where the pale green silk was cut away at the throat. A 
narrow circlet of dull gold was clasped about her neck. 

'* Ah ! That is something like my Sibilla ! Now you look 
as I would have you always look — happy, careless, fearless, as 
of old. But one can see/' he continued, " how pale you have 
become lately, and how serious, none the less. You are not 
the same light-hearted girl you were, Sibilla. You are sure 
that there is nothing?'' 

'^ Nothing, Father,'' she repeated, smiling up at him again, 
and blushing in spite of herself. 

He saw the smile and the blush, and kissed her gravely 
upon the brow. She returned his embrace, putting her soft 
arms around his neck. "Now will you believe me. Father?" 
she said. 

*' Believe you ? Yes, child ; of course I believe you. Why, 
your two eyes shine like twin stars, my Sibilla ! Your lips are 
the very bow of Cupid! One might think you were in love 
to look at you, so does the love-light shine in your eyes! 
Who is it, child ? " he asked in banter, stumbling by chance 
upon her secret. "Surely my child, my bird, my pretty Si- 
billa, has not given away her heart?" 

"Father!" she exclaimed, blushing furiously, and averting 
her face. 

" Ah ! So I have found you out, little one ! " He smiled 
in jest, half divining the truth. 

"And who is the happy suitor that aspires to the hand of 
the heiress of the Viponts ? Come, Sibilla ! Who is it ? Young 
Clifford ? Tracy ? Why, what a quiet minx you are to fall in 
love without telling your doting father all about it ! " 

" Father, how can you ! " cried the girl, now on the verge 
of tears again, her bosom swelling with emotion. "I have 
never spoken of love to a single soul ! Father, how can you 
say such things ! No one has ever made love to me — no one ! " 
And Sibilla stood proudly on her dignity and looked at her 
father with flashing eyes. 

"Come, Sibilla, come! Do not be angry! One of these 
days it will have to be, and then you will not speak like that," 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 745 

he said sadly. '^ And maids do lose their hearts ; in truth they 
do I Why, your mother — God assoil her ! — But there is some 
one, child, whom you have seen — ?" 

Was it maidenly, thought the girl quickly, was it consistent 
with the pride of the Viponts ? What would her father say if 
she did tell him? There was no reason why she should not 
keep her secret safely locked up in the innermost shrine of her 
own heart. No one knew. No one need ever know. It was 
hers and hers alone, a thing unshared and incommunicable* 

But as a counterbalance to this thought there was another. 
When a maid loves truly — ox a man, for the matter of that — 
there is a comfort, a solace, and a pride in speaking of the ob- 
ject of the love, in confessing to a real passion. She had no 
mother, poor maid, to confide in, and she loved her father 
dearly. Never before had she had secrets from him. Why 
should she hide this? She was not ashamed of her growing 
love for Arnoul. Rather was she proud of it — proud with that 
blind, unreasoning pride that is love itself, wrapping the loved 
one in a glamor of perfection, like a saint in his sanctity, in- 
tangible and unassailable. 

She made up her mind suddenly, unsuspiciously, without 
misgiving. 

''Yes, Father, you have guessed rightly. There is some one." 

"Young Tracy, Sibilla? Pomeroy? Clifford?" Vipont 
named houses of Devon fame, assured position, great estates. 

'' No, Father, it is none of those " ; replied the girl quietly, 
her downcast eyes seeking a refuge from her father's searching 
glance. 

*' Who then ? Bauzan ? Surely not I He is too old — and 
too ugly." He ended with a laugh. 

''No, none of those." The long lashes swept her cheek. 
'' It is the brother of Sir Guy of Woodleigh, Arnoul de Valle- 
tort, whom I love." 

" What I " gasped Vipont, almost speechless with astonish- 
ment '' Sibilla, Sibilla, what are you saying ? Arnoul de Valle- 
tort? The boy has not an acre of land to boast of! Come, 
girl, what madness is this?" 

" It is no madness. Father, but the simple truth. God help 
me! I know not that he even cares for me; but I confess it 
— I love him with all my heart and soul." 

" By the wounds of God, girl ! " retorted Vipont, fast work- 



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746 Arnoul the Englishman [Mar., 

ing himself into a passion. ''Have you no modesty? Have 
you no pride ? Have you no shame ? A Vipont and a beg- 
garly Valletort mated ! Faugh I My gorge rises at it ! A Vi- 
pont — and my daughter! The younger brother of a fallen 
house — the brother of the shaveling priest of Woodleigh ! Are 
you mady girl ? Have you lost your senses ? '' 

** You asked me. Father/' the girl answered, pale and trem- 
bling. It was much harder than she thought. The confession 
was not enough; she must also defend her new-born love. 
** You asked me, Father, and I have answered you. I have told 
you what my lips would reveal to no one else. Arnoul de 
Valletort claims as good a lineage as we. I see no madness 
in such love, nor do I feel in aught ashamed." 

'' But he is a beggar ! " 

** Is there naught but gold to think of in the world ? " asked 
the girl bitterly, lifting her swimming eyes to his. 

'' I will not hear of such a thing ! " stormed Vipont, the 
danger signals of rage swelling red upon his brow. ** VLy 
daughter shall not think such thoughts. Have done with it, 
girl 1 A beggar and, they say, a clerk I Let your modesty 
spare you shame ! This Valletort is half a monk ! Besides, he 
does not love you ! He cannot love you ! He has not dared 
— has he — to whisper to you of love ? " 

** Ah 1 '' Sibilla sighed. ** You have asked me, Father, and 
I have answered you truly. I love Arnoul, come what may. 
He has not spoken to me. He may never speak. For aught 
I know he does not look on me with love — '' 

The man swore a dreadful oath. ''I will not hear of it,'' 
he shouted. ** I forbid you to speak — to think, of such a thing I 
No daughter of mine " — and he raised his hand threateningly 
— '^ no daughter of mine shall so demean herself 1 Shall, do I 
say ? You have demeaned yourself already and dragged your 
honor in the dust in making such a shameless boast ! God's 
blood ! Would you go to him upon your knees and beseech 
his condescension ? " 

"Father 1" exclaimed the girl pleadingly. "Father! Re- 
member, I beseech you ! " 

Is was enough. The man's visage paled suddenly and his 
hand dropped to his side. He had been within an ace of strik- 
ing her. For a moment he stood silent; then, the pent-up 
wrath choking his voice, he spoke. 



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i9o8.] Arnoul the Englishman 747 

''Forgive mei Sibilla, but do not goad me too far. For- 
bearance has reached its snapping- point. Such words as you 
have spoken are enough to stir my rage to very madness. I 
forbid — I utterly forbid — these thoughts of Valletort. And if 
the churl should dare to raise his eyes to you, I shall send him 
— I swear it on my faith 1 — to join his forebears in hell. But 
he will never dare ! Such thoughts are unmaidenly in you, 
Sibilla. Put them from youl When the time comes for you 
to marry — when it comes, I say — I will find you a suitor. But 
this Valletort — I will not have you think of him I '' 

The girl stood white and trembling. Vipont's forced calm- 
ness was worse than his anger. Still she made answer. 

''Father, in all I can I will obey you. It is not from fear 
but from love that I have never disobeyed you yet. But I 
cannot do this thing! I cannot promise! It is not in my 
power 1 How can I love when you bid me love, or hate when 
you bid me hate? I would never do aught against your will; 
but as well might I bid the wind to cease from singing through 
the leaves as hid my heart not to love!" 

" Then you are no daughter of mine," replied Vipont in the 
same cold voice, shaking with suppressed passion. " I forbid 
you to love this Valletort whelp, Sibilla I Mark you, I forbid 
this! You will forget it as a passing fancy. I, your father, 
command youl" 

And, fearful of himself, he turned on his heel and left her. 

The poor child burst into tears. It was hard enough to tell 
her father of her love — far worse that he should take it like 
this. Oh, why — she wondered — should affection have come 
thus into her heart ? Why should it grow to be a part of her- 
self ? Why should she love at all ? She found no answer, for 
there is none. So she dried her eyes after a time and went to 
her women, suffering silently, swayed hither and thither by the 
cross-purposes of her heart. Yet, such is the waywardness of 
human nature, from that day her love for Arnoul grew ever 
greater, and her presentiment of its ultimate fruition more strong 
and certain. And from that day her heart was happy with a 
serene happiness and proud with a glorious pride, as having 
raised her maiden love above all other things so high that she 
could bring herself to boast of it in the very teeth of her fa- 
ther's displeasure. 

(to be continued.) 



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OVERLANDING. 

BY M. F. QUINLAN. 

** Now this is the law of the Orerland that all in the West obey. 
A man must cover with trareling sheep a siz-mile stage a day ; 
But this is the law which the drorers make, right easily understood. 
They travel their stage where the grass is bad, but they camp where the grass is good ; 
They camp and they ravage the squatter's grass, till never a blade remains. 
Then they drift away as the white clouds drift on the edge of the salt-bush plains. 
From camp to camp and from run to run they battle it hand to hand. 
For a blade of grass and the right to pass on the track of the Overland.*' 

F all the avocations out back, there is perhaps 
none that requires so many qualifications as that 
of droving. It takes a smart man to be a drover. 
Not only must he understand the handling of 
stocky but also the management of men. 
On every overlanding trip he has in his employ from eight 
to twelve men, six or eight shepherds, a cook, and a horse 
boy. These are usually rough customers, difficult to handle, 
hard to hold in leash. And since pistols are proscribed in the 
back country — no one carrying firearms without a special li- 
cense — ^the drover who knows how to use his hands is the one 
who enforces respect. 

In the gray wastes of Australia, where the employer and 
employed stand side by side in the battle of life, it is invariably 
the best man that wins. 

There are not too many rules and regulations out back. In 
engaging a hand no arrangement is entered into beyond the 
rate of payment; the length of his job depends on a variety 
of possible incidents. For instance, if a man sleeps during his 
watch and the cattle break camp in the night, he may be 
turned off in the morning. Or perhaps when a bush-shanty is 
struck on the lonely plains, the shepherd may succumb to an 
almighty thirst. For these or such like delinquencies the hand 
is subject to instant dismissal. When summary notice is given 
along the track the drover must be prepared to take off his 
coat and settle matters then and there. It may be that the 
drover's man does not care a hang whether he is turned off or 
not, but for the sake of appearances he may feel impelled to 



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I908.J OVERLANDING 749 

protest. Hence there will be a round or two with the boss. 
If a man is dismissed close up to a shanty, he receives just 
the amount of pay that is due to him. If on the open plains, 
where no human habitation is within call, he is entitled to ra- 
tions as well. With this provender he strikes out on his own, 
sometimes in the hope of making a homestead, but more often 
doubling back to the last bush-shanty. For to the drover's 
man the nearest shanty is the best shanty. To him these way- 
side places of refreshment are all too few. To him in particular 
the lay of the ** Bush Christening " is especially dear, were it only 
for the opening voice: 

'* On the outer Barcoo, where the churches are few 
And men of religion are scanty, 
On a road never crossed 'cept by folk that are lost, 
One Michael Magee kept a shanty.'' 

Indeed the bush- shanty out back has much to answer for. 
But even though his men may at times stray away from the path 
of sobriety, the wise drover will hesitate to turn off a hand in the 
open spaces. Hands are scarce in the back country. It may 
be many days before he comes up with a traveler — and the 
man ''on the wallaby"* is not always keen for a job. So the 
drover must exercise judgment and sometimes be content to 
look the other way. 

But besides knowing how to deal with men, the overlander 
needs to know his way about. Unless he's an expert bushman 
he's no good. Out here in the wilderness the drover should 
be able to take his bearings by day and by night. So too he 
must have a keen eye for observing passing things if he is to 
avoid being ''bushed." It may be the lie of a dead gum; or 
a projecting bit of rock; perhaps the trace of the mail in the 
sand; or, best of all, the faint track of emu pads on the dry 
ground. These earth marks are not easy to find, but since they 
generally lead to a water hole, they are worth studying. 

According to the rules of the Great Stock Routes, cattle 
must travel ten miles a day. For sheep, it is a six- mile stage. 
But while sheep can live on the run without much water, pro- 
vided the feed is green, on the dry, dusty road, they need to 
be watered daily. With cattle this is even more necessary. 

* A slang tenn for an " out-of-work " along the track. 



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750 OVERLANDING [Mar., 

And as the Government tanks only occur at intervals varying 
from six to twenty miles, it follows that the finding of natural 
water is an important matter to the drover with a big mob. 

In these dry stretches it is difficult enough to find water 
for the camp. The water cask is jealously guarded by the 
cook, while each man carries his own water bag. These are 
replenished at an occasional creek along the line of route. 
Sometimes the creek, which in the good seasons was a swift 
running stream, has shrunk up into a chain of water- holes, the 
liquid therein being of both the color and the consistency of 
mud. 

But whatever the difficulty to the drover of providing water 
for his men, these pale before the greater difficulty of supplying 
the needs of his stock. To be obliged to shift camp every day 
— twenty-four hours being the outside limit for grazing on a 
Government reserve — and to make provision, finding feed and 
water for twenty thousand traveling sheep, is no light task in 
a dry season. Yet this is the daily problem which every drover 
must solve for himself out back. 

Apart, however, from these material matters, the drover has 
other questions to face; and the obstacles put in the way of 
the overlander may have serious consequences. Therefore, if 
he is to stand his ground in dealing with the pastoralists, through 
whose country lie the open stock routes, he must have a clear 
and definite knowledge of all legislation affecting traveling stock. 
He must know the different Acts of Parliament which protect 
the interests of the squatter, no less than those which apper- 
tain to the rights of flocks and herds. 

In a bad season, with the sheep dying all along the route, 
the desperate drover will disregard all the rules of the road, 
and, regardless of the lurid expostulations of the station hands, 
he will spread out his sheep beyond the half-mile track, bat- 
tling his way in the teeth of everything, determined only to 
keep the life in his flocks. At such times every man's hand is 
against him; and he — what does the desperate drover care for 
the printed word ? Yet — 

'' . . . this is the law of the Great Stock Routes — 'tis writ* 
ten in white and black — 
The man that goes with a traveling mob must keep to a half- 
mile track; 



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I908.] OVERLANDING 75 1 

And the drovers keep to a half-mile track on the runs where 
the grass is dead, 

But they spread their sheep on a well grassed run till they 
go with a two-mile spread. 

So the squatters hurry the drovers on from dawn till the fall 
of night» 

And the squatter's dogs and the drover's dogs get mixed in 
a deadly fight ; 

Yet the squatter's men, though they hunt the mob, are will- 
ing the peace to keep. 

For the drovers learn how to use their hands when they go 
with the traveling sheep. . • .'' 

From the heart of Queensland to the Victorian capital is a 
long way ; longer than I can say. But from Melbourne to the 
Queensland border — that is, just over the fence — it measures 
twelve hundred miles. This is a common trip for the drover, 
but it's a big thing, take it all round; and it is natural that it 
would entail some foresight and the arrangement of certain pre- 
liminaries. First of all, there is the drover's contract which 
must be carefully drawn up and duly signed. 

In former years the drover was paid so much per head for 
every sheep, or every bullock, on delivery at their appointed 
destination. For sheep the rate was perhaps nine pence, per- 
haps one shilling per head. And when this was multiplied by 
say, twenty thousand, the profits to the drover were considera- 
ble, even when the working expenses had been deducted ; for the 
drover must always pay the wages of the men, and find their 
'' tucker," besides supplying mounts and remounts throughout the 
trip. 

But this payment per head, though satisfactory from the dro- 
ver's point of view, was found unsatisfactory to the pastoralist. 
For instead of his stock arriving at the capital in prime condi- 
tion, as they were when they left the run, they werie delivered 
thin and ragged ; the aim of the drover paid by the job being 
to hurry them on, romping them over good and bad pastures 
alike, so that they might the sooner reach their distant goal. 

To-day, however, a different arrangement holds. Every 
drover is now paid according to the time he spends on the trip. 
Thus the pastoralist finds it better to pay the drover so many 

VOL. LXXXYI.— 48 



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752 OVERLANDING [Mar., 

pounds per day for an indefinite period, and thereby ensure the 
good condition of the stock. 

For every sheep that is lost on the road, the drover must 
pay. Sometimes the rate is eleven shillings a head ; other times 
it may be as high as twenty shillings a head. But if» on the 
other hand, one sheep or a hundred and fifty sheep die along 
the track, the drover will suffer no loss, provided he can pro- 
duce the scalps of the missing sheep. By the scalp is under- 
stood the two ears with the connecting strip of hide. On every 
pair of ears are certain marks for identification. First there 
is the registered Government ear- mark; and secondly the sta- 
tion age mark, which latter mark will only be known to the 
station hands of the particular run to which the sheep be- 
longs. 

When the drover's contract is settled, the sheep are counted 
and then branded. In New South Wales T. is the brand; in 
Queensland it is a large Q. over T. (Queensland Traveling 
Stock). This brand is placed, not on the flank but on the 
back. According to a Government regulation no traveling stock 
may pass along the open routes unless this obligation is com- 
plied with ; and the drover who would endeavor to slip across 
with un branded sheep would be promptly held up on the border 
by the Government authorities on the charge of '' lifting " cat- 
tle. 

But, besides having his sheep properly branded, the drover 
needs to provide himself with certain documents signed by a 
Justice of the Peace, which will give him the right of way along 
the track of the Overland. First there is his permit and then 
his traveling statement — the latter being similar to a merchant- 
man's bill of lading — giving such particulars as the number of 
sheep in the mob, where from, their destination, the late own- 
er's name, the name of the buyer, and lastly the name of the 
drover. All these things are entered in the drover's papers, 
which must be shown on demand to every inspector along the 
route. 

Occasionally it may happen that in the hurry of setting out, 
a paper is carelessly filled in, and though the omission may not 
be of much importance, the zealous inspector will bold up the 
drover as a matter of abstract principle. The immediate result 
of such an action is uncertain, since every drover acts on bis own 



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I908.] OVERLANDING 753 

responsibility when it comes to an emergency. To knock out the 
inspector is the quickest solution, and sometimes the only one 
that occurs to the drover, but the wisdom of this course de- 
pends on the chances of a magistrate being within a practica- 
ble radius. Anyhow the drover is always ready to take the 
risks, being a light-hearted son of the South, and possessed of 
the optimism which accompanies a well-knit frame and a fist 
like a sledge hammer. And if in the enthusiasm of the mo- 
ment he happens to handle the Government inspector a bit 
roughly, it may subsequently transpire that this devil-may-care 
drover is the son of a prominent citizen in some distant capi- 
tal, that his father holds the King's Commission in a sister 
State, and is altogether a power in the land. Then the magis- 
trate may possibly manage to find cause why a warrant should 
not be issued, while the son of his old friend leisurely tides 
away into the gray silence, with his pipe between his teeth and 
his heart untrammeled by care. 

The night's camp is always arranged beforehand, therefore 
the first thing the drover does, is to despatch the cook and the 
horse boy to fix up things in advance. In the light wagon 
driven by the cook are stored all the provisions and the camp 
requisites, including the drover's tent and the men's swags. 
And while the cook busies himself getting the camp ship-shape, 
the horse boy hobbles the horses — perhaps fifteen or twenty — 
which are to serve as remounts throughout the trip. If the 
horse boy thinks fit, he may give the cook a band in the culi- 
nary arrangements, but in this case the cook must clearly un- 
derstand that the services rendered are works of supererogation 
and no more. The horse boy takes no orders from the cook. 
Only the boss may lift his voice in the camp. Were the cook 
to take to himself any such prerogative, the chances are a hun- 
dred to one that the horse boy would " go for him " with an ax: 

No; the rights of the individual are jealously guarded out 
back, any infringement being put down instantly and with a 
firm hand. 

The next duty of the horse boy is to prepare the enclosure 
in which to "hold" the sheep. This is done by throwing up 
a light barricade of green boughs or the dead limbs of trees. 
But as a complete barrier of wood would entail too much labor, 
a row of stout wooden pegs are hammered into the ground, and 



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754 OVERLANDING [Mar«» 

along this line of pegs is stretched a length of white calico, 
about twelve inches wide. In the daytime this barrier would 
not suffice to keep in the sheep, but it answers for the night. 

When overlanding, sheep are never left unguarded, in view 
of the possible danger of their breaking camp. Usually one 
man remains on watch — with ** scrub '' cattle two, since the lat- 
ter are more difficult to hold. 

The watches are in shifts throughout the night, the last 
watch being taken by the boss. He has plenty to think about 
and to arrange before the camp is astir. 

Just before daybreak the boss stirs up the horse boy, who 
has to track up the horses before the gray plains awaken ; be- 
fore the birds begin to twitter, and the hum of the insect world 
fills the ear and shuts off the sound of hobbled hoofs far out 
in the scrub. 

At dawn, or soon after, the overlanders are again on the 
road. In dealing with a large mob of twenty thousand sheep, 
it is usual to break them up into separate flocks, of four thou- 
sand to a flock, this being a convenient number for two men to 
handle. The sheep dogs are worked in relays, every dog taking 
a shift each alternate day. Either barbs or kelpies are best 
for shepherding. Collies have too little stamina for overland- 
ing. No bushman would be bothered with a collie. Accord- 
ing to him every collie requires a bucket of water, a pair of 
shoes, and a shady tree, otherwise he'll knock up ; whereas the 
wiry kelpie is built for the strenuous life and will battle along 
through the drought and wag his tail at the end of it. The 
kelpie is always game. 

Once the flocks are started, they are in the hands of the 
shepherds. The drover goes on ahead to examine the country. 
He has always enough to fill his mind, and the anxieties of 
the way may not be shared by any one. He must keep his 
own counsel and make his own plans. Wherever the track lies 
along a river frontage, water is assured, the Government reserves 
being situated at regular intervals of six miles. Sometimes it 
happens that another mob of traveling stock is close up. The 
drover must know what mobs are on the road and where they 
are. Should two mobs arrive simultaneously, there is always 
the danger of the sheep getting ''boxed," therefore, if one 
mob be already camped on the reserve, these must be drawn 



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I908.J OVERLANDING 755 

off further along the track, while the newly arrived mob is wa- 
tered. These must then go further out to a camp improvised 
by the drover. 

For feed there may be some grass to be picked up, but 
the river frontage is usually eaten bare. Boree scrub is good 
eating for stock, and so is the stunted salt- bush — as distinct 
from the Old Man Salt-bush which grows to a height of eight 
feet. Both grow on the plains, but the latter makes poor feed. 
In parts of New South Wales and Queensland the Darling Pea 
grows in isolated patches of country. In appearance it is pretty 
enough, composed as it is of two shades of delicate green, but 
to the drover it is a plant accursed. When sheep eat it they 
go silly, butting their heads into the ground, attempting to 
climb trees, and refusing to come in to water. Pea-struck 
sheep have usually to be destroyed. 

Another difficulty that the drover has to grapple with is to 
gauge the strength of the next river. In the dry seasons the 
sheep can ford a river without much difficulty, but after the rains, 
when the water swirls along high up on the banks, it may be 
an exciting time for both men and stock. Sheep can swim 
well, but they will never take the initiative in crossing running 
water. What the drover has to do, therefore, is to get them 
started; for whatever the foremost sheep does, that the mob 
will do. 

So the mob are driven up against the river bank and the 
drover chooses a leader — one with curly horns is best — and 
with this sheep in tow he passes across the river in the ferry. 
Arrived at the opposite bank, he ties the animal up by the 
horns to a neighboring tree. No sheep likes to be separated 
from the mob, consequently he begins a series of '' baa-baaing." 
This attracts the attention of the mob, who start fidgetting to 
join the isolated wether. Now is the time for the drover, who 
accordingly signs to his men. Helter-skelter, one after the 
other — right side up, wrong side up, any way up— the sheep 
are pitched into the swiftly running river. There is a mighty 
splashing and frightened bleatings, but once in the water each 
sheep strikes out for the bank ahead, while the rest of the mob, 
fearing to be left behind, jump in after their mates, and the 
crossing is safely accomplished. 

Thus day follows day along the open track, and the mc- 



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756 OVERLANDING Mar. 

notony which would seem to be inseparable from life in the 
open spaces is broken by the obstacles and difficulties of the 
way. The subtle charm of the wild is in no sense affected 
by the seasons. Be they good or bad, whether in sunshine or 
in storm, the drover lies under the spell of the bushland, in 
whose keeping are the great stock routes which lead away from 
the busy haunts of men into the silent places where the hu- 
man heart finds rest. 

How well the Australian poet knew this is indicated by those 
lines which throb with a sense of fulfilled desire — of joy and 
contentment, the heritage of those whose lives are passed on the 
far-reaching plains where beats the heart of the great Earth- 
Mother. Thus he writes: 

'' In my wild erratic fancy, visions come to me of Clancy 
Gone a-droving * down the Cooper,' where the Western dro- 
vers go; 
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them 
singing. 
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never 
know. 
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices 
greet him 
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars. 
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, 
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars." 



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LORD KELVIN. 

BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D.. LL.D. 

|N December 17, 1907, the cable brought the news 
of the death of Lord Kelvin, one of the great- 
est of the scientific investigators of the last cen- 
tury, and of the last two generations probably 
the most important contributor to applied sci- 
ence and scientific theory. Few men have been more honored 
by his contemporaries than this man, in whom royalty honored 
itself by raising him to the peerage. Ten years ago a most 
enthusiastic celebration was held in honor of his completion of 
fifty years' service in the University of Glasgow. At this ju- 
bilee delegates from every civilized country and every impor- 
tant scientific society in the world came to do honor to this 
dean of physical science. 

The following estimate of Lord Kelvin was written by one 
of his scientific confreres, Arthur G. Webster, of Clarke Uni- 
versity : 

With the death of Lord Kelvin, on December 17, there 
passes away the grandest figure of contemporary science, and 
with it closes an epoch in the history of physics. When Wil- 
liam Thomson was bom, in 1824, Ohm's law of the flow of 
electric currents had not been discovered. Oersted's discovery 
of the magnetic action of the current was but four years old, 
while Faraday's capital discovery of the induction of currents 
was not to come for seven years. The wave theory of light 
had been but recently set on its feet by Young and Fresnel, 
and was not yet thoroughly believed, while the two laws of 
thermodynamics, perhaps the most important contribution of 
the nineteenth century, were unknown. All these things 
l/ord Kelvin saw, and a great part of them he was. Probably 
no one, with the single exception of Helmholtz, bom three 
years earlier, exercised greater influence on the science of the 
nineteenth century, while to compare the influence of these 
two great physicists with that of Darwin is as bootless as to 
question whether the grass is greener than the sky is blue.* 

* Science, January 3, xpoS* 



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758 LORD Kelvin [Mar., 

Lord Kelvin himself, however, would have been one of the 
last men to admit that he was proficient in science. Some 
eight years ago, when he resigned his professorship at Glasg^ow 
University, wishing still to maintain his connection with the 
institution, he entered his name as a student in the matricula- 
tion books. This was what he considered himself to be — a life- 
long, patient student of science. Few students who have ever 
matriculated at any university have so well deserved the name 
as he, even during these last years. 

When physical science is considered in its popular sense, 
the name of Tyndall suggests itself as the representative mod- 
em investigator. Lord Kelvin was a greater man than Tyndall, 
though he came much less before the public, for he was the 
real leader of scientific thought in physics, not only among; 
English-speaking people but for the world. It is curious to 
reflect that much of Tyndall's reputation was a mere exploita* 
tion of his outspoken agnosticism. Lord Kelvin, eminently con- 
servative, a profound believer in the Creator and in the moral 
obligations of man to his Creator, and of this life as a prep- 
aration for the next, had no such adventitious aid to fame. 

More than once Lord Kelvin publicly proclaimed his utter 
disagreement with those who assert that science teaches noth- 
ing about creation or a Creator. Less than four years ago, at 
a meeting where rationalism was the subject of discussion, he 
stated his convictions on the relations of science to the belief 
in a Creator and to the manifestation of God in the world 
around us. He declared that many of the assumptions of ra- 
tionalists and materialists are absurd in the light of science 
alone. The doubts of the incredulous, he maintained, were much 
more bothersome than the difficulties experienced by the be- 
liever. It is impossible to understand the meaning of life and 
the universe when one has rejected the existence of God and 
the immortality of the soul. 

Lord Kelvin's speech on the occasion mentioned was re- 
ported in the London Times for May 2, 1903. Two days later 
the distinguished scientist corrected certain words in the report 
of the Times^ but acknowledged that the rest might stand : 

Science positively affirmed creative power. Science made 
every one feel a miracle in himself. It was not in dead mat- 
ter that they lived and moved and had their being, but in the 



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i9o8.] Lord Kelvin 759 

creative and directing power which science compelled ihem 
to accept as an article of belief. They could not escape from 
that when they studied the physics and dynamics of living 
and dead matter all around. Modem biologists were com- 
ing once more to a firm acceptance of something, and that was 
a vital principle. They had an unknown object put before 
them in science. In thinking of that object they were all ag- 
nostics. They only knew God in his works, but they were 
absolutely forced by science to admit and to believe with ab- 
solute confidence in a directive power — in an influence other 
than physical, dynamical, electrical forces. Cicero denied 
that they could have come into existence by a fortuitous con- 
course of atoms. Was there anything so absurd as to believe 
that a number of atoms by falling together of their own ac* 
cord could make a crystal, a sprig of moss, a microbe, a liv- 
ing animal ? People thought that, given millions of years, 
these might come to pass, but they could not think that a 
million of millions of years could give them unaided a beauti- 
ful world like ours. They had a spiritual influence, and in 
science a knowledge that there was that influence in the 
world around them. He admired the healthy, breezy at- 
mosphere of free thought in Professor Henslow's lecture. 
Let no one be afraid of true freedom. They could be free in 
their thoughts, in their criticisms, and with freedom of 
thought they were bound to come to the conclusion that sci- 
ence was not antagonistic to religion but a help for religion. 

The life of such a man is worth profound study. Lord Kel- 
vin, William Thomson, was born in Belfast, in 1824. His great 
colleague in the realm of physics, John Tyndall, was also of 
Irish birth. The Celtic qualities of poetic imagination and in- 
tellect eminently fit the Irish for success in literature, and the 
same qualities, under proper circumstances, have a like effect 
for success in scientific investigation. In a lecture on the Irish 
School of Medicine, delivered at Johns Hopkins University 
some years ago, I called attention to the fact that Irishmen, 
as far as their opportunities went, were quite as successful 
in science as in literature. 

It has always been generally recognized that a very im- 
portant portion of what is called English literature is really 
due to the native genius of English-speaking writers of Irish 
birth and parentage, whose Celtic qualities of mind and heart 



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76o LORD Kelvin [Mar., 

have proved the sources of some of the most significant devel- 
opments in the language of their adoption. What a large la- 
cuna would be created in English literature by the removal 
from it of the work of such men as Dean Swift, Goldsmith, 
Burke, Sheridan, and Moore! It is not generally known, 
however, that if the work of the distinguished Irish physi- 
cians and surgeons of the last century were to be blotted out 
ot English medical literature, there would be left quite as 
striking and as wide a gap.* 

Lord Kelvin was always proud of the fact that his qualities 
of mind and heart were essentially Irish. In the course of a 
popular address delivered at the height of his fame, he em- 
phasized the fact that he was proud of his Irish origin and 
character, and said : 

The only previous enumeration of the senses according to 
which they were considered as being more* than five in num- 
ber, is, so far as I know, the Irish counting of seven senses. 
The seventh sense of the Irish, if I am not mistaken, was the 
common- sense ; and I believe that among my fellow-country- 
men, for I talk as an Irishman, the possession of this seventh 
sense, which in my judgment the Irish possess to a note- 
worthy degree, has done more in the course of time to temper 
the woes of the Irish people than would even the removal of 
the '^ melancholy ocean " which surrounds their shores. 

Lord Kelvin received his education at the universities of 
Glasgow and Cambridge. He was the son of James Thomson, 
LL.D., a distinguished professor of mathematics in the Uni- 
versity of Glasgow, where the son began his academic career. 
At the age of eighteen he went to St. Peter's College, Cam- 
bridge, and his success, especially in his favorite study of 
mathematics, can be realized from the fact that he became 
First Smith's Prizeman and Second Wrangler. This meant that 
he was head of his class, and second in the severest examina- 
tion in mathematics held anywhere in Europe. One might 
conclude that he was a ''grind." But he won the Colquhoun 
Sculls as the best oarsman at Cambridge, and during his senior 
year was president of the Musical Society of the university. 

* Mahtrs of Modem Medicine, Article, "The Irish School of Medicine.'* By James 
J. Walsh, M.D. 



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i9o8.] LORD Kelvin 761 

This diversity of inteiests remained with him all his life. A 
writer in the Athenaum says of him that ** throughout his long 
life he retained his powers wonderfully, and had that fine sim- 
plicity of nature which goes with greatness. His interests were 
by no means confined to science, and when he was over eighty 
he would converse with the animation of a boy on all sorts of 
subjects." 

After leaving Cambridge he went to Paris. Kelvin's genius 
was eminently mathematical. He worked for nearly a year 
in the laboratory of the famous Regnault, and there prepared 
himself for that life-long devotion to the mathematical side 
of physical science. In the words of Helmholtz, he had '* the 
gift of translating real facts into mathematical equations and 
vice versa^ a gift which is far rarer than the capacity for find- 
ing the solution of a given mathematical problem." 

At the age of twenty-two years Lord Kelvin was appointed 
professor of natural philosophy in the University of Glasgow. 
Under the term natural philosophy was included at that time 
most of what we now call physics, that is, the general subjects 
of sound, heat, light, electricity, and the basic principles of 
matter. He held the professorial chair, thus early occupied, 
with ever- increasing prestige for fifty- three years. 

Lord Kelvin first came into public prominence in connec- 
tion with the laying of the Atlantic cable. It is very probable 
that but for his absolute assurance and his complete confidence 
in the result, founded on good scientific reasons, the cable never 
would have been laid, or at least not in our time. When the 
first attempt failed, it was he who insisted that there were no 
insurmountable physical obstacles in the way. He was the 
electrician of the second expedition. Because the ordinary tele- 
graph apparatus, with its delicate relay, proved too heavy for a 
long submarine cable, a more sensitive receiver was found nec- 
essary. Lord Kelvin, by his inventive genius, devised such an 
instrument, and thus solved the largest problem which presented 
itself in the laying of the cable. The principle of his device is 
extremely simple. A current of electricity passing through a 
coil of wire always influences the magnetic needle. In Kelvin's 
apparatus a tiny magnet is suspended by delicate silk fibre in- 
side a coil of very fine wire. The minimum current causes 
this to be deflected. As it is so small, however, it is difficult 
to note its movements. To detect even the slightest move- 



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76a LORD Kelvin [Mar., 

ment, a minute mirror is attached to the magnet On this 
a ray of light is thrown. The slightest deviation of the mirror 
causes a large deviation in the reflected ray of light The 
indicator- handy though of considerable length, is absolutely 
without weighty since it is this beam of light Signals may be 
made through this with a very small current. The whole ap- 
paratus is most ingenious and gives the best possible idea of 
the practical bent of Kelvin's mind. The principle thus ap* 
plied by him, of using a ray of light as an indicator, has been 
adopted frequently in applied mechanics. 

Other ingenious inventions of Lord Kelvin deserve to be 
mentioned. His voyages as cable- electrician, as well as his 
devotion to yachting as a recreation, suggested many inventions 
for the use of navigators. He invented an apparatus for de- 
termining deep-sea soundings which was much superior to in- 
struments formerly in use. He used piano wire instead of rope ; 
and thus the indicator of his sounding apparatus depends on 
the pressure of the depth of water, and not on the crude, more 
or less guess-work, measurement of previous times. He is also 
the inventor of a compass in which lightness and sensitiveness 
are well exemplified. The card of his compass is supported by 
siltc strings. He perfected the method of correction of the 
compass for the deviation to which it is subject because of the 
ship's magnetism. The original idea for this came from Abb6 
Hauy, the father of crystalography, but Kelvin's elaboration of 
it practically gave us the instrument in use to-day. Besides 
Lord Kelvin was the inventor of a number of instruments for 
the measurements of units of various kinds in electricity. 

Lord Kelvin did not confine his inventive applications to 
electrical science. Like many another scientist of the nineteenth 
century, his thoughts naturally turned to meteorology. With 
his profound knowledge of the great influence of electricity on 
air, it is not surprising that he should have realized that the 
continual changing of the electrical condition of the atmosphere 
must have an important effect on other atmospheric changes. 
He felt that the recording of these changes would sooner or 
later help in the forecast of weather conditions. He invented 
an apparatus by which such a record of the variations of the 
electrical potential of the atmosphere may be recorded auto- 
matically. 

Very early in life Lord Kelvin commenced that devotion to 



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i9o8.] Lord Kelvin 763 

original scientific research which was to characterize his entire 
career. Few present-day students realize how difficult it was 
to introduce into the world of scientific thought the theory of 
the conservation of energy, now such a common-place. The 
obvious of the present is sometimes the impossible or the ab- 
surd of a past generation. Motion stops, it is true, but we 
realize that its arrest, the energy by which it is carried on, is 
changed into heat. The heat of the sun, on the other hand, is 
practically the prime motive power of everything that moves on 
earth. Our main sources of energy are wood and coal. We 
are able to liberate energy so readily from these, because the 
sun's heat has been stored up in them, and the potential energy 
thus accumulated may be readily utilized. Even when we use 
a waterfall as a source of energy, it is the sun that is the 
prime mover. The sun's heat vaporizes the water of the ocean, 
carries it in the form of clouds over the land whence it came, 
is shed as rain, and flows back again into the sea. 

Practically every schoolboy now knows all this, and most 
of them realize that no motion is ever really lost, no energy 
ever ceases to exist. It may change its mode of action, but 
that is all. Heat is a mode of motion. The store of energy in 
the universe is not lessened, in spite of our employment of it 
for our own purposes. We lower the plane of it somewhat, but 
the total amount of it remains. Long ago St. Thomas Aquinas 
said : " No thing will ever be converted into nothingness " ; and 
Aquinas meant that neither matter nor energy could ever be 
destroyed, and that they would never be annihilated. He had 
reached this conclusion by deduction which, as a method of 
arriving at a new truth, is often scoffed at to-day. It is usual- 
ly stated that these principles of the indestructibility of matter 
and the conservation of energy were first discovered at the end 
of the first half of the nineteenth century, but as a matter of 
fact they were then for the first time experimentally demon- 
strated; as principles they had been known long before. The 
truths seemed so novel and even impossible to the scientific 
world, however, that for a long time scientists absolutely re- 
fused to listen especially to the doctrine of the conservation of 
energy. 

Three men are responsible for this new development in sci- 
ence. They are Robert Mayer, a German physician, and the 
Englishmen, Joule and Lord Kelvin. Kelvin, in 1847, &t the 



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764 LORD Kelvin [Mar., 

age of twenty-three, before the British Association, stood as the 
champion of the theory of the conservation of energy, which had 
just been set forth in its complete and logical form by Joule. 
Old scientists listened with impatience to this young man who 
was trying to teach them something that they could see at 
once was absurd. Absurd is such a dangerous word in science. 
Nearly all the great discoveries have looked absurd to some dis- 
tinguished scientific authority when they made their first ap- 
pearance. It is not astonishing that men who have been teach- 
ing a particular science from thirty to forty years, should re- 
fuse assent to the supposed new discovery of a young man. 
Kelvin's paper on the conservation of energy received, therefore, 
scant attention. 

The young man, however, was right. It required a decade 
of patient demonstration and forceful exposition to make the 
points of the new doctrine clear, but Kelvin did it, and then 
the English scientific world realized that a new star had arisen 
above its horizon, and that illumination over many obscurities 
might be confidently looked for. Nor was it destined to be 
disappointed. It was not long before developments of the doc- 
trine began to come from the young man's pen. He practical- 
ly laid the mathematical foundations of the modern theory of 
heat. He was the first to suggest that the sun was cooling, 
and that a time would come when, owing to the absence of the 
sun's heat, all life would disappear from this universe. Many 
calculations have been made of the length of time this would 
require, and the figures vary from twenty million to two hun- 
dred million years. 

It is a curious indication of the changeableness of scientific 
theories that after this principle of the conservation of energy 
had become a common- place in popular knowledge, an entirely 
different theory is coming into vogue. Physics is regarded as 
acquired knowledge of the natural phenomena of the universe, 
but the deductions from such knowledge must oftentimes be re- 
vised. Sometimes, indeed, the very contradictory of a proposi- 
tion once generally held must be accepted in the light of sub- 
sequent investigation. After we had all made up our minds 
that the world, instead of burning up, as we had been accus- 
tomed to think because of the dicta of Holy Scripture, and 
while it had been generally conceded that the sun and the earth 
were gradually cooling, more than a doubt is thrown on this lat- 



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i9o8.] LORD Kelvin 765 

ter theory by the discovery of radium. Radio-active substances 
exist very abundantly vifithin the earth and in the sun, and it is 
more than probable that these bodies are developing new heat 
instead of becoming cooler in the course of time. There are 
distinguished scientists who do not hesitate to say that the 
earth will lose the life now on its surface, not as a consequence 
of becoming too cold to support life, but because of growing 
too hot to permit it, and that eventually the earth will become 
practically a flaming mass. This curious reversion to the older 
theory of the consummation of the world, is interesting as a 
new development in science. 

It is not surprising, however, that Lord Kelvin, having orig- 
inally introduced the other theory, should have refused to ac- 
cept the supposed action of radio-active substances. At the 
last meeting of the British Association he declared that entirely 
too much was claimed for radium, and that much more study 
and experiment would have yet to come, before any of the 
consequences of its action could be accepted by scientists gen- 
erally. He occupies the same position with regard to the new 
ideas in science as that taken by the older men against him- 
self in his statement of the conservation of energy sixty years 
ago, and only time can tell whether he is right or wrong in 
this last position. 

His work as a student of science, especially in his later years, 
had been accomplished with unremitting devotion, in spite of a 
serious affliction borne so uncomplainingly for nearly twenty 
years that only his most intimate friends knew of it. He suf- 
fered from facial neuralgia in one of its intractable forms, and 
the torment of it often took him from his work, though never 
until the pain was unbearable. It was well known that wher- 
ever he went he carried with him a little note-book, so that 
when unoccupied by business or social duties he devoted the 
time to working out whatever scientific problems he might be 
engaged on at the moment. He seemed to consider that be got 
many precious lights as to the methods of experimentation and 
the real significance of observations that he had made while 
poring over his pocket note- book. He used to say that pre- 
paratory consideration of the details of experiments, and espe- 
cially reflection on the meaning of the results obtained, were 
even more important than keenness of observation at the time 
of the experiment itself. 



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766 Lord Kelvin [Mar., 

A worker in science of this kind might possibly be expected 
to be so preoccupied with thoughts about his scientific obser- 
vations, past and future, as to be absent-minded with regard to 
most other things, and to be at best a quite unsatisfactory 
friend or companion. On the contrary, however. Lord Kelvin 
was always noted for his kindliness and courtesy towards others, 
and for the thoughtfulness with which he not only met but 
even anticipated the wishes of friends. It has been said that 
his charming personality endeared him even to those who met 
him but once. Those who knew him best all re-echoed the 
sentiment of one of his colleagues, who said that Lord Kelvin 
was noted quite as much for ''his childlike humility, his very 
remarkable power of inspiring affection as well as esteem, and 
his interest in and sympathy with every one, as for his success- 
ful scientific investigations.'' 

One is tempted to wonder what Lord Kelvin's attitude was 
towards certain materialistic tendencies in the science of his 
time, and especially in biology. As an answer to the inquiry, 
we have a distinct declaration from Lord Kelvin, made at the 
height of his career, and in his full maturity. About thirty- 
five years ago he was elected president of the British Associa- 
tion. In his inaugural address he reviewed certain tendencies 
in the science of his day. Darwinism was the topic of the hour. 
His opinions on the subject are well worth recalling. The fol- 
lowing paragraph shows the attitude of the great scientist to- 
wards faith and the things of the spirit : 

Sir John Herschel . . . objects to the doctrine of natu- 
ral selection, that it was too like the Laputan method of mak- 
ing books, and that it did not sufficiently take into account a 
continually guiding and controlling intelligence. This seems 
to me a most valuable and constructive criticism. I feel pro- 
foundly convinced that the argument from design has been 
too much lost sight oi in recent zoological speculations. Re- 
action against the frivolities of teleology, such as are to be 
found, not rarely, in the notes of the learned commentators 
on Paley's ** Natural Theology," has, I believe, had a tem- 
porary effect in turning attention from the solid and irrefrag- 
able argument so well put forward in that excellent old book. 
But overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevo- 
lent design lie all around us ; and if ever perplexities, wheth- 
er metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a 



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ipoS.] LORD Kelvin 767 

time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing 
to us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching 
us that all living beings depend on one ever-acting Creator 
and Ruler.* 

Lord Kelvin frequently expressed himself very emphatically 
on this matter. For instance, on one occasion he said: ''The 
only relation of dynamics to theoretic biology is the absolute 
negation of an automatic beginning or an automatic persistence 
of life.'' He had previously said : '' It is impossible to under- 
stand the beginning or the continuance of life without an all- 
ruling creative power, and it would be entirely unjustifiable for 
us to build any conclusions drawn from the science of dynam- 
ics as to the future condition of the earth which might seem to 
suggest pessimistic conclusions as to the fate of the intelligent 
beings who dwell upon the earth/' It is sometimes said that 
as men grow older they grow more conservative and sometimes 
their repugnance to the thought of death ending all, forces them 
to a belief in personal immortality. It was not only at the end 
of life, however, but at all times, that Kelvin insisted that sci- 
ence taught the existence of a Creator and the immortality of 
man. The expressions that we have quoted were all used be- 
tween his fortieth and fiftieth year, when his intellect was in 
its prime. 

Lord Kelvin was, then, a great man as well as a great sci- 
entist in the best and broadest sense of these terms. An affec- 
tionate friend, a kind husband, a fervent believer in the things 
of the spirit, as well as a distinguished scientist, his life is a 
lesson to this generation. Only too often it is presumed that 
science leads men away from faith, but this is true only for the 
minds that are too small to hold both science and faith. Lord 
Kelvin was but following the tradition of the great discoverers 
in electricity in remaining a believer in the orthodox views of 
creation and man's relation to the Creator. Every one of the 
prominent names in electricity is that of a man who was a firm 
believer in the great truths of religion. Volta and Galvani, the 
Italians whose names represent the basic discoveries in practical 
electricity, were good Catholics. And Galvani was, at his dy- 
ing request, buried in the habit of St. Francis. Oersted, the 

* Report of the forty-first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Sci- 
ence, held in Edinburgh, August, 1871. 

VOL. LXXXVI.~49 



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768 LORD Kelvin [Mar. 

Dane, was a firm believer in revealed religion and its power to 
lift men up to higher things. To him we owe a remarkable 
apology for Christianity. Ampere was a devout Catholic and 
so was Coulomb. Ohm, the discoverer of the great principle 
of the law oi electrical resistance, was also a Catholic 

Faraday, who took up the work of these continental inves- 
tigators and carried it on so wonderfully in England, was an 
elder in one of the Protestant non- conformist sects, and often 
confessed his belief in God and a hereafter. The next great 
English scientist in electricity, Clerk Maxwell, one of the most 
wonderful mathematicians, as far as applied mathematics is con- 
cerned, of the nineteenth century, was a devout Anglican. The 
last great name in electricity is that of Roentgen, in whom we 
resume the chain of original discoverers who belong to the 
Catholic Church. 

Lord Kelvin, then, far from being an exception to the gen- 
eral run of scientists in his acceptance of religious truth, is bot 
another example of the constant historical tradition in science, 
that the supremely great minds do not have their faith obscnred 
by science. Lord Kelvin's career and achievements deserve tbe 
attentive study not only of those interested in science, but also 
of those occupied in the work of Christian Apologetics. 



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A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA. 

BY JEANIE DRAKE, 
AuiAdtr of 'In Old SU Stephen's" *' Tke AietropolUatu" *• On Pigeon River" etc., etc. 

[EHIND walls of dripping moss-green boulders and 
in the cool noon-day darkness of interlaced tree- 
tops and overleaning crags rushed invisibly above 
the cabin's smoke, and leaped and tumbled and 
foamed and sang Salola's waters on their way to 
the distant ocean. But the tiny cabin itself, of logs mud- 
plastered, clung to a grassy slope below, where the sun silvered 
the laurel's pale-rose blossoms and set a* flaming the tall candles 
of the chestnut trees. 

Ben's Cove the sunlit nook was called; though the old- 
est mountaineer knew not who Ben was or what his family 
name. If such he owned it was without local habitation, for 
Dan Callett's shack, hewn by himself from primeval timber, 
was the first man-built home to dispute freehold with wild-cat 
or mink in this far forest solitude. Across and across the 
cleared patch, slanting sharply up the slope beside his house, 
went the young farmer now, guiding a tilting harrow which 
burrowed and flung the soil about. Behind him, with easy, 
swinging step, walked a girl of eighteen, one hand gathering 
her apron together, the other in large and noble gesture scatter- 
ing its seeds abroad. Her handsome, uncovered head was as 
finely poised as a young deer's, and the fitful spring breeze, 
tightening and rippling the narrow draperies, made evident her 
free, unconscious grace. At the end of the last row he turned 
and paused, and letting fall her apron, her arms hanging 
straight at her sides, she stood confronting him, the harrow 
between. His naturally frank face wore now an expression 
half -sullen, half- uneasy, and his gaze avoided her to interest 
itself in certain chinquapin bushes sending down fragrance from 
high up the cliff's front. 

" Smells like grapes e'enamost," he commented. '' Thar'll 
be oodels o' nuts this fall comin', looks like." 



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770 A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA [Mar., 

She heeded this as little as she did the crisp air flinging down 
to her spicy^ woodland scents and fluttering her cotton skirt. 
** Last night/' she said, in her even, restrained mountain tone, 
''you been out again, makin' ten times in the month. An' I been 
by myself — up here in this lonesome holler, with a screech- 
owl a-hootin' an' a painter a-yowlin' near by. Not that I'm 
afeard" — with a quick spark of fire in red- brown eyes, color 
of her hair. '' Don't you be a-thinkin' that, Dan Callett ! For 
you know I shoot e'enamost as straight as you; an' I slep 
with the gun handy. But when I give up my paw, thet's a 
lone widder man, an' the boys an gals thet was my friends, 
for you^ 'twas on your promise to quit your wildness an' fool- 
ishness for me** 

''Thar's diff'rent idees o' foolishness," he muttered. 

''Name it worse, then," she flashed, ''to leave your work 
by day an' your sleep by night, at the call of a pack of low- 
down rowdies thet's known to run a still, an'U git ye into jail 
yet." 

" I don't tech the stuff," he protested with heat. 

"I ain't sayin' you do," she answered steadily. '"Tain't 
likely a church member'd a- married you ef you had. But 
they're a-pullin' you on a road thet leads to thet an' worse 
ruin. Now listen to me, Dan" — her voice and eyes wonder* 
fully softened — "you think more o' me, sure, than o' them 
thar trash. Leave off runnin' the mountains nights breakin' 
the law; an' me so lonesome without you down in Ben's 
Cove." 

" It's jes as folks says," he returned, still gloomily intent on 
the chinquapins. " Give a gal a term or two at the Normal 
School, an' she thinks she's a man's boss. But you ain't a- 
goin' to be mine. I was a fool to give you any promises, an' 
rd be a double fool to keep 'em." 

She flushed and fired and hardened again. "An' I'd be a 
fool three times over to stand by an' watch you break 'em. 
I made up my mind to-day'd be the last time of layin' it 
before you. An', as you end by choosin' them, you lose me. 
I'm leavin' you this very minute, an' for good." 

"What!" he exclaimed, in such amazement as caught his 
errant gaze and held it upon her now. " Leave me ! Where'd 
you go ? You're crazy, Juno ! " 

His wife's girlish figure, drawn tensely to its height, looked 



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IpoS.] A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA 77! 

taller and slimmer than ever. In a long pause, while they faced 
each other, the hidden cataract above and immemorial rocks 
and woods preached Nature's constant, disregarded sermon to 
stormy human hearts. 

She motioned his words aside with such gesture as would 
have become the goddess whose name she wore. '' I've helped 
you put in your crop. The cow and calf are fed. I stayed up 
all night scrubbin' your cabin. You'll find everything clean an' 
in its place. Your dinner's on the fire. But I won't ever step 
inside your door again — until you've changed." 

She turned and lifting her sunbonnet from the wood-pile, 
stayed at the spring for a last drink, her eyes across the gourd's 
rim, dwelling long on the little clearing. 

He followed, leaving the harrow in its ridge. ''What's to 
prevent my liftin' you up," he asked hoarsely, ''an' tyin' you 
here, if I like to?" 

" I'd git loose some time," she returned with composure. 
"You know you ain't able to keep me here, unless I choose. 
Mis' Brattle, to the Willow Inn, '11 send up for my things. 
I'm a-goin' thar to help with the milkin' an' housework." She 
passed, with her swaying graceful step, down the trail from the 
Cove to the valley of the Salola, her husband watching until 
the last glint of the sun upon her chestnut hair, the last flutter 
of her cotton skirt, had vanished. 

Then he sat upon his doorstep, pulling on an unfilled pipe. 
"Them white pigeons I brung her from Easton," he muttered, 
unconscious that he spoke, " they hold their heads up proud 
like hers. I got to water the lay lock bush — she thinks a heap 
o' them flowers. An' me an' June on'y married three months ! 
Well, sirs I But no woman ain't a-goin' to drive me ! No ; no ! " 
And he ground his teeth in pain he took for wrath, and smashed 
his pipe against the step. 

At any other than the Willow Inn the unusual rush of early 
guests, combined with unpreparedness, might have caused some 
mental anxiety or flurry in host and hostess. But an Oriental 
of immovable fatalism would be more accessible to such agita- 
tion than Mr. and Mrs. Brattle. Inborn calm was with them 
intensified by environment of Nature's solitudes, in which they 
saw the course of the stars and progression of the seasons un- 
affected by petty human disquietudes. So that guests who 
clamored for fresh water or more abundant towels were entire- 



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772 A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA [Mar.» 

ly at liberty to get them for themselves, or to appeal to Juno 
Callett, if her varied duties permitted her attention. 

''It is really astonishing how much the girl gets through/* 
they agreed among themselves, ''and without the least fuss or 
noise or hurry. Industrial School training, they say." 

" The Industrial School didn't give her that face or carriage, 
though,'' remarked an elderly physician, refugee from city heat. 
'' Look at her now, crossing the lawn with that basket of apples 
on her shoulder. How she steps 1 A stately nymph in calico I 
My dear " — to his wife — " let us carry her o£F with us. I am 
venerable enough to remark without risk that she would be a 
refreshment to jaded, urban eyes." 

" Mrs. Brattle might object, or even Juno's husband." 

" A husband I That young thing ! " 

"Whom she has left. Very wild, they say. Wilder than 
ever since she has gone away. Associates with the most reck- 
less fellows." 

" Did she tell you ? " 

" She 1 Her talent for silence amounts to genius. And with 
a natural dignity — surprising in her station — which forbids per- 
sonal questions." 

" Oh, come, Mrs. Rathbone," interposed knowingly a new- 
comer, a young man with a camera, " you don't mean to say a 
mere country girl, a handsome milkmaid, couldn't be won over 
by a bit of flattery into prattling a blue streak about herself. 
At any rate, a man might try." 

" He might," said Mrs. Rathbone drily. " That is a detest- 
able person," she remarked to her husband, when the one in 
question had strolled away. 

" Your reason, fair lady ? " 

" Because he is." 

The young man, whose name was Teague, approached her 
husband later in the day and said significantly : " I can at least 
give you some good pictures of the beautiful Juno to take home 
with you. Doctor. I've snapped a lot of dandy poses." 

" With her knowledge ? " Mrs. Rathbone asked. 

"Well, not exactly. But that makes no difference." 

"You think not?" 

Being thus challenged, as he chose to consider, Mr. Teague 
was gathering plums in the far pasture just as June Callett came 
across the meadow after sundown milking. He relied somewhat 



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IpoS.] A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA 773 

on tourist regalia of brilliant plaid knickerbockers and silken 
sash and yellow shoes to dazzle the simple rustic. Even more 
on flattering looks and broadly flirtatious accost 

'' What a picture you make, June 1 I wish I had my kodak. 
That wonderful hair, and such roses in your cheeks 1 He'd be 
a lucky man who might [touch those lovely flowers. I'll bet 
the very cows fall in love with you at that sweet call I heard 
from the house." 

''They've more sense than some humans/' replied the girl, 
in soft mountain drawl. 

Anything enigmatic in this must be, he lightly concluded, 
pure accident from an unsophisticated rustic; and he sauntered 
with her towards the turnstile. '' Let me," he said, with flour- 
ishing gallantry, and, mounting beside her, would have taken a 
bucket. She swerved away from him, and he, persisting, laid 
a caressing hand on hers; when, in some manner, the pail was 
upset and its creamy contents drenched him from head to foot. 

While he still gasped and wiped his eyes, Juno, in the dairy, 
was quietly explaining to the indulgent Mrs. Brattle : '' I tripped 
on something in the meadow and wasted one bucket's milk; 
but thar's a-plenty in the spring-house for the crowd." 

It needed some days after this for Mr. Teague's self-com- 
placency to smooth its plumes and rear its crest. '' But I 
should really forgive the clumsiness caused by a bashful moun- 
tain girl's pleasure at my attentions," he reasoned. And was 
prompt to join Dr. and Mrs. Rathbone setting forth on a Sun- 
day exploration, with Juno as guide. The girl mounted before 
them, lightly and easily, up the steep trail; and, with Mrs. 
Rathbone's eye upon him, Mr. Teague ventured no immediate 
advance. On their tardier progress Juno waited patiently, up 
ahead, her figure poised on some rock or cliff against the moun- 
tain's verdure. 

'' Handsome creature 1 " repeated the physician. ** A perfect 
forest nymph." 

''Oh," cried his wife, interrupting, ''see the dear little hol- 
low down below, and a tiny brook trickling. Somebody must 
live there. There's a cabin and corn fields and a gay patch of 
flowers. Let us go down nearer." 

"The view you want/' Juno interposed, her gaze avoiding 
Ben's Cove, " is up above, near the Falls." 

" Dr. Rathbone'U go with me," said the lady. " It's fasci- 



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774 -^ MOUNTAIN GRISELDA [Mar., 

nating down there. You needn't come — we'll be back in a 
minute.'' 

''Take trail then to the left/' called the girU ''a short cot 
to the Falls; we can meet you there." 

This appeared Teague's opportunity. He alertly lessened 
space between himself and Juno, who moved on and up and 
crossed, on stepping-stones, a stream which, dividing, surrounded 
a flat rock in its middle. On this, with water tumbling and 
splashing about them, sat four men playing cards. 

'' Picturesque, if not pious," called Teague gaily, overtaking 
the girl on the opposite bank. '' Did you see that big fellow with 
dark hair scowl at me ? It's your duty as guide, June, to save 
me from bears and snakes and mountain desperadoes." 

She heard not a word, her lips compressed and breath flut- 
tering. He caught her sleeve, holding her in the screening 
thicket, and, so near that beauty of curve and tint made him 
daring, leaned to kiss her. But a rough, masculine grasp tore 
him away and flung him wide against a tree trunk. 

'' You darned dude, how dare you ? " growled Dan Callett, 
black with rage. 

The other man, courageous enough after the first surprise, 
clenched his fist and made for him. But Juno stood instantly 
between, facing her husband, in seeming care for Teague. 

''You're very good, Mr. Callett," she said, in slow scorn, 
" an' if I was a kid I might feel obleeged for your meddling. 
But I been a-takin' care of myself for some time, an' I'm 
a*goin' to do it still. So, you're free to go back to your own 
business, which looks like loafin' an' gamblin' an' Lord knows 
what else — on Sunday!" 

Thus put in the wrong, he hesitated, frowning, while a coarse 
laugh echoed from the group he had left on the rock. 

" Juno, Juno," called a feminine voice from above. 

"There's a lady with me," added the girl; and motioning 
Teague to precede her, went on, leaving her husband silenced 
yet furious. 

Mn Teague inwardly exulted. " Why, the poor child dread- 
ed that fountain bully — for me ! If Mrs. Rathbone could know 
this 1 " In high spirits he chattered incessantly, assumed a man- 
ner of caressing patronage to their guide, and contrived in costly 
indiscretion to whisper to her. " I know something," he said^ 
" will soon punish that clownish brute for frightening you." 



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I908.] A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA 775 

She slackened pace at once, with such sudden interest as 
further elated him. '' Is it a secret ? But you can tell me ! '^ 
she urged sweetly. 

** Had any one seen her smile like this before ? " he thought^ 
in delighted wonder. ''You must not mention it to a soul, 
mindl It is a dead secret. But I have a friend in the rev- 
enue, and know they are sending a party up to-morrow night 
to capture a still on Bear Trap; and that fellow's one of the 
gang they're alter. I've half a mind " — affectedly — " to go with 
them myself and help land him in the penitentiary." She cer- 
tainly turned pale — yes, by Jove ! in her alarm for his safety. 
Why need the Rathbones have stayed just then to wait for 
them 1 

Climbing up to Ben's Cove under next morning's star, Juno 
thought fiercely: ''Dan Callett shan't never come near me 
again I But I ain't a-goin' to let a pack of curs pull down a 
man 1 " And, making sure that its master was absent, she slipped 
her warning in printed, unsigned scrawl under the cabin door. 
Then, unmissed, was back in the valley to attend to milking 
and breakfast duties; to see girls no younger than herself go 
off, Hghthearted and gaily clad, on pleasure excursions; to be 
contemptuously conscious of Teague posing for her benefit, and 
at nightfall strolling to the village, " to meet friends," with sig- 
nificance meant for her ear only. 

" I heard you movin' a heap last night," said Mrs. Brattle 
to the girl next morning, sweeping the veranda; "ain't you 
well, June ? " 

But for answer Juno grasped her arm, dropping the broom. 
"What's that?" she whispered, looking at a buggy approach- 
ing from the mountain foot and a man with bandaged head 
leaning against the driver. 

"Looks — like — Teague," announced the leisurely Mr. Brattle. 

It was, indeed, Mr. Teague himself, somewhat injured and 
more chagrined. "Some of their spies had warned the moon- 
shiners," he declared. " We found no still — nothing — nobody. 
But coming down a narrow trail, Indian file, I was aimed at 
from cover — the cowards! The doctor says my head is full of 
bird shot. It'll take days to pick it out. I owe my life to 
the wretched creature's poor shooting — miserable ruf&an I " 

Juno Callett's cheeks were crimson — her eyes flashing. " You 
really reckon our boys ain't acquainted with guns ? " she asked 



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776 A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA [Mar., 

deliberately, standing forth, to the amazement of all. ''Bird 
shot ain't meant to kill — humans — but jest for a lesson to med- 
dlers. If bullets are wanted they ginuUy sends them party 
straight. But one lesson's enough, ef their target ain't quite a 
plumb fool." And, as she walked off, it was suddenly revealed 
to Mr. Teague what she thought of him and had always 
thought 

Then came news to any whom it might interest that Dan 
Callett, suspected of this offence, had left for the coast; and 
the little cabin in the Cove was silent and deserted. Mrs. Brat- 
tle, noting his wife's pallor, answered her announcement: *' Well, 
June, seein' as you've done spoke your mind purty free to one 
of the boarders, and your paw really needs ye to the toll-gate, 
I'll have to let ye go; but I'll miss ye powerful." Then, at 
the girl's quick embrace and impulsive whisper : '* Name o' the 
Lord ! " said the landlady. '' Go, then, and take care of your- 
self, and I'll be over to see ye when the crowd gits away." 

But mountain days glide unmarked and mountain miles are 
long, and the kindly Rathbones and the crest-fallen Teague were 
gone with the other guests from the Willow Inn, and summer 
had merged into fall, and that into winter, before Mrs. Brattle's 
visit to the toll-gate was paid. Then she found the little house- 
hold dependent on Juno, silent and efficient as ever, but with 
something touching now in her beauty, which impressed even 
the unimaginative visitor. 

''Is she a-honin' for Dan?" the matron wondered; but 
''How's the baby?" was what she asked. 

"Oh, he's all right," answered the toll-keeper, eager to 
plunge into personal grievances. " I allow as ye found the 
road here powerful cut up. Mis' Brattle? But 'tain't my fault 
if the county lets it git so. An' it's my duty to collect toll, 
an' I'm a-goin' to do it. The boys passin' here keeps a- 
grumblin' an' a-kickin'; an' a lot of wagons has been a-goin' 
round by James' Gap, three miles longer. If they choose to 
ill- convenience theirselves thetaway, 'tain't my business; but 
'tis to make 'em pay when they comes this way — rough or no 
rough." 

" What'U you do if you're laid up with your rheumatiz ? " 
asked the placid Mrs. Brattle. " Reckon June kin keep a 
crowd o' wagoners from pushin' past free — specially after Satur- 
day market ? " 



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I908.] A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA JJJ 

''She ain't my darter, ef she kaint, ''grimly replied the 
widowed tolUkeeper. And June gave him a reassuring look. 

Mrs. Brattle's jesting suggestion became weighty earnest a 
week later when, the toll- keeper being laid up helpless with a 
rheumatic seizure, it was Juno's duty to come forth to each 
passer-by and collect the varying dues. 

"Worth twice the money to see that mountain beauty," 
lightly declared a chance tourist or two. But the more fre- 
quent native had eyes for only the mud- holes, and protested 
that it was "plumb robbery." 

" Complain to the county, then," retorted June, with spirit 
" We're put here to collect, an' we got it to do. Pay here or 
go round by the Gap." 

One dark and cloudy Saturday the passers were few, and 
the day wore on to evening, when she heard, from within doors, 
creaking of wheels returning from market. She came out, un- 
locked and swung loose the chain, and stood on the little 
porch awaiting toll. 

With cracking of whip and jest and laugh, loud even for 
Saturday, from wagoner to wagoner, the foremost would have 
driven on calling: "'Tain't good enough for pay, tell your paw; 
an' we been advised not to waste time goin' round James' Gap. 
So long ! " 

" Stop ! Stop right there t " she cried, and was in and out 
again with a gun. " If you try to cheat the toll, sure as you're 
alive, I'll shoot." Then she first perceived sitting beside the 
driver a young man, broad-shouldered and black-haired. " You 1 
Youl" she gasped, and recovering herself: " Perhaps 'twas you, 
Dan Callett, advised them not to pay, or go round peaceably ! " 

" It was,'* he retorted, with defiant hostility, and bent for- 
ward to strike the mules. 

Then Juno calling: "I warn you^-once — twice — three times!" 
pulled the trigger, aiming a little ahead, but, unhappily, the 
animals plunged forward at that exact moment, and her husband 
wavered in his place and fell back. 

All was confusion — ^the train of wagons stopping, their drivers 
shouting and running to the front; but, before even his com- 
panion could aid the wounded man, the girl had climbed be- 
side him. " Help me lift — no, no^ no, I tell you, he's ncf dead I 
Bring him in here — on my bed. Take the mare — in the stable 
— don't wait — the doctor — at once." 



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778 A MOUNTAIN GRISELDA [Mar. 

There followed a time of hourly uncertainty, when she, who 
had endangered Dan Callett's earthly existence, strove, with 
courage maintained against despair, to save it. Then, his fine 
constitution aiding devoted nursing, he exchanged delirium for 
bewildering physical exhaustion, which Juno tended in pallor 
and silence and careful self-restraint. One day she met a 
strange, long gaze from his eyes, and stopped at once, stand- 
ing straight and tall beside his bed. 

'' I'll give myself up, if you say so," she breathed in low 
monotone. 

"For what?" 

"For — for — oh, if I'd a-killed you! But — I — never — meant 
—it— Dan." 

" I allowed — mebbe — not." But his look was cold as hers 
had once been, and wandered from her, estranged by sudden 
recollection of their parting in the Cove. There was silence; 
a clock in the cabin ticked loudly; outside the limping toll- 
keeper laughed and a little child crowed. "I had the queer- 
est dreams," said the young man abruptly, "I'd see you in 
that same blue frock, but there was a baby in your arms had 
pulled your hair all tumbling down — like pictures in a church 
down to the city," 

She was gone and back in a moment, her face luminous, 
her air proudly submissive, a laughing infant cradled against 
her swiftly beating heart. 

" Whose ? " he whispered. 

"Yours, Dan. Yours and mine," and sank on her knees 
beside him, that his weak arm might encircle both. '' He favors 
you powerful, my man. You'll forgive me your hurts — for him. 
And I'll forgive the broken promises — but you'll keep them 
now — for him." 

Dan Callett drew a long breath at the wonder of it. "I'll 
keep them, my gal, for you — for you^ that's sweeter than a 
posy. But the little feller's all right; and we'll take him to the 
Cove and find the cherry trees and laylocks, and the white 
pigeons waiting for us." 

June pressed closer to his shoulder and laid her cheek on 
his. 



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LORD BACON'S CHARGES AGAINST SCHOLASTIC 
PHILOSOPHY. 

BY MICHAEL HOGAN. SJ. 

IHOSE who have become eminent in the world of 
physical science, and are therefore well qualified 
to judge, declare that Lord Bacon was no scien- 
tist himself, and that he was the father of scientists 
only because he successfully pleaded the cause of 
science. His pleading in behalf of physical science took the 
form of a crusade, which he not inaptly termed the ** demol- 
ishing " part of his philosophy. The harangues of that crusade 
— to some of which we shall have occasion to refer in the fol- 
lowing pages — are to be found in his Be Augmentis and in the 
first book of his Novum Organum, There we find him pointing 
to the sacred domain of knowledge and telling the world how 
for centuries it has been desecrated by the Mohammedanism of 
deductive philosophy. He writes: 

If Jthat philosophy which we have derived from the Greeks 
was not manifestly a dead letter, it would never have hap- 
pened that it should have adhered almost immovable to its 
original footing, without acquiring any growth worthy of 
mankind, and this so completely that not only an assertion 
continues to be an assertion, but a question to be a question. 
. . . This slavery of philosophy arises merely from the 
impudence of a lew and the indolence of the rest of mankind. 
. . . The Aristotelian philosopy, after having destroyed 
other systems by its disputations and its confutations, decided 
upon everything, and Aristotle himself then raises up diffi- 
culties at will, in order to settle them. The same method is 
now in use among his successors^ whose aim is not so much to 
throw light on the questions under consideration^ by evidence ^ au» 
thority, and examples, as to ifidulge in the most trifling subtleties 
and hairsplitting, . . . But by far the greater number of 
those who have assented to that philosophy have bound them* 
selves down by prejudice and the authority of others, so that 
it is rather obsequiousness and concurrence than unanimity. 
With regard to authority, it is the greatest weakness to at- 



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78o LORD Bacon and Scholastic Philosophy [Man, 

tribute infinite credit to particular authors, and to refuse his 
own prerogative to Time, for Truth is rightly named the 
daughter of Time and not of Authority. . . . Those 
very leaders who have usurped the dictatorship in learning, 
will yet, when they occasionally return to their senses, com- 
plain of the subtlety of nature, the remoteness of truth, and 
the obscurity of human wit. . . . The present system of 
logic rather assists in confirming and rendering inveterate, 
the errors founded on vulgar notions, than in searching after 
truth, and is, therefore, more harmful than useful. We ihere-^ 
fore refect the syllogism ^ andy in everything relatin^r to the nature 
of things^ we make use of Induction for both the major and the 
minor propositions.* 

There is manifested in all this an extravagance of accusation 
that would make the charges it contains unworthy of notice, 
were they not the dicta of Lord Bacon, whose great name will 
be a guarantee to many of their truth and justice. And yet 
the foregoing is but a fraction of what he has to say against 
ancient philosophy. Indeed, he seems to act on the old vulgar 
policy, that if a good deal of mud be thrown some of it will 
surely stick. He complains of a ''slavery of philosophy," a 
** dictatorship in learning,'' a '' binding down of the understanding 
by prejudice and obsequiousness," an '' enchaining of the power 
of man by the bonds of antiquity, authority, and unanimity." 

It would be impossible to bring forward against ancient 
philosophy a charge so utterly unfounded. One of the princi- 
ples of that philosophy is, that a writer's authority, whoever he 
be, is worth just as much as the argument he adduces in favor 
of his opinion, and nothing more. ''Tantum valet auctoritas 
quantum valet argumentum," is a motto familiar enough to any 
one who has had even a little acquaintance with Scholastic 
philosophy. Albertus Magnus writes : '' A philosopher should 
admit nothing without sufficient reason : for it is a desire in- 
nate in all of us to know the causes of things. // may behoove 
the Pythagoreans to sweat by the word of their master. For our 
party we are content to receive the doctrine when its truth sfiall 
ftave been proven by reason.** 

Roger Bacon is equally emphatic: ** Authority is worth noth- 
ing unless it be accompanied by a reason ; it makes us believe, 
but it does not make us understand. We yield to authority, 
but we are not convinced by it." 

* The italics occurring in all the citations from the works of Lord Bacon are ours. 



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I 1908.J Lord Bacon and Scholastic Philosophy 781 

\ These passages have very little of ^' obsequiousness '^ or 

f " slavery " in them. And nevertheless they are fair examples 

of the attitude of the Schoolmen towards authority in purely 

^ philosophical questions. Not only did they not follow Aristotle 

' blindly or slavishly — and this is evident from the many points 

^ of Scholastic doctrine that are in open contradiction with his 

^ teaching — ^but they were the first to revolt against the blindness 

' and servility of Averroes and the other Arabian followers of 

the Stagyrite, who contended that his writings were absolutely 

free from error, and therefore must not be contradicted nor 

even questioned in anything whatever. 

But authority, rightly understood, is not and cannot be ex- 
cluded from any science. As long as there are problems too 
intricate for the ordinary inquirer — and at what period or in 
' what science have they not abounded — so long will the pro- 

f nouncements of genius be appealed to, in favor of conflicting 

^ opinions. And why should it not be so? Why should not a 

theory, of whose truth or falsity we ourselves are unable to judge, 
receive some confirmation from the assent of those better able 
( to weigh the motives than we are ? As a matter of fact, there 

has been thus far no department of investigation (and probably 
( there never will be) in which authority does not obtain in a 

greater or less degree. Max MuUer is appealed to in philol- 
ogy, Blackstone in jurisprudence, Cuvier in zoology, Niebuhr in 
; history, Liebig in chemistry, Lyell in geology, Faraday in elec- 

tricity, Herschel in astronomy. If one does not understand the 
theory of determinants, or the laws that govern the motion of 
projectiles, it is not considered obsequiousness to accept the one 
on the word of La Place, or the other on the authority of New- 
ton. A new theory about the nature of heat, or the causes of 
magnetic attraction, or the formation of crystals, would be suffi- 
ciently recommended to the scientific world of to-day by the 
mere authority of Lord Kelvin. Why, then, should authority, 
so much invoked in every other science, count for nothing in 
deductive philosophy ? If the philosophy of Aristotle had al- 
ready withstood the world's scrutiny for over a thousand years, 
were the Scholastics obsequious because they considered this 
fact an added presumption in its favor ? They did not create 
the authority of Aristotle; they found it already established. 
For centuries prior to the rise of Scholasticism, the philosophy 
of Aristotle had flourished and his authority had held sway in 



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782 LORD Bacon and Scholastic Philosophy [Mar., 

the schools of Syria, Arabia, Persia, and Alexandria. In fact, 
it was through translations from the languages of these Oriental 
schools that the works of Aristotle first became accessible to 
the scholars of the West. 

And while Lord Bacon thus inveighs against authority^ is 
he conscious of the *' dictatorship in learning'' which he him- 
self is about to inaugurate, of the life-long chains, the ''slav- 
ery," the ** obsequiousness " he is preparing for mankind, in a 
system of philosophy, which, according to his own words, is to 
** level men's wits and leave but little to their superiority " ? 
" Our method of discovering the sciences," he says elsewhere 
'' is such as to leave little to the acuteness and strength of wit, 
and, indeed, rather to level wit and intellect. For, as ia the 
drawing of a straight line or accurate circle by the hand, much 
depends on its steadiness and practice, but if a ruler or com- 
pass be employed, there is little occasion for either; so it is 
with our method " iJNov. Org.^ Bk. I., Aph. 6i). 

Bacon regrets that authority has usurped the prerogative 
of Time in begetting Truth, "for Truth," he says, "is the 
daughter of Time and not of Authority." Now if the deposit 
of natural truth^-of which alone there is question here — like 
the deposit of revealed truth, keeps steadily disclosing itself 
from one century to another, and ever remains the "daughter 
of Time," is it not reasonable to look for a growth in the daugh- 
ter proportioned to that of the father ? And yet, though Time 
had been rolling its ceaseless course for well-nigh six thousand 
years before the prophet of the New Philosophy was ushered 
into existence, when at length he came he did not find truth 
upon the earth. "Our only hope and salvation," he says, in 
the preface of the Novum Organum^ " is to begin the work anew 
and raise or rebuild the sciences^ arts^ and all human knowledge 
from a firm and solid basis.** 

We shall burden the reader with only one other instance of 
his characteristic incoherence. In the face of all the accusations 
cited above, and many others which from lack of space have 
not been cited, he subjoins the following : " The ancient authors 
and all others are left in undisputed possession of their honors. 
For we enter not into comparison of capacity or talent but of 
method, and assume the part of a guide rather than a critic" 
How much of a guide and how little of a critic is evidenced 
in the passages already given ! How like a guide and unlike 



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I908.] LORD BACON AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY 783 

a critic he behaves when he says in the opening lines of the 
Novum Organum: ^'They who have presumed to dogmatize 
on Nature, as on some well-investigated subject, either from 
self-conceit or arrogance ^ and in tJie professorial style ^ have in- 
jflicted the greatest injury on philosophy. For they have tended 
to stifle and interrupt inquiry exactly as they have prevailed 
in bringing others to their opinion, and their own activity has 
not counterbalanced the mischief they have occasioned by cor* 
rupting and destroying that of others." 

It is difficult to reconcile this, and what has gone before, 
with the following protest culled from the same treatise: ''We 
make no attempt to disturb the system of philosophy that now 
prevails. We leave the honor and reverence due to the an- 
cients untouched and undiminished, so that we can perform 
our intended work, and yet enjoy the benefit of our respectful 
moderation." How much in harmony with all the violent in- 
vective already quoted is this expression of his peaceful pro- 
ject 1 ''An established Church," says Cardinal, Newman, " must 
first be national, and after that be as orthodox as it can." 
Lord Bacon must first deal what he considers a death-blow to 
ancient philosophy, and after that be as "moderate "as he can. 
But is it not ludicrous to find him loading that philosophy 
with assurances of respect and moderation, and at the same 
time constituting himself its headsman ? Alas, that he should 
have lost sight of these his own pledges before he had yet 
passed from the page on which they were so beautifully written. 

Another of Lord Bacon's charges is that ancient philosophy 
has " adhered almost immovably to its original footing, without 
acquiring any growth worthy of mankind." If this accusation 
implies that deductive philosophy has had little or no devel- 
opment, it is false. Let any one who would doubt it read the 
history of the Scholastic period from its beginnings in Scotus 
Erigena, about the middle of the ninth century, to its noon- 
day splendor under Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas of Aquin, 
and Duns Scotus in the thirteenth. If the accusation means 
that many of the conclusions of deductive philosophy have re- 
mained fixed and are destined to remain so, it is true ; but this, 
so far from being to its discredit, constitutes its chief excellence. 
The unchanging character of these conclusions is derived mainly 
from three sources — the subject-matter with which that philos- 
ophy is concerned, the principles on which it is founded, and 
vo ULXxxvL— 50 



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784 LORD BACON AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY [Mar., 

the assent which the mind gives to its conclusions. And first 
the subject-matter of deductive philosophy .is little liable to 
change. The notion of ''being*' must always remain a tran-^^ 
scendental notion, wider than the most general classification. 
It must always have the attributes of unity, truth, and {good- 
ness. Its division into finite and infinite being must always be 
adequate. God must always remain the origin and destination 
of all created things. His perfections cannot cease to be in- 
finite as time goes on. His Providence cannot be extended to 
his creatures at one period and withdrawn from them at another. 
His external glory must always depend on the service creatures 
render him, just as it did at the dawn of creation. Man cannot 
cease to be made up of soul and body. His soul cannot cease to 
be spiritual and immortal. His intellect cannot cease to operate 
through the medium of his senses. His will cannot cease to 
render him a free and consequently a moral agent He cannot 
cease to be the subject of rights and duties — rights and duties 
towards his Maker, rights and duties towards his family, rights 
and duties towards civil society; rights and duties in justice, 
rights and duties in equity. Truth, even in God, must always 
be the conformity between mind and object. Justice must ever 
consist in "rendering unto Cassar the things that are Caesar's 
and to God the things that are God's." Theft will always be 
the taking of what belongs to another without his knowledge 
and reasonable consent. A lie will always consist in deliberately 
saying other than we think, and murder in taking the life of a 
human being on private authority. Is there much room here 
for getting away from what Bacon calls the '' original footing " ? 
Another source of permanence in these conclusions is the 
eternal and immutable character of the principles on which 
they are founded. The principle that a thing cannot be itself 
and, at the same time and in the same respect, something else 
or nothing at all, must hold good whenever and wherever there 
is an intellect. Every effect must always have a proportionate 
cause, whatever be the circumstances in which it is produced. 
The mode of operation of every being must always be deter- 
termined by its peculiar nature. It is impossible that one en- 
dowed with intelligence should act without a purpose. Good, 
either real or apparent, must be the object of every human de- 
sire and every human appetition. Free choice must always be 
a condition of the merit and demerit of human actions. Every 



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I908.J LORD Bacon and Scholastic Philosophy 785 

duty begets a right to the means necessary for the discharge 
of that duty. Every moral law requires a sanction to insure 
its observance. In the moral order such is the distinction be- 
tween what is good in itself and what is bad in itself, that nei- 
ther can ever become the other, nor can man be ever exempted 
from the obligation of doing the former or avoiding the latter. 
Is it to be wondered that there should be no growth in this 
direction ? 

A third reason why many of the conclusions of deductive 
philosophy are not likely to vary, is that they are based on 
evidence, and evidence leaves the mind in absolute certainty, 
without need or even possibility of further speculation. That 
which was absolutely certain in the thirteenth century, could not 
become more certain or less certain in the fifteenth, sixteenth, 
or nineteenth. 

Experimental science, on the contrary, lacks every one of 
these sources of permanence. The subject-matter with which 
it deals is constantly becoming wider and wider. Its scope ex- 
tends to the whole material universe visible and invisible. It 
is directly concerned with every property of that world of mat- 
ter, and with every change which takes place in it, whether 
such change be the result of natural causes, or is brought about 
by contrived agencies. It is not content with investigating the 
properties of the substances elementary and composite which it 
finds in Nature, and under the variety of aspects in which Na- 
ture presents them. It is continually forming new combinations 
of elements, breaking up existing ones, and varying in a thousand 
ways the conditions of rest and motion, heat and cold, attrac- 
tion and repulsion, light and shade, contraction and expansion, 
condensation and rarefaction, pressure, absorption, radiation, and 
the like, according as one or other of these conditions is favor- 
able to the desired investigation. 

The principles of experimental science lack the character of 
permanence. If we except those which it borrows from meta- 
physics, there is not one of its principles that is not open to 
error. That which is now a hypothesis may become a theory 
fifty years hence, and a century later be altogether rejected. 
It was for a long time a principle in astronomy that the planets 
moved in circular orbits, since the circle is the simplest, and there- 
fore the most natural, of geometrical figures. Many of the astro- 
nomical calculations of Copernicus, and even of Newton, were 



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786 LORD Bacon and Scholastic Philosophy [Mar., 

founded on this erroneous assumption. It was a principle in 
physics that as a force is necessary to move a body, so a perpetual 
supply of force is necessary to keep it in motion. All of what 
Kepler calls this ^'physical reasoning" was carried on under 
the influence of this misconception. And Gallileo, for a time 
at least, shared both of these delusions. Another principle of 
physics for almost two centuries was that the velocity of light 
is increased in a refracting medium. It was put forward by 
Newton in the seventeenth century and held its place until the 
contrary was proved by Foucault about the year eighteen hun- 
dred and fifty. It is an axiom of physical science that potas- 
sium is an element^ and that white light is made up of the 
seven colors of the spectrum neither more nor less. But this 
only means that no one has yet succeeded in further decom- 
posing the one or the other. Indeed the received classification 
of elementary substances is open to suspicion when viewed in 
the light of some recent experiments of Sir William Ramsay, 
wherein he claims to have accomplished the long-wished-for and 
long*sought-for transmutation of one element into another. By 
usage we have become so familiar with what physicists call the 
law of gravity, that we doubt its existence about as little as 
We doubt our own. And yet our confidence in it may be 
shaken to-morrow by the hopelessness of trying to reconcile it 
with some established fact or principle which the calculations 
of the physicist had hitherto ignored. 

Finally the conclusions of physical science are not based on 
evidence that would justify us in regarding them as altogether 
unalterable. The constant modes of activity and influence 
which we observe in Nature, and which we call physical laws, 
are not founded on the Divine Essence, and hence immutable 
as God himself, but rather on the divine decrees, and there- 
fore liable to exceptions through divine intervention. Nor is this 
the only way they are unreliable. We have not, and cannot 
have, absolute certainty that they exist at all. The infinite wis- 
dom and goodness of the Creator are an infallible guarantee that 
there are such things as physical laws, but not that there is a law 
of conservation of energy, or a law of harmonic planetary motion, 
or a law of definite and multiple proportions. The most we can 
claim for these or any other individual physical law is that they 
are plausible conclusions from observed facts, since they seem to 
explain all the phenomena thus far known to us, and to satisfy 



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I908.] LORD BACON AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY 787 

every test to which they have hitherto been subjected. ''Real 
discoveries/' says Dr. Whewell, "are mixed with baseless as- 
sumptions, not rarely or in peculiar instances, but commonly 
and in most cases. To try wrong guesses is apparently the only 
way to hit on right ones,** The possibility of a plurality of 
causes, where he who is observing or making an experiment can 
discover only one, because of his helplessness in ultimate analy- 
sis, must keep the conclusions of physical science forever out- 
side the domain of absolute certainty. St. Thomas says : ** The 
visible world changes ; it must, therefore, owe its origin to One 
who cannot change. It was not and now it is ; He Who brought 
it into existence must, therefore, have existed always. It was 
produced from nothing ; He Who created it must, therefore, be 
infinite." Avogadro says: ''If the molecular theory of matter 
be the true one — if there be such things as molecules — and if, 
moreover, the conditions of temperature and pressure be the 
same, then it is probable that equal volumes of all gases will 
contain the same number of molecules.*' No one need be sur- 
prised that the one system should have " adhered almost immov- 
ably to its original footing.'' Neither is it surprising that the 
other system should not. 

And is the crime of having an assertion continue to be an 
assertion, and a question to be a question, peculiar to deductive 
philosophy ? Chemists speak as familiarly about " starch " and 
"cellulose" as potters do about clay, and has the question 
"what is starch," " what is cellulose," ceased to be a question? 
Has the single- fluid theory of Franklin, or the double-fluid theory 
of Coulomb ceased to be an assertion, after one hundred and fifty 
years or thereabouts ? Has the undulatory theory of light, put 
forward by Huyghens more than two hundred years ago, and now 
the popular theory, ceased to be an assertion ? Has the emission 
theory, proposed by Descartes, supported by Newton, and ever 
since the rival explanation, ceased to be an assertion ? What 
about the phlogiston theory of combustion ? It began with Stahl 
in the seventeenth century and was exploded by Lavoisier only 
a hundred years later. It has ceased to be an assertion only 
by becoming an absurdity. What about the several theories 
regarding the elements of material substances? The dynamic 
theory originated with Leibnitz towards the end of the seven- 
teenth century, and was modified by Wolff and Kant and Bosco- 
vitch in the eighteenth. At present its claims on our acceptance 



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788 LORD BACON AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY [Mar,, 

are being urged anew by many scientists. But it is still an as- 
sertion. The atomic theory goes back to LeocippuSf five hun- 
dred years before the Christian era. Democritus remodelled it, 
and it has had many remodellers since. It held its place till 
yesterday as one of the favorite theories. But it has "gone 
the way of all flesh." It is no longer an assertion. What about 
the " ions " and the '' electrons " that are now enjoying their 
brief hour of popular favor ? What about the Darwinian theory 
of " natural selection '' ? It has been before the world for half a 
century and to-day it is mentioned by scientists only to reject it. 

The charge of subtleties and hair-splitting, so far at least 
as it relates to the bulk of the Scholastic teaching — for it is 
not necessary to defend every doctor of every school — is easily 
answered. The opposing schools of philosophy were unchris- 
tian in spirit and doctrine alike. In this respect little was to 
be looked for from the Arab or the Jew. The one aimed at 
shaping a philosophy that would defend the dogmas of the 
Koran, the other, a system that would uphold the Talmud. 
Both assailed the teachings of the Catholic Church, and both 
claimed for their arguments the authority of Aristotle. If, then, 
the objections against the truths of Christianity were urged with 
subtlety, why should the Schoolmen be expected to dispense 
with subtlety in answering them ? Instead of applying them- 
selves as some of the rival systems had done, to the absurd 
task of trying to reconcile Revelation with Aristotle, they re- 
conciled Aristotle with Revelation, by a more correct because 
more subtle interpretation of his meaning. 

But nowhere perhaps does Lord Bacon give us so full an 
insight into his true mental character as when he decides to 
" reject the syllogism and make use of induction for both the 
major and the minor propositions.'' This is equivalently a re- 
solve to use observed facts, and nothing but observed facts, as 
a medium of inference in deducing physical laws. But the 
'^ father of physical science " did not see that no accumulation 
of facts, however extensive, used as premises, can ever warrant a 
universal conclusion, and that without a universal conclusion there 
can be no law and consequently no science. One may have seen 
a stone fall to the earth ten thousand times under the influence 
of gravity, but these ten thousand instances can of themselves 
give him no assurance that the same will happen the next time, 
and every time the stone finds itself in mid- air; and without 



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I908.] LORD BACON AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY 789 

such an assurance his knowledge is in no sense scientific. The 
connection between the stone in mid*air and its having been 
attracted to the earth, is merely historical. It is only some- 
thing which has been, not something which must be. The ten 
thousand instances are nothing more than an enumeration of 
individual facts, and there is no science of individuals. The 
expression is self- contradictory. One of the most fundamental 
rules of logic — and a rule which no one, who wishes to reason 
aright, can disregard — requires that the terms must not be more 
general in the conclusion than they were in the premises. If, 
then. Lord Bacon is resolved to ** make use of induction for 
both the major and the minor propositions," he must be con- 
tent with a particular conclusion. In order that a universal law 
may be legitimately inferred from any number of observed facts, 
the general principle known as the uniformity of Nature must 
enter into the reasoning. If I start out with the assurance that 
the same physical agency acts in the same way — produces simi- 
lar results — whenever it acts under similar conditions, I can be 
sure that the phenomena of yesterday will be repeated when- 
ever such an agency acts with the same conditions verified; I 
can be sure that whenever a stone is thrown into the air it will 
fall to the ground by the attractive force of gravity.* To es- 
tablish the existence of this law of the uniformity of Nature, is 
the work of metaphysics. Physical science is unable to establish 
it.f And yet it would not be a science at all without it Here 
we have the grounds for the Scholastic axiom that an induction, 
to be valid, must have an analytical premise. Moreover, the sub- 

* The reasoning process, according to syllogistic form, would be as follows : The same 
cause acting under the same circumstances must always produce the same effect But the at- 
traction of gravity upon a stone in mid-air is the same cause acting under the same circtun- 
stances. 

Therefore, the attraction of gravity upon a stone in mid-air must always produce the same 
effect But the effect produced yesterday by the attraction of gravity upon a stone in mid-air 
was to make it fall to the ground. 

Therefore, the effect produced by the attraction of gravity upon a stone in mid-air must 
always be to make it fall to the ground. 

What form Lord Bacon's reasoning with two inductive premises would take, it is difficult 
to imagine. If he were validly to infer a physical law from such premises, he would be ac- 
complishing what is more difficult than to bridge chaos. 

t " All physical science starts from certain postulates. One of them is the objective exist- 
ence of a material world. It is assumed that the phenomena which are comprehended under 
this name have a ' substratum ' of extended, impenetrable, mobile substance, which exhibits 
the quality known as inertia, and is termed matter. Another postulate is the universality of 
the law of causation ; that nothing happens without a cause [a necessary, precedent condi- 
tion]. Another is, that any of the rules, or so-called ' laws of nature,' by which the relation 
of phenomena is truly defined, is true for all time. The validity of these postulates is a prob- 
lem of metaphysics." — Huxley, Essays, " A Half-Century of Science." 



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790 LORD BACON AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY [Mar. 

ject-matter of the inductive or particular premise must be com- 
pared with that of the analytical or universal premise, for all 
reasoning, inductive as well as deductive, is '^a comparison of 
a least part with a greatest whole, by means of a greater part 
or lesser whole/' 

Now of this process of comparison the syllogism is but the 
expression. To exclude the syllogism, then, would be to omit 
the comparison, or, what comes to the same thing, to deal with 
the phenomena of yesterday, and the similar ones observed 
again to-day, as isolated units, without inquiring why they are 
similar, or whether their recurrence be not the result of a uni- 
form mode of action on the part of the causes which produced 
them. But Lord Bacon is resolved to investigate Nature with- 
out concerning himself with the inquiry whether Nature acts 
uniformly or not. He has made up his mind not to borrow 
from metaphysics. He will not be found eating with sinners. 
The syllogism too must go as being "too confused, and allow- 
ing Nature to escape from men's hands." Yet he was using the 
syllogism on every page of his writings and at the same time 
pronouncing it worthless in science. It is recorded that Eliza- 
beth refused to appoint him to the office of Attorney- General, 
saying that he was "a man rather of show than of depth." 
He surely displayed no great depth when he decided to discard 
the syllogism from his philosophy, and to *'make use of in- 
duction for both the major and the minor propositions." 

Strange anomaly (1) Lord Bacon does not hesitate to declare 
to the world, that he has taken all knowledge for his province; 
that his Novum Organum is intended to supersede the Otganon 
of Aristotle; that the method therein described is to secure 
physical discoveries by the most certain rules and demonstra- 
tions; nay, more, that it is to furnish a firm and solid basis 
for the sciences, arts, and all human knowledge. Nothing but 
shortsightedness could have led him to make such claims in 
behalf of such a system, and at the same time to pronounce 
the philosophy of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, which he found 
stamped with the approval of twenty centuries, to be "a sys- 
tem of vicious demonstrations which merely subject and enslave 
the world to human thoughts." When shall the popular delu- 
sion about his mighty intellect be dispelled ? When shall the 
sacred name of Philosophy be severed forever from the name 
of Lord Bacon ? 



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ZOE AND THE PRINCE. 

BY MARY CATHERINE CROWLEY. 

^01^fJZo6 Chauviiiy mot aussi / " 

The baby, just learning to walk and to talk, 
stood^^by the side of the brook and screamed; 
screaming, at least, was to him an old accom- 
plishment. The shabbily- clad little girl making 
her way across the stepping-stones to the small island, with the 
new baby in her arms, looked over her shoulder and aimed at 
the defenceless! head of the senior baby a volley of Canadian 
French. 

Insult being thus added to desertion, the cry of the injured 
rose higher^in a prolonged and indignant wail. 

By this time Zoe had reached the green oasis in the middle 
of the stream. Gently laying the new baby on the grass under 
a sheltering bush, she turned back, threaded her path again 
over the bright, rippling water, administered to the young dis- 
turber of her peace a shaking that literally shook the cry out 
of him, and picking him up under one of her arms, as if he 
were nothing more than a bundle of waste from the great mill 
above the dam, carried him over to her fairyland. 

For this is what the secluded islet, with its three dwarf 
willow-trees and wild growth of brush and blackberry vines^ 
was to Zo6. What though the outer world, the village of Mill- 
ville, knew her as only an unkempt, bare-foot little drudge, the 
child of factory people? Here in her island domain she was 
a beautiful princess, living in an enchanted place. The largest 
of the willows was her palace, its curtains of green were rich 
tapestries, the birds chirping in the bushes an orchestra of 
musicians, the few berries on the vines a banquet spread by 
the hands of invisible servitors; the grass from which wild- 
flowers peeped up here and there was a splendid carpet. 

Many of these ideas Zo6 gleaned from a wonderful book 
she had borrowed from the mill-hands' library ; but other pretty 
conceits were her own. For a child sees fairyland through the 



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792 ZOE AND THE PRINCE [Mar., 

prism of its own personality, and the reveries of no two day- 
dreamers are ever alike. 

The senior baby was the jarring note of the symphony, for 
he was altogether too obstreperous to fit into the scheme of the 
fairy palace. He was the square peg of commonplace thrust 
into the round hole of poesy. The new baby might be a 
changeling, or a tiny, white hind ; almost anything sweet, since 
it was too wee even to cry much; but the senior baby was a 
source of perplexity, until 2,oi decided that he should be the 
army. In the Wonder Book, an army was always rebelling 
and showing insubordination, and the r6U suited him to a dot. 
Even a beautiful princess has trouble. 

The chief assailants of the realm were a horde of mosquitoes 
which sometimes drove the princess, the changeling, and even 
the army into exile. When the mosquitoes were not very an* 
noying, however, Zo^, her faded blue calico frock changed by 
fancy's wand to shimmering satin, sometimes spent almost the 
whole day in her sylvan paradise. For, since the new baby 
was being brought up by hand, a bottle of^ milk satisfied its 
one idea of happiness, while a lunch of bread and a drink from 
the brook, with the chance of a few more berries having ripened 
since yesterday, constituted a feast for the princess and rations 
for the army. 

On these occasions, however, when the afternoon grew old 
and the shadow oi the great mill spread over the broad sheet 
of water above the dam, leaving only a rim of brightness around 
the opposite edge of the pond, then Zo^ came back to the 
realities of life and, knowing it lacked but an hour to " closing 
time,'' hurried home with her charges. For in that hour must 
be accomplished the housework of the day. The rooms must 
be " tidied up " and the evening meal prepared for father and 
step -mother toiling in the mill. 

That a less happy-go-lucky housekeeping would have been 
more conducive to the family comfort goes without saying. 
Yet, after all, for a little girl of her years, Zo^ did her part; 
and if she surreptitiously spent her time on the fairy island, the 
pleasant summer days in the open air kept the babies well and 
added to the little store of the child's own strength upon 
which she was soon to draw prodigally. 

This particular afternoon was not to be as others. While 
Zo^ was *' flying around getting supper," and shortly after the 



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I908.] ZOE AND THE PRINCE 793 

factory whistle '' blew for six o'clock/' a group of women came 
down the street whereon the operatives' houses faced. Sup- 
ported by the arms of two among them tottered a young 
creature, almost a girl, whose once pretty face was pale as 
death. 

From the dilapidated Chauvin house the child saw them 
approaching, and rushing out, cried in alarm: '^Finon, Finon, 
qu^ avis^vousf** The limp woman was her step- mother. 

'^She just keeled over beside her loom, and went o£f in a 
dead faint," explained a kind-hearted, wizened-faced daughter 
of New England. ** Your father, Pierre Chauvin, was dis- 
charged for drunkenness this morning, an' the poor girl wor- 
ritted over it, I guess; the more so, when she heard awhile 
ago that he's shook the dust of the village from his feet an' 
gone off, nobody knows where. It's a good riddance to a bad 
bargain, I say, but Finon don't seem to look at it in that 
light. When the heart-break comes to some women, it 'fects 
them different than what it does others." 

Perhaps Finon was a poor-spirited young thing; or, was 
it that the long, ten* hour days of toil in the mill when the 
new baby was still so very new had wrung from her the last 
remnant of her strength? After a few days, when it became 
plain beyond a doubt that Pierre Chauvin had deserted her, 
she broke down completely. 

" She lacks Yankee grit. But how can she help that, being 
a Frenchy with two babies to care for ? " said the neighbors. 

^'Zo^, I could not tend a loom now if they gave me all it 
earned ; yet, perhaps, after a little while, this may not be so," 
said Finon to the child. ** I am sorry ; there is no other way. 
You must go into the mill. You are under the age, but I 
can get you in." 

Pierre Chauvin had two other daughters, Josette and Laure, 
who earned ** big money " at the looms, wore fine clothes, 
went to dances, and were of the gay set of the factory town. 

These lively demoiselles had not approved of their father's 
second marriage, they considered his wife beneath them so- 
cially, and seemed to forget that litte Zo^ was their sister. 

Laure woke up now, however. Meeting the child in the 
street she called to her. ** Hello, mignonne^ stop a moment 
and speak! Say, Zo^, I'll get you a good place on my floor 
at the factory, and you can come and live with us instead of 



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794 ZOE AND THE PRINCE [Mar., 

drudging for a step-mother. It is time you were doing for 
yourself. You'd loolc real pretty if you were dressed up. My, 
but I wish I had such a nice pink glow in my cheeks I I keep 
my color in a little box, child. Well, will you come?'' 

'' No " ; answered Zo^ laconically. 

There the sisterly interest ended. 

" What could one do with such a stubborn minx ? " protested 
the offended demoiselle, whose patronizing offer of assistance 
was so sturdily rejected. 

Zoi was not conscious of any love for her step-mother. 
Finon had treated her neither well nor ill. Zo^ had been to 
Pierre Chauvin's second wife only a part of the machinery by 
which she was surrounded, a machine that had picked up the 
broken threads of a joyless domestic life. 

But now Finon, touched by the child's loyalty, and noting 
how small and fragile she was for her age, would have spared 
her had it been possible. 

It had cost Zo^ a pang to refuse Laure's offer, she was en 
chanted with the idea of going into the mill. Now she would 
earn, money, money, money 1 She did not regret her father's 
defection; drink had made him morose and harsh. She was 
proud that she was going to be, for a while, the bread-winner 
for the family. Le ban DUu had given it to her to do. 

"Yes, I will earn so much money that, besides taking care 
of Finon and the babies, I shall be able to buy silk dresses 
like Laure and Josette, and a hat with a beautiful white feather," 
she said to herself in a blissful dream. " Then, as in the Won- 
der Book, some day, far, far in the future, perhaps the prince 
may come." 

It was the usual rounding- out of the fairy tale. 

Thus, with a brave heart, Zo^ went to work at the cotton 
mill. Other little girls were there, and almost all of these she 
had known at the village school. The superintendent was al- 
ways ready to employ the girls, they were so deft-fingered and 
so much steadier than the boys. 

Zo^ was the smallest and youngest of the child-workers. 
Like some of the others, she was set to minding the bobbins. 
When a thread broke she had to catch and tie it; when the 
bobbins were full she took them out and replaced them with 
new ones. All day long, from seven o'clock in the morning 
until six at night, with only an hour's rest at noon, she stood 



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I908.] ZOE AND THE PRINCE 795 

on her little feet and minded the bobbins, until her little hands 
and head and eyes grew so weary she hardly knew what she 
was doing. 

At first, even though tired, she was happy at her task, and, 
when the end of the week came, and she brought home her 
small wage to Finon, no one among all the mill children was 
prouder than Zo^. 

In the second week the novelty wore off, and the child be- 
gan to feel like a little untamed hare or bird caught in a snare. 

How bright were the autumn days, how she longed to be 
out in the sunshine, longed even for the care of the babies and 
the housework, rather than to be chained here like a slave one 
might say, for it was nothing but toil in this great room, with 
the noise of the machinery ever in her ears, and the bobbins 
ever whirring round, until, with watching them, her eyes grew 
dim and her head dizzy. 

In the beginning Zoi tried to make a play of it all. The 
superintendent was an ogre who had shut her up in a dismal 
castle, where a malicious fairy, the forewoman, set her a seem- 
ingly endless task. Being a princess, however, she would ac- 
complish the task and regain her freedom. But, after weeks 
and weeks, the task appeared no nearer completion than at first. 

*' Finon was going into a decline," the neighbors said. Only 
twice, during the golden glory of October, was the child able 
to steal away to the fairy island. Then came the white frosts 
of Novettiber, and after that the winter. 

For a year and a half Zo€ worked in the mill. Her face 
grew wan and pinched, but no one noticed. Were not all the 
mill children pale and anaemic ? Her black eyes became dull 
and vacant, but were not all the mill children listless and stu^ 
pid-looking? Her frock was shabbier than ever; few of the 
mill children were well dressed. 

" Little French Zo€ is a good worker, but, like all foreigners, 
she is queer, and getting queerer every day," said the fore- 
woman. '^ Sometimes there is a look in her big black eyes that 
fairly gives me the shivers." 

Up to this time Zoi had loved to go to the church and, 
kneeling before the beautiful statue of Notre Dame de Pitie\ 
murmur her childish prayers, as she dimly remembered having 
been taught to do in the village of the province of Quebec, 
from which the Chauvins had come. But now she grew care- 



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796 ZOE AND THE PRINCE [Mar., 

less. Sometiiqes on Sundays she slept late and did not go to 
Mass ; often Finon was too ill to go. Zo^ straightened up the 
house for her. 

Father Gabriel, seeking his straying lambs, called at the cot- 
ti^e in the round of his visitations. '* Who made you, Zo6 ? " 
he asked, putting to her the first question of the catechism. 

" God." 

''Why did he make you?'' 

" To work,'' answered 7xi€ bitterly. 

Alas, many of these children of the mills are almost wholly 
uninstructed ; yet, when reproved for not coming to Sunday- 
School, they say they are too weary. *' Can one be severe 
with them ? " murmured the zealous French priest, as he sadly 
wended his way homeward. 

The summer came for the second time ; the fairy island now 
looked a long way o£F. Even when Zo€ passed it, the charm 
that had hung over it, with the soft violet haze, had disap- 
peared. It seemed to her only like a motionless green dragon 
guarding the mill-race, and lying in wait to devour any reck- 
less little girl who might attempt to escape from the eternal 
grind of the mill. She would not have gone near it for the 
world. 

''Time seems so long to a child, and trials appear insur- 
mountable. Zo^ despaired of relief from the toil to which she 
was doomed. Finon could never work again ; Josette and Laure 
had married and gone to live in a neighboring city; Pierre 
Chauvin was heard of no more. 

How the child grew to hate the great mill and even its 
shadow, which darkened the surface of its mirror-like pond look- 
ing deep down into the depths of the blue water, as if deter- 
mined not to let one little drop escape from the labor of help- 
ing to turn the vast machinery. Zo^ felt as if she were that 
one tiny atom in the current of Millville life. 

"She has wheels in her head," declared the forewoman. 

" Ah, if the mill were not there 1 " 

Zo^ was frightened when the thought first came to her. " If 
the mill were not there the work could not go on." But the 
mill was so high, and solid, and strong ; it would be there until 
doomsday. 

If a bolt of lightning would only strike the great buildings ; 
if a hurricane would but sweep them away, or an earthquake 



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I908.] ZOE AND THE PRINCE 797 

would shake the tall walls from their foundations and send them 
toppling into the lake. None of these things happened; but 
the wheels in Zo^'s head whirred louder. 

One evenings as the operatives were leaving the mill, she 
lagged behind unnoticed until all were gone. The heavy gates 
closed with a clang. But she could get out when she chose. 
She had only to unlock one of the windows on the lowest floor 
and squeeze through the space between the iron bars. Being 
so small and thin the feat would not be difficult ; she had tried 
it. 

Her work for the day was not over; no, there was some- 
thing to be done more important than even the superintendent 
knew. 

Zo^ crouched upon the floor ; she struck a match, and tossed 
it from her. A small tongue of flame leaped up from a pile of 
cotton waste collected in a corner. 

The child sprang to her feet with a cry of delight. As she 
turned to flee, however, a hand clutched her shoulder, and her 
heart seemed to stand still with fright, as she looked up into 
the face of Eph Sargent, the factory watchman. 

** Ha, ha, so you are setting fire to the mill, you little devil I ** 
he exclaimed as, with the rapidity of thought, he dragged her 
along to the place where the hand-grenades hung, and, seizing 
one after another of them, flung all on the flames. 

Within two minutes after it started, the fire was extinguished 
and the mill saved. 

Oh, if Zo^ could have taken those two minutes out of her 
life. 

** What would the mill owner do to her ? ** she dazedly won- 
dered ? 

*' Let you go, hey ? '* replied Eph to her pleading and sobs 
of remorse. ''Wall, I guess not. You will spend the night in 
jail, never fear.* Don't you know you are a criminal; and for 
this you'll probably be sent to prison to stay until you are 
grown to be a woman ? Come on, whimpering won't save you.'* 

With many a shove and cuff he dragged the wretched child 
to the house of the superintendent, a police officer was sum- 
moned by telephone, and Zo^ was lodged in the jail. 

The news spread among the factory people. 

'' She is a little fool," they said. 

Finon dragged herself to see the child. ** Oh, Zo^, why did 



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798 ZOE AND THE PRINCE [Mar.« 

you do it ? " she lamented. '^ What will become of us now ? 
Our French people have done so well in the mills, but you 
have disgraced them. You have brought trouble even upon 
the babies." 

The next morning, alter a night of mental torture, Zo^ sat 
on a bench in the matron's room, a picture of stoical hopeless- 
ness. The one advantage of her forlorn situation was that she 
did not have to stand HX day, as at the mill. 

'<Is this the little girl?" 

A woman's well-modulated voice broke the stillness of the 
room. 

7so€ raised her eyes with a dull stare as a lady, accompanied 
by a young man, entered the room with the matron. 

"Yes, Mrs. Morton, this is the small imp of Satan." 

Zo^ shrank back into herself and turned her head away, in 
sullen defiance. 

The matron went on down the corridor, but the lady, cross- 
ing the floor swiftly, took the child by the hand. 

" My dear, I am your friend," she said sweetly. '' I look 
after the children who are brought into court and help them if 
I can." 

The face that bent over the young prisoner had lost the 
beauty of youth, but in its kindness it seemed to Zo^ as the 
face of an angel. 

The child burst into tears. In another moment the lady's 
arm was around her and she was drawn to a heart generous 
and tender enough to have mothered all the unhappy children 
whose wretchedness moved its compassion. 

'^ Zo^, I am sure you understand now that it was very wicked 
to try to set fire to the mill," said the lady gently. ''Why 
did you do it?" 

'' I had to work so hard and I was so very tired," faltered 
Zo^, trembling so pitiably that the lady had to hold her closer. 
'' I thought if the mill was burned there would be no more 
work for a while and I would have a rest." 

'' Poor little creature," exclaimed the young man, as he 
walked up and down with rapid strides. '' Poor little creature." 

In the afternoon Zo^ was brought into court. 

When she heard her mad act described by the counsel for 
the mill-owner, she was frightened at the depth of her deprav- 
ity. 



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I908.] ZOE AND THE PRINCE 799 

" Oh, truly, I am very wicked," she said to herself. " How 
can I ever again even dare to lift my eyes to the little Jesus 
in the arms of Notre Dame de Pitief*^ 

She would be sent to prison. Her fate seemed sealed. Just 
as she reached this conclusion, she caught sight of Mrs. Mor- 
ton and her son, who had come to the jail. Zo^ had often 
seen them before. They sat in the front pew of the church. 

And now George Morton sprang to his feet. He was actu- 
ally taking her part. 

Was it true, then, that although she had done wrong, very 
wrong, there was still some hope for her, not only here, but 
before the court of Eternal Justice, which she pictured as far 
away beyond the blue sky ? 

This was the young lawyer's first effort, a petty case, for 
which, prompted by his sympathies, he had volunteered. Yet, 
had it been the great opportunity of his life, he could not have 
been more in earnest. 

"Technically the defendant has committed a crime," he ac- 
knowledged ; " but upon whom does the real responsibility rest ? 
Is it upon the child, over-worked for a pittance, robbed of her 
puny strength, of her right to develop physically and mentally 
in God's sunshine, robbed almost of her reason, her sense of 
right and wrong confused by excessive toil ? We have just 
heard it stated that she does not seem to have any real sense 
of the enormity of her offense ; that she is ' a little out.' But 
I ask your Honor," queried Zo^'s advocate^ turning to the 
judge, " is it not rather the so-called Christian civilization of this 
State that is ' a little out ' ? Has it any real sense of the enor- 
mity of its crime in permitting the existence of the system of 
child-labor of which this incident is an unfortunate result?" 

Thus he went on, not melodramatically « not posing for ef- 
fect or indulging in bombastic oratory, but quietly and with 
logical force, arraigning the manufacturers, the capitalists, the 
men of his own class, with whom, he maintained, lay the gen- 
uine culpability. 

Zo^, enthralled, heard his eloquent plea, and, while her little 
heart beat tumultously, a thought flashed upon her. 

Here was the prince, the real prince of whom she had 

dreamed ever since the days of the fairy island. Not a prince 

of romance, she was too young for this sort of day-dreaming 

(if the feminine fancy is ever too young) ; at least it was not of 

VOL. LxxxTi.— 51 



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8oo ZOE AND THE PRINCE [Mar., 

romance she thought now ; it was only that before her stood 
the embodiment of manly nobility, truth, and generosity, one 
eager to help the poor, the unhappy, the down-trodden, to up- 
raise even the sinful whom he might meet along his way. 
And he was come, when all others seemed to have forsaken 
her, to save her, Zo^, and restore her to liberty. 

The judge had paid close attention to the argument of the 
young lawyer, whose family were prominent in the community. 

** The court gives due consideration to your statements, Mr. 
Morton," he now said. *' Nevertheless, since children are em- 
ployed in the factories, and this at the earnest wish of their 
parents or guardians, they must not be permitted to become 
lawless menaces of society." 

The superintendent of the mill, who was present as the rep* 
resentative of the proprietor, smiled superciliously. Seldom 
does labor run up against capital without being worsted. 

Not all mill-owners are hard men. But to be masters of 
great manufacturing plants, of the mechanical forces, to know 
that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of operatives depend up- 
on them for daily bread, that for a weekly wage they own the 
strength, the maximum toil of an army of human beings, to 
whom their word is law, bringing misery or happiness — these 
things greatly tend to make men hard. The adamantine relent- 
lessness of the machinery, its utter disregard for all else but a 
ceaseless demand for ** piore," too often enters into the very 
fibre of their natures. 

The owner of the cotton factory had decided to make an 
example of Zo^. 

Undaunted, her champion continued. He urged that, es- 
pecially in juvenile offenses, the object of justice is not so much 
the punishment, as the reformation of the offender, an object 
unfortunately not always effected by reformatories and indus- 
trial schools. And then — Zo^'s heart almost stood still with a 
suspense that was halt-gladness, half- pain — then he announced 
that the relatives of Madame Finon Chauvin had sent for her 
and her children to go back to the province of Quebec, that 
she was ready to start at any time, taking Zo^ with her also, 
if it might please the court to let her go ? Might not the ends 
of justice be served if she were simply removed from the scene 
of her desperate deed, committed in a moment of childish de- 
spair and temporary insanity?" 



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I908,] ZOE AND THE PRINCE 8oi 

Mr. Morton respectfully submitted the point to his Honor. 

Here was a means of satisfying in part the officials of the 
mill, and yet of showing clemency to the dazed offender. The 
judge seized upon it. 

''The prisoner is discharged, with the understanding that 
she be removed elsewhere, so that the property of the com- 
plainant shall be no longer endangered," he ordered pompously. 
''The next case is called." 

Banishment ! But was it a punishment that had been meted 
out to Zo^ ? Back to Canada I She recalled only dimly the 
village where she was born; yet, from the haze that half veils 
the early years of childhood, several scenes and incidents stood 
out clearly. She had played in the fields unreproved, and there 
were no tasks to do. Then her sisters had come to Millville 
and obtained work in the mill. From that time her father 
talked of the great and glorious country of " the States." Hav- 
ing married Finon, he brought her away to New England, and 
Zo^ too. All were to grow rich in their new life. 

But what had "the States" done for them? Pierre Chau- 
vin, temperate and good-humored, if somewhat indolent, at 
home in Quebec, had become surly, a hard drinker, and a 
loafer, whose taking off of himself was regarded as a blessing. 
Finon was going to die, and Zo^'s physical endurance was 
broken down by the long hours of toil that even a man's strength 
finds irksome. 

Ah, it would be no hardship to go back to the land of con- 
tented poverty, where the people are idle only because there 
is little work to be had. 

Thoughts like these struggled through the mind of the 
child, and her heart thrilled with thankfulness. 

As a uniformed guardian of the peace led her from the 
court- room and turned her out into the world once more, he 
spoke a parting word of good advice on his own responsibility ; 
but she hardly heard him. For was not that her champion 
coming down the steps with his mother ? 

Zo^ ran towards them. "Oh, sir," she cried, impetuously 
grasping the hand of her deliverer, " how can I ever thank 
you for what you have done for me ? I have no money now, 
but I will work, somehow, somewhere, and one day I can pay 
you in part. Not every bit of money in the whole world could 
fully repay you." 



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802 ZOE AND THE PRINCE [Mar. 

''Pay me, child?" rejoined the young lawyer, tightenisg 
his clasp of her thin, feverish fingers. '' Do you think I would 
take money earned by these tired little hands, this weary little 
brain? No, Zo^; you shall repay me, but it must be by try- 
ing to be good and to grow strong. Then the machinery won't 
go whirring through your head any more, and you will not at- 
tempt to right your wrongs like a crazy anarchist. Will yon 
promise me this?" 

Zo^'s voice shook with a sob as she promised. 

She never saw him again; but from that day he was her 
hero. Her gratitude had in it no element of selfishness. Even 
when at home in French Canada, where she found simple em- 
ployment and grew to be a good and pretty demoiselle, never 
in her wildest flights of fancy did she imagine that she could 
ever be anything to him. He was as far above, beyond her, 
as though he were, indeed, a knight from fairyland. 

Finon was dead ; both the junior and the senior babies bad 
become sturdy urchins. In time Zo^ loved and married a son 
of the soil. But there was one who ever remained her ideal 
of chivalry and honor — the prince who took a wretched little 
girl by the hand, when all the world seemed against her, and 
led her toward hope and happiness, a path that had brought her 
back to her native village, to kneel again at the feet of ''the 
Child who was set for the condemnation of many in Israel,* and 
the compassionately smiling Notre Dame de Pitie\ 



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THE SHAKESPEARIAN CLOWN. 

BY A. W. CORPE. 

||HE immediate ancestor of the stage clown, a char- 
acter which attained its culmination in the plays 
of Shakespeare, was the ** Vice " of the medi- 
aeval "Moralities." The Moralities themselves 
derived their origin from the " Mysteries " or 
"Miracle Plays" of the Church. In the mysteries the devil 
was a prominent personage, duly furnished with suitable ap- 
parel, horns, cloven feet, hooked nails, and other grotesque 
properties. On the decline of the mysteries, the secular moral- 
ities sprang up and, to a certain extent, usurped their place. 
In the latter, in addition to the personation of the devil, was a 
character called ''Vice," sometimes also called by other titles 
as: "Sin," "Hypocrisy," "Iniquity," and the like, as in the 
passage in Richard III. : 

Thus like the formal vice. Iniquity. 

The principal function of this personage was to belabor 
the devil, for which purpose he carried a wooden lath or dagger. 
Sometimes he would jump on the devil's back and pretend to 
pare his nails and otherwise harass him. In the "Histrio- 
mastix" occurs the stage direction: "Enter a roaring Devil 
with the Vice on his back." However, the Vice did not always 
have the best of it, for his adventures not unfrequently termi- 
nated on his being himself cairied off to hell by the devih 

From early times it had been the custom for kings and 
great men to keep attached to their courts fools or jesters, to 
afford amusement to them and their households. These would 
probably be persons somewhat abnormal in their intellects — 
eccentric characters — whose manners and sayings would have 
the merit of originality, and be a welcome relief to those who 
had no resource in liberal studies during the hours unoccupied 
by the chase and warlike sports. Others, again, would be men, 
perfectly sane, but with cleverness enough to affect slight 
mental derangement. Viola in "Twelfth Night" says of the 
clown, Feste: 



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8o4 THE SHAKESPEARIAN CLOWN [Mar., 

This fellow's wise enough to play the fool; 
And to do that well craves a kind of wit. 

Others, again, would be men possessed of real wit and hn- 
mor, whom a frolicsome disposition incline to this kind of life ; 
Yorick, the '' fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy," 
whose gibes, gambols, songs, and flashes of merriment, which 
were wont to set the table in a roar, at once occurs to us. 
Many names might be quoted of jesters, regularly licensed 
to the English courts; visitors to the Palace at Hampton 
Court will not have failed to notice the portrait of Will Som- 
ers, court jester to Henry VIII. ; Archie Armstrong, court jester 
in the times of James I. and Charles I., will be remembered as 
figuring in Scott's Fortunes of Nigel; one is mentioned as at- 
tached to the French court as recently as the time of Louis 
XVIII. These persons were usually dressed in a fantastic, 
motley habit, from which circumstance, motley came to be used 
as equivalent to fool ; Jaques, in '' As You Like It," referring to 
Touchstone, says : '^ Motley's your only wear " ; and Shakespeare, 
speaking of himself, says (Sonnet ex.) that he had made him- 
self '' a motley to the view," For head dress the fool had a 
hood surmounted by a cockscomb, and he carried a bauble; 
the Vice of the Moralities was usually dressed in the costume 
of the domestic fools, and when the clown, in course of time, 
became a stage personage, the characters of the two became 
blended into that of the stage clown as represented by the dra- 
matists of the period preceding Shakespeare. As may easily 
be supposed, the character afforded frequent opportunities, the 
exercise of the ex-tempore witticisms condemned by Hamlet in 
his Address to the Players ; it was reserved for Shakespeare to 
elevate this character from the level of buffoonery to one of 
unique importance. 

The creations of so many-sided a man as Shakespeare defy 
classification — each is his own individual sell; and in studying 
the Shakespearian clown we must not confine ourselves to the 
purely domestic jester, such as Touchstone, Feste, and Lear's 
faithful follower. Both Speed and Lance in ^' The Two Gentle- 
men of Verona " — one of the few plays of which the First Folio 
contains a list of the characters — are described as ''clownish 
servants " to Valentine and Proteus respectively. In the dramatic 
action they are the body- servants of their masters, but in addi- 



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i9o8.] THE Shakespearian Clown 805 

tion, Speed acts the part of the blundering, word* distorting 
fool, and Lance that of the sententious jester. It will, perhaps, 
be the simplest course, in considering some of these characters, 
to take them in the probable order of the productions of the 
plays in which they occur; the development of the character 
will thus be made apparent. 

In '' Love's Labour's Lost " there ar6 two characters more 
or less answering to the description of the fool. Dull, a con- 
stable, and Costard, called in the modern editions a clown; 
there is also a schoolmaster called in the latter part of the 
play '' the pedant," under which name a somewhat similar kind 
of diversion to that of the clown was submitted to the specta- 
tors. One of the attendants on the King of Navarre, on the 
introduction of the '* fantastical" Spaniard, Armado, announces 
that "Costard the Swain" shall be their sport Dull and Cos- 
tard presently enter, and the nature of their humor is soon ap- 
parent. After one or two verbal distortions. Costard relates an 
incident in his love-passages with Jaquenetta: 

''The manner of it is, I was taken with the manner." 

''In what manner?" asks Biron. 

" In manner and form following, sir ; all those three ; I was 
seen with her in the manor house, sitting with her upon the 
form, and taken following her into the park ; which, put to- 
gether, is in manner and form following. Now, sir, for the man- 
ner — it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman; for the 
form — in some form." 

Moth, Amado's page, might pass for a jester of the witty 
sort, but in truth, not only the humbler characters, but even the 
lords of the King of Navarre's court and the Princess of France 
and her ladies, all indulge in badinage and repartee chiefly 
based on verbal quibbling; the following is a fair specimen of 
Moth's wit : Amado had asked Moth to name great men who 
had been in love and said: " Let them be men of good reputa- 
tion and carriage." 

"Sampson, master," says Moth, "he was a man of good 
carriage, great carriage, for he carried the town- gates on his 
back like a porter; and he was in love." 

Biron and Rosaline, the slightly sketched studies to be there- 
after developed in the persons of Benedick and Beatrice, do not 
aim much higher in their style. 

Another of the Princess' ladies aims higher when she says. 



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8o6 THE Shakespearian Clown [Mar., 

on her lover offering to kiss her: ''My lips are no common, 
though several they be/' impertinent allusion to the legal sense 
of the words. 

Moth is answerable for the witty remark, after Sir Nathaniel 
and Holofernes have been engaged in a long discussion, carried 
out in fantastic fashion and with affectation of learning: ''They 
have been to a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps." 

With reference to the verbal quibbling, so frequent in Shake- 
speare's earlier work, it may well be the case that it did not 
bear the air of poverty of wit, with which we regard it, but 
that it was the fashion and acceptable to the audience of his 
day; as Rosalind says: 

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear 

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue 

Of him that makes it. 

In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," Speed alone, accord- 
ing to the modern editions, is described as " clownish " ; but, as 
already stated, both the servants are so described in the First 
Folio; certainly we should give the preference to Lance, with 
his immortal dog. We may pass over Speed's puns, but his 
description, in Act II., of a man in love and what follows, is 
excellent. A little later Lance and Speed meet, but their con- 
versation is chiefly quibbling; as Speed says: "Your old vice 
still; mistake the word." Lance's soliloquy on the object of 
his affections, and the discussion with Speed following on her 
several qualities, is in a higher strain; his conclusion that her 
wealth makes her faults gracious, is one that still holds its 
ground. But Lance lives in our memories on account of the 
famous soliloquies upon the unsympathetic and ill-mannered 
"Crab" in Acts II. and IV., from which it would be super- 
fluous to quote. Eajly as the play is, perhaps Shakespeare has 
never done anything more exquisite in this style; we seem, in 
fancy, to trace the changes of look and attitude of the cur, as 
his master complains of his callousness, while he himself watered 
the ground with his tears, or when he tells how he had taken 
upon himself the blame for the cur's misdeeds, and lectures him 
upon his lapses from gentlemanlike behavior; and we feel with 
Lance how foul a thing it is, when a cur cannot keep himself 
in all companies. 

The comic characters in "The Midsummer Night's Dream,"^ 



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I908.J THE Shakespearian Clown 807 

with the all* too-ingenious Bottom, humorous though they are, 
and though many verbal distortions occur in their parts, do not 
possess the characteristic of the true clown, and need not de- 
tain us. 

Lancelot Gobbo, Shylock's servant in ''The Merchant of 
Venice,'' is described as clown in the modern editions ; but per- 
haps Jessica's description of him as ''a merry devil," and Lor- 
enzo's as '' a wit- snapper," are nearer the mark. The argu- 
ment between his conscience and the fiend, whether he should 
run away from his master, is a fine piece of humor. 

'' ' Budge,' says the fiend. ' Budge not,' says my conscience. 
'Conscience,' say I, 'you counsel well'; 'Fiend,' say I, 'you 
counsel well ' ; to be ruled by my conscience, I should stay with 
the Jew, my master, who (God bless the mark I) is a kind of 
devil ; and to run away from the Jew, I should be ruled by 
the fiend, who, saving from reverence, is the devil himself.'" 

Lancelot is not without the humanities; in the dialogue 
with his half-blind father, when he tells him that his son is 
dead, he talks of the " Fates and Destinies and such odd say- 
ings, the Sisters Three and such branches of learning " ; and in 
a later scene with Jessica, where he suggests, by way of excuse 
for her change of faith, that she may not be the true child of 
her father, he says : "Truly, then, I fear you are damned both 
by father and mother; thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I 
fall into Charybdis, your mother; well, you are gone both 
ways." His passages of wit are of a more polished style than 
those we have hitherto met with. Compare his farewell to Jes- 
sica — " Adieu I tears exhibit my tongue, most beautiful pagan, 
most sweet Jew! . . . These foolish drops do something 
drown my manly spirit ; adieu ! " — with the first soliloquy of 
Lance with his dog. 

The " unimitated inimitable " Falstaff cannot be classed among 
the clowns, but he is certainly in the finest vein of his humor 
in those scenes where he plays the part of jester to the Prince, 
and, unless I am mistaken, these scenes show that, under this 
strange combination of wit» vanity, selfishness, and sensuality, 
there was a real a£Fection for the Prince, ill-requited by the cold 
rebuff of the newly-crowned King, who had so often sought 
recreation in his company: "The King hath killed his heart,'^ 
the quondam Mistress Quickly says in the following play, where 
we are told of the poor old man's death. 



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8o8 The Shakespearian Clown [Mar., 

Dogberry and Verges, the famous city officers of Messina, 
in ''Much Ado About Nothing/' are not strictly clowns, but, 
in addition to their part in the action of the play, they serve 
to amuse the audience by theit grotesque blundering, and, on 
more than one occasion, give utterance to philosophy unawares. 
Dogberry's charge to the watch is in the best style of clownish 
shrewdness: Seacole being put forward for Constable, on ac- 
count of his superior education, Dogberry goes about to mod- 
erate his self-esteem by the delightfully absurd antithesis ''To 
be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune ; but to write and 
read comes by nature"; and checks his ready claim to both 
by the equally delightful sarcasm : " Well, for your favour, sir, 
give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your writ- 
ing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such 
vanity." 

Dogberry then proceeds to his charge : " You shall compre- 
hend all vagrom men." 

Possibly there is here an allusion to the recent Act of 39th 
Elizabeth, enacting that all players, except as therein specified, 
should be adjudged rogues and vagabonds, as, in point of fact, 
they had already been held to be ; it would not escape the au- 
dience that the term might comprehend the poor player himself. 

"You are to bid any man stand, in the prince's name," he 
goes on. 

"How if he will not stand?" asks one of the watch. 

There is philosophy as well as shrewdness in Dogberry's 
answer : 

"Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go; and 
presently call the rest of the watch together and thank God 
you are rid of a knave." 

The disposal of those found drunk in ale-houses is settled 
in an equally satisfactory manner, and the problem of how to 
deal with a thief is evaded by a witticism of which the speaker 
may be supposed to have been unconscious : " Let him show 
himself what he is and steal out of your company." 

Ending his charge, Dogberry impresses upon the constable 
the dignity of his office: "You constables are to present the 
prince's own person; if you meet the prince in the night, you 
may stay him." 

Verges questions this, but Dogberry maintains his position 
with a proviso: 



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i9o8.] THE Shakespearian Clown 809 

''Five shillings to one on't, with any man that knows the 
statues^ he may stay him; marry, not without the prince be 
willing; for, indeed, the watch ought to offend no man; and 
it is an offense to stay a man against his will/* 

The short scene wherein Dogberry and Verges take the ex- 
aminations of the conspirators, is full of delightful blunders — 
one may be quoted, Confade has told Dogberry he is an ass. 
Dogberry fires up: 

'' Dost thou not suspect my place ? dost thou not suspect 
my years? oh, that he were here to write me down — an ass! 
But, masters, remember that I am an ass ; though it be not 
written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. • • • Oh, 
that I had been writ down — an ass.** 

We now come to two examples of the ideal Shakespearian 
clown — the domestic jester retained to enliven the times of mer- 
riment with his quips and frolic, or to relieve the tedious hour 
with his shrewd and sometimes caustic sayings. Touchstone, 
the clown of ''As You Like It," is of the sententious and sa- 
tirical order, the vein of humor of Feste of " Twelfth Night " 
lies rather in mirth and merriment. 

Celia and Rosalind, the twin stars of " As You Like It," are 
discussing how they shall employ themselves, when Touchstone 
enters and announces that Celia is to go to her father. She 
asks : " Were you made the messenger ? " " No, by mine hon- 
our, but I was bid to come for you," he replies; and being 
asked where he heard that oath, makes answer: "Of a cer- 
tain knight that swore by his honour they were good pancakes 
and swore by his honour the mustard was naught; now, I'll 
stand to it, the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, 
and yet was not the knight forsworn"; and illustrates his 
meaning by suggesting that the ladies should swear, by their 
beards, that he was a knave; and ends with the epigrammatic 
remark : " The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what 
wise men do foolishly." 

Her uncle's jealousy has banished Rosalind; Celia will re- 
nounce her father and go with her, and they will make for the 
forest of Arden, as Ganymede and Aliena, and Touchstone 
shall accompany them " to be a comfort to their travel." Ar- 
rived in the forest. Touchstone interviews in turn the simple 
inhabitants of the place and of the banished Duke's retinue, 
the philosophic Jaques. It were needless to refer to the pas- 



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8lO THE SHAKESPEARIAN CLOWN [Mar., 

sages called forth by the various circumstances of the inter- 
views; besides such passages lose their point, detached from 
their surroundings. We will quote Jaques' account of Touch • 
stone : 

A fool, a fool 1 I met a fool i' the forest, 

A motley fool ; a miserable world 1 

As I do live by food, I met a fool; 

Who laid him down and basked in the sun. 

And railed on Lady Fortune in good terms. 

In good set terms, and yet a motley fool. 

" Good-morrow, fool," quoth I. " No, sir," quoth he, 

"Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune." 

And then he drew a dial from his poke. 

And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye. 

Says very wisely : " It is ten o'clock : 

Thus we may see," quoth he, ** how the world wags : 

Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, 

And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; 

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. 

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; 

And thereby hangs a tale." 

. . . O noble fool 1 

A worthy fooll Motley's the only wear. 

''What fool is this? says the Duke. 

worthy fooll One that hath been a courtier, 

• • • and in his brain. 
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit 
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd 
With observation, the which he vents 
In mangled forms. O that I were a fool ! 

1 am ambitious for a motley coat. 

''Thou shalt have one," says the Duke. 

" It is my only suit," quippingly replies Jaques. 

"As You Like It," according to the manner of comedies, 
terminates in marriages : the Duke with his train and the other 
personages are assembled — "There is, sure, another flood to- 
ward, and these couples are coming to the ark 1 " remarks Jaques ; 
then, observing Touchstone and Audrey : " Here comes a pair 
of very strange beasts, which in all tongues are called fools."- 



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I908.] THE SHAKESPEARIAN CLOWN 8ll 

Touchstone, with an affectation of grandiloquence, bids '' Salu- 
tation and greeting to you all ! '' 

Jaq : Good my lord, bid him welcome ; this is the motley- 
minded gentleman that I have so often met in the forest; he 
hath been a courtier, he swears. 

Touch: If any man doubt that, let him put me to my 
purgation. 

Whereupon follows the famous dissertation upon the seven 
degrees in a quarrel and the superlative value of if^ which it 
would be superfluous to quote ; the humor of the characteristic 
break, however, where Touchstone says, aside to Audrey (whom 
he had previously introduced as an ''ill-favored thing, sir, but 
mine own ") : " Bear your body more seeming, Audrey," may 
be noticed. The character of Touchstone is well summed up 
by Jaques and the Duke: ''Is not this a rare fellow, my 
lord ? He's as good at anything and yet a fool," says Jaques ; 
and the Duke replies : " He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, 
and under the presentation of that, he shoots his wit." Those 
who have seen the late Mr. Compton in this part, will remem- 
ber his admirable representation of it: the air of gravity and 
shrewdness he put into it, the look of inscrutable wisdom with 
an under-current of humor. 

If in "As You Like It" we have a " swift and sententious " 
clown, as the Duke terms him, "Twelfth Night" exhibits in 
Feste a clown of a somewhat different complexion. We see 
comparatively little of him, but from the scenes in which he 
takes part with Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, 
we perceive that, though he could on occasion put on a sen- 
tentious manner, he more nearly resembles Hamlet's Yorick in 
his humor. In answer to the question of Viola (posing as Ce- 
sario), " Art thou not the Lady Olivia's fool ? " He answers : 
" No, indeed, sir, the Lady Olivia has no folly ; she will keep 
no fool, sir, till she be married ; and fools are as like husbands 
as pilchards are to herrings — the husband's the bigger; I am, 
indeed, not her fool, but her corruptor of words." 

But, whatever his bent may be, he shows himself equal to 
all occasions. On his first appearance in the play, in company 
with Maria, he adopts the usual quibbling style: "Well, God 
give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let 
them use their talents " ; and afterwards, by way of soliloquy : 
''Wit, an't be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those 



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8 12 The Shakespearian Clown [Mar., 

wits, that think they have thee, do vety oft prove fools ; and I, 
that am sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man; for what 
says Quinapalus? 'Better a witty fool than a foolish wif ' 

Upon Olivia's entrance, he assumes a more serious vein; 
she has said, ''Take the fool away," in reply to his salutation, 
" God bless thee, lady 1 " He follows up with, " Do you not 
hear, fellows ? Take away the lady." '' Sir, I bade them take 
you away,'* she says. " Lady," he replies, " Cucullus nonfacit 
monachum; that's as much as to say, I were not motley in my 
brain. Good Madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool"; 
and he then proceeds to deliver an admonition, serious enough, 
if in jesting form, against the folly of undue grief for the de* 
parted. 

But it is in the scenes with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew Ague- 
cheek that we see him, or rather picture him, at his best. We 
fancy we hear him singing his songs and leading in the catches 
and holding forth about Pigrogromitus and the Vapians passing 
the Equinoctial of Queubus, whereby he did ''impetico" Sir 
Andrew's " gratillity " — it may be fooling, but it is " very gra- 
cious fooling." We see little more of him — true he visits Mal- 
volio in the prison as Sir Topas, the Curate, and afterwards in 
his own proper person, and then again as Sir Topas, but this 
is rather the part of mimic man of a jester; we hear him 
once or twice singing his songs, and at the end of the play 
we have another song from him. Whether this piece of dog- 
gerel is worthy of the occasion may be a question ; it is, how- 
ever, to be noticed that another verse of the same song is 
sung by the fool in King Lear. 

Lavatch, the clown in ''All's Well That Ends Well," has 
only a subordinate part; perhaps bis best piece of humor is 
when he explains to the Countess, that he has "an answer 
will serve all men " ; this is no other than " O Lord, sir ! " 
which seems to have been fashionable at the time. He finds 
however, that this, though it may serve long, may not always 
serve, for it would answer too appropriately to a whipping. 

" Measure for Measure " contains two characters of the 
clownish order — Elbow, the Constable, who recalls Dogberry 
and Mistress Overdone's servant, Pompey — it will be beside 
the purpose to go through more in detail, but Pompey's "I 
hope here be truths," in the examination before Angels and 
Escalus, must not be forgotten. The whole of this scene is ad- 



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i9o8.] THE Shakespearian Clown 813 

mirable; especially to be noted is the ingenuity with which 
Pompey crosses the scent. 

The play of Hamlet affords us, in the person of '' the first 
g^ave-digger/' a type of the simple yet shrewd countryman. 
From his opening sentence, ''Is she to be buried in Christian 
burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation ? " to the end of the 
short scene in which he appears, he is unique — a man without 
education, but of quick natural parts, apt to pick up what he 
might hear in the local courts of law or in conversation at the 
ale-house, ready and pungent in repartee, and withal having 
a good opinion of himself — a not very unusual combination, 
and yet how the figure stands out from the canvas. 

Othello's servant is described as a clown, but he has so 
small and unimportant a part, that it is unnecessary for the 
present purpose to consider it. 

Neither need Trinculo, the usurping Dukfe's jester in "The 
Tempest,'' detain us. He and Stepbano, the butler, are amusing 
enough in their talk, but their talk is not of the kind with 
which we are now concerned. We may be permitted to sup- 
pose that Trinculo's professional abilities were reserved for his 
master's entertainment. 

The fool in ''Timon of Athens" has only a slight part; 
perhaps the best specimen of his repartee is when Varro's 
servant tells him he is '' not altogether a fool," he says, '' nor 
thou altogether a wise man; as much foolery as I have, so 
much wit thou lackest." He only appears in the scene from 
which this is quoted. 

There remains the fool in '' King Lear," '' one of Shake- 
speare's triumphs," as Professor Bradley terms him ; a character 
more nearly akin to the domestic retainer than is the case in 
most of the instances we have noticed. Lear calls him '' boy " 
— for that matter, the fool calls Lear " boy " — but it dots not 
necessarily follow that he was not grown up. Probably some 
slight touch in the brain added piquancy to his speech and 
permitted him a greater familiarity than usual. Though blunt 
and caustic in his utterances, he regards his master with a dog- 
like affection, and faithfully follows him in his misfortunes. He 
thus occupies an important position in the play, and to quote 
him at length would be to quote a great part of Lear also. 

In a scene that we are tempted to quote at length, Lear 
and the fool have been conversing. While they are talking, Gon- 



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8 14 THE Shakespearian Clown [»li 

eril enters and begins to upbraid Lear with the disorderly cc 
duct of his followers, and his allowance of it, and Lear's pei 
up rage breaks forth: 

Are you our daughter? • • . 

Does any here know me? . . . 

Who is it that can tell me who I am ? 

'' Lear's shadow/' answers the fool. Repulsed by Goner 
Lear will take refuge with Regan; the fool says: ''Shalt s\ 
thy other daughter will use thee kindly" (using the word in 
double sense) ; '' for though she is as like this as a crab's HI 
an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell. . . . She will tast 
as like this as a crab does to a crab." After some further bar 
tering, while Lear, brooding over Goneril's behavior, groi^i 
frantic, the fool says : '' If thou wast my fool, nuncle, I'd hav 
thee beaten for biding old before thy time." " How's that ? 
says Lear. ''Thou shouldst not have been old before thoi 
hadst been wise," is the reply, and Lear breaks out into th< 
piteous wail: 

O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven ! 

Keep me in temper ; I would not be mad ! 

Arrived at Gloster's Castle, where Regan and Goneril have 
met, Lear finds Kent in the stocks; the fool exclaims: " Ha, 
ha, lookl he wears cruel garters" (making a pun on the word 
cruel). " Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by the 
neck, monkeys by the loins, and men by the legs; when a 
man is overlusty at legs, then he wears wooden nether-stocks." 

A little later, we see the fool, with the half-crazed king, in 
the storm : Lear will brave the tempest. " Blow, winds, and 
crack your cheeks ! " he cries in his passion ; but the fool sees 
things differently : " O nuncle, court holy- water in a dry house 
is better than this rain-water out o' door. Good nuncle, in, 
and ask thy daughters' blessing : here's a night pities neither 
wise men nor fools." 

Then we come upon the wonderful passage, where Lear, 
trembling on the verge of madness, will be "the pattern of 
patience," will forget his rage, his sufferings even, and will think 
upon the distresses of others; he will have Kent and the fool 
to take shelter in the hovel before him, he will remember the 
poor and wretched, the homeless, the hungry, of whom he had 
taken too little care: 



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I908.] THE SHAKESPEARIAN CLOWN 815 

In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty, — 
^^Xf get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep. 
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, 
How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides. 
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you 
From seasons such as these ? O, I have ta'en 
Too little care of thisl Take physick, pomp; 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them. 
And show the heavens more just. 

The fool finds Edgar in his disguise, in the hovel, is fright- 
ened and begs Lear not to enter: ''Come not in here, nuncle, 
here's a spirit. Help me, help me 1 " Edgar comes forward, 
and Lear, fast lapsing into actual insanity, takes him to be a 
replica of himself: ''Hast thou given all to thy two daughters? 
And art thou come to this?" Gloster eaters and leads Lear 
and the others to a farmhouse near his castle. Here Lear, now 
quite mad, imagines that Goneril and Regan are about to take 
their trial, and the fool enters into the humor. Lear says to 
Edgar : 

Thou robed man of justice, take thy place ; 
And thou [to the fool], his yoke-fellow of equity. 
Bench by his side. • • . 

Arraign her first; 'tis Goneril. I here take my oath 
before this honourable assembly, she kicked the poor 
king, her father. 
Fool: Come hither, mistress, is your name Goneril? 
Leaf : She cannot deny it. 
Fool: Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool. 

Lear, presently calmed, says : " Make no noise, make no 
noise; draw the curtains: So, so, so. We'll go to supper i' 
the morning. So, so, so." To which the fool adds: "And I'll 
go to bed at noon." 

Then the fool disappears from the play. 

After Shakespeare, the stage clown quickly died out; Ben 
Jonson never introduces the character ; Beaumont and Fletcher 
seldom ; Massinger never. A few generations later, the domes- 
tic fool, as an institution, became extinct; we are indebted 
mainly to Shakespeare for continuing to us the memory of it 

VOL. LXXXVI —52 



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flew JSooks* 

The History cf the Society of Jesses 
HISTORY. in North America^ Colonial ami 

Federal,^ is the title which Father 
Hughes has chosen for the work which has already exacted from 
him so many laborious years, and which, before its completion, 
if it is to be completed on the scale of the first volume, will 
absorb a great many more. He explains why he has chosen 
this somewhat unwieldy geographical designation contained in 
the title. After observing that Parkman had appropriated the 
shorter and popular epithet of '' Jesuits '' to denote the Society, 
in the title of his work. The Jesuits in North America in the 
Seventeenth Century ^ Father Hughes states: 

This was a rather wide undertaking for that brilliant writ- 
er ; and his performance did not carry it into execution. He 
treated of the French and left out the Spanish and English 
Jesuits in North America. We, for our part, could not pre- 
tend to adopt so comprehensive a term. We feel that our ti- 
tle, like our subject, must needs be circumscribed, to distin- 
guish it\and exclude from it Spanish and French North 
America. This we have attempted to do with the aid of two 
adjectives, ** Colonial and Federal," which imply a double 
stage of history, as before and after the American Revolution, 
and also include Canada from the time of its being ceded to 
England. The definition of our subject, by means of these 
two adjectives, connotes a line of history which was not com- 
mon to New Spain or to New France. 

The portion of the American history covered by the pres- 
ent volume properly belongs to the history of the English prov- 
ince of the Society. But it has been judged more consistent 
with the general symmetry of the projected universal history 
of the Society, of which this is a part, to attach the story of 
the Maryland mission to the American, rather than to the Eng- 
lish division. 

English affairs occupy a good third of the space ; for, be- 
sides defining the general features of the religious situation in 
England, and the position of the Society, Father Hughes, in 

•History of the SccUty of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal. By Thomas 
Hughes, of the same Society. Text. Vol. I., from the First Colonization till 1645. New 
York : Longmans, Green & Co. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 817 

order properly to discuss the character of Lord Baltimore's 
high- handed dealings with the clergy and their possessions, 
enters into an examination of the law of Mortmain, the scope 
of the Bulla Ccena^ Test Acts, and Oaths, and the nature of 
the charter which Baltimore obtained from the English Crown. 
A remarkable feature of the work is that it pleads strongly for 
a reversion of the hitherto entertained opinion that Cecilius 
Baltimore was a kind and generous protector of Catholicism. 
On the contrary. Father Hughes charges him with tyrannous 
rapacity, duplicity, and a persistent pursuit of his own aggran- 
dizement at the expense of the interests of the Church. And 
Leonard Calvert does not fare much better ; for Father Hughes' 
evidence goes to prove that, though Leonard was not quite so 
unscrupulous, he generally proved a pliant tool in the hands of 
his elder brother. 

Bristling with documents and references at every step, full 
of meritorious discussions on canon and civil law, on obscure 
incidents and complicated political and legal transactions, this 
work supplies food for the serious student, rather than easy en* 
tertaining reading for leisure hours. It will prove an invaluable 
mine for future historians. 

A text-book on Mediaval and Modem History^^ by a pro- 
fessor of St. Thomas' College, oi the archdiocese of St. Paul, 
is written according to the ideal that now prevails of what ed- 
ucational history should be. It assigns much less space than 
used to be allowed to military and political events, and much 
more to the nature and character of institutions, the signifi- 
cance of the religious, social, and industrial forces which have 
made modem civilization. Proportion and perspective are, gen- 
erally speaking, respected. A topical summary at the end of 
each section will assist the pupil in the work of memorizing; 
and a judiciously chosen list of references will help to inspire 
a taste and serve as a guide for more extensive reading. Each 
paragraph is numbered, and is introduced by a line of heavier 
type indicating its import. The writer relates events in a very 
objective fashion, and seldom expresses either approbation or 
condemnation. Indeed one is somewhat surprised, remember- 
ing the name of the college on the title-page, that the story 

* MtdUnal and Mtdtm Hiit^ry : lU PortmoHvt Camts amd Broad MovtwunU. By J. A. 
Dewe. A.M. With Maps and lUustrations. New York : Hinds, Noble & Eldredge. 



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8i8 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

of the Italian revolution, the capture of Rome, and the de- 
struction of the temporal power of the Pope is related without | 
a word of disapproval for the men or measures that brought ^ 
about this consummation. The title of the manual is somewhat 
inaccurate ; it treats only European history. I 

The two volumes of the English version of Janssen's His^ ' 

tory of the German People^ that have just appeared correspond 
to Vol. VI. of the fifteenth German edition, which was enriched 
with copious notes and other additions, under the editorship 
of Ludwig Pastor. These volumes are a survey of German civili- 
zation and culture from the end of the Middle Ages to the be* 
ginning of the Thirty Years* War. No other chapter of his 
work exhibits so manifestly the vast erudition of the author in 
his chosen field. He passes in review here, music, painting, 
sculpture, engraving ; popular literature, including folk-lore, 
songs, satires, lampoons, books of jests, and love stories; the 
literature of occult arts and diabolism; and the various schools 
of the drama. From every one of these different fields of evi- 
dence he comes laden with facts, and critical inferences based 
on them, to convince the reader that the first stages of the 
Reformation were attended by decay in all forms of art, a deep 
corruption of morals, and an incredible coarsening of manners 
throughout every grade of society. 

Since the publication of the new 
COMMENTARY ON THE Syllabus of Errors and the late 
INDEX. Encyclical by the Holy Father, 

By Dr. Hurley. attention has been directed anew 

to the work, purpose, and powers 
of the Congregation of the Index. The appearance of such 
works as Father Hilger's Der Index der Verbotenen Bucket and 
The Censorship of the Church of Rome^ by George H. Putnam, 
has also stimulated interest in the history of condemnation by 
the Church of certain prohibited books. It is, moreover, of 
great practical importance that Catholics, and especially priests 
who have to speak and write upon the matter, should be thor- 
oughly and in a scholarly way acquainted with the exact legis- 
lation concerning the Index of forbidden books. 

We know of no work in English which gives one the oppor- 

* History of the Get man People at the Close of the Middle Ages. By Johannes J anssen. 
Vols. XI., XII. Translated by A. M. Christie. St. Louis : B. Herder, 



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i9o8.] New BOOKS 819 

tunity of making himself familiar with such legislation, except 
the volume before us/ which has just appeared; and our sin- 
cere thanks are due to the author, Dr. Timothy Hurley. The 
volume includes what may be termed the whole legislation of 
the Church on the question of prohibited books. It gives us 
the letter of Pope Leo XIII. of 1897, the rules adopted by the 
Congregation of the Index, to which this letter was a preface, 
and the Bull, "SolHcita ac Provida" of Benedict XIV. which, 
in the reform of the Index by Leo XIII., was allowed to stand. 
The author dwells upon the necessity to-day of some censor- 
ship of the press; cites instances where similar legislation has 
been and is enacted by civil governments; relates the history 
of the development of the three departments of the Index and 
the scope of each. 

He would disabuse our minds of a popular fallacy that the 
Index in its legislation is co- extensive with the field of the 
natural and the divine law, and that it contains all the books 
that are forbidden to us. Dr. Hurley in writing the volume 
faced an arduous and a delicate task, one that has its peculiar, 
circumstantial difEculties at the present time, when the parti- 
sans of this school and of that would interpret the rulings of 
the Index to their own special views or, on the other hand, 
would scout and weaken its authority and its practical useful- 
ness entirely. 

To our mind Dr. Hurley has done his work in a capable, 
well-tempered, and judicial manner. He is evidently a close 
student of the great Angelical, Thomas Aquinas, and we may 
say that he has brought something of the spirit of the great 
Doctor to the execution of this work. He has endeavored, 
without narrowness or partisanship, to set forth the mind of the 
Church; to show the logic and the necessity of her legislation; 
to point out that her purpose is not arbitrary nor reactionary, 
but that, conscious of her responsibility in the care of souls, 
she would, and she must, guide her children on the upward 
road of learning and advancement, and warn them from hid- 
den pitfalls of which they otherwise might not know. 

Every priest, particularly one who would preach on pro- 
hibited books or write on theological subjects, and particularly 
also one who would pass judgment or censor the work of another, 

* A Cimmentary an thi Praemi Index Legislation, By Rev. Timothy Hurley. D. D. Dub 
lin : Brown & Nolan. 



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820 New Books [Mar., 

ought to possess this book and study it carefully. It will be in- 
forming. The judicial temper and the true Catholic spirit guiding 
the author may be illustrated by quoting his commentary on 
Rule 39: 

In Rule 39 the legislator admonishes the examiners of 
books that, in passing judgment on certain opinions and doc- 
trines, their minds must, in accordance with the directions of 
Benedict XIV., be free from every prejudice; they must lay 
aside all indulgent leaning towards their native country, 
towards their community, towards the schools in whicli they 
were trained, and towards the institute to which they belong; 
they must lay aside the principles that are the guiding marks 
of mere schools or parties, and must, instead of such, be 
guided solely by the dogmas of the holy Catholic Church, 
and by the conmion teaching of Catholics — as contained in 
the decrees of the General Councils, the Constitutions of the 
Roman Pontiffs, and the unanimous teaching of theologians. 
In a word, they must imitate that broad*minded liberality of 
the Angelic Doctor, who is almost to be admired as much for 
the way he deals with those who differ from him, as in the 
way he expounds his own view, and who, before condemning 
any one's opinion, instead of searching for faults, strives in 
every way he can to reconcile it with the Catholic doctrine. 

A pleasant variation on the rather 

BRUNHILDE'S PAYING overworked theme of the pros- 

GUEST. perous North and the impecuni- 

By Caroliae Fuller. ous South is Brunhilde's Paying 

Guest.* A Southern woman, no 
longer young, of artistic temperament, who has sacrificed her 
ambitions to filial duty, opens a boarding house. She recon- 
ciles the enterprise with her family pride by the thin fiction 
that her boarders are guests. One of these guests speedily falls 
in> love with her; and she with him, after a decorous delay. 
But would it be honorable and wise for her to take advantage 
of the love of a man so much younger than herself? With- 
out any ambitious effort at character- drawing or analysis of 
motive, and without the aid of any villain or harrowing situa- 
tions, the auther sketches a pleasant comedy full of refined 
people, and redolent of the social atmosphere of Southern life. 

* BrunhUde*s Paying Guest, A Story of the South To-day. By Caroline Fuller. New 
York : The Century Company. 



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I9o8.] NEW BOOKS 821 

Some striking pictures of the mis- 
SLUM STORIES. ery, poverty, and crime amid which 

the London poor pass their lives 
are drawn from actual experience by those two indefatigable 
slummers, Miss M. F. Quinlan * and Miss Olive Katherine Parr.f 
The readers of The Catholic World need not to be told of 
the power of Miss Quinlan's graphic pen, with its command 
over pathos and humor. Miss Parr, who certifies that her sto- 
ries are actual histories, some of which have figured in the 
London press, writes with '' more matter and less art/' Both 
seek to awaken among Catholic women an interest in social 
work, by inculcating the fact that even in the most vicious and 
degraded souls there still live pulsations of a nobler life, if 
one can but discover them and stimulate them by sympathy 
and encouragement. 

St Margaret of Cortona, the me- 

ST. MARGARET OF CORTONA. diaeval Magdalen, was not pre- 

By Ft. Cuthbert. cisely a wanton, or an '^ abandoned 

woman,'' but a girl who fell 
through excessive gayety, and over- great affection. She lived 
nine years with her lover 'Mn defiance of law and convention," 
the only mitigation of her sin being her constant hope of law- 
ful marriage with the man who had deluded her. He was mur- 
dered, his promise remaining unfulfilled. But his death was the 
occasion of the conversion of Margaret. Her reversion to vir- 
tue and to God was characteristically whole-hearted. She fought 
her way through many temptations, gave her life to the poor, 
outdoing them in voluntary poverty; merited admission to the 
third order of St. Francis, and died a saint. Her ^' legend " 
by her confessor, Fra Giunta,| is given with the delicious sim- 
plicity and naivete of the early Franciscan chroniclers. The 
introduction to it, in seventy-five pages, by Father Cuthbert, 
is an admirable little treatise on her religious psychology, with 
not a little unobtrusive moralizing. The contrast between the 
modern touch of Father Cuthbert and the mediaeval artlessness 
of Fra Giunta, is most striking, but each in his own way is 
extremely enjoyable. 

* My Brothtr's Keeper, Bj U, F« Quinlan. New York : Benzig^er Brothers, 
t Back Slum Idols, By Olive Katherine Parr. New York : Benziger Brothers. 
tA Tuscan Penitent, The Life and Legend of St. Margaret of Cortona. By Father 
Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. London : Burns & Oates. 



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822 NEW Books [Man, 

No Catholic on this side of the 

THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF ocean feels any temptation to doubt 

CHRIST. the virgin birth of our Savior; 

By Professor Onr. indeed, so fundamental and, as it 

were, instinctive is their belief in 
the virginity of Mary, that they cannot understand why pro- 
fessing Christians should question that article of the Creed. 
Yet, outside the Catholic Church, this point is vehemently de- 
bated, more so at present, perhaps, than any other. Many 
scholars and preachers take the attitude that the virgin birth is 
a matter of no religious importance, and, at best, historically 
doubtful; the more radical stoutly deny it, or insidiously treat 
it as a belief beneath the serious consideration of a thinking 
man. To this new field Protestantism, fulfilling its destiny, is 
moving with greater or lesser rapidity ; despite the efiforts of 
individual scholars, it advances steadily, resistlessly, like a gla- 
cier, destroying and being destroyed, whose progress man is 
powerless to arrest 

That it is obedience to its original impulse, rather than the 
logic of facts, which is hastening Protestantism towards the 
precipice, is made clear by the present work* of Dr. Orn 
Here we have a book by a Protestant divine which the Master 
of the Sacred Palace himself might approve; of almost immacu- 
late orthodoxy, it might, with the sacrifice of a few sentences, 
pass for the product of a Catholic author. It shows, with 
great strength and clearness, that there is nothing in the facts 
of Holy Scripture or in the doctrines of Protestantism, which 
should lead to disbelief in the virgin birth of Christ; yet, if 
signs are prophetic, this able effort will avail little to turn 
back the course of destructive thought in the church of the 
author. If facts and reasoning alone had weight with his co- 
religionists, he would gain the battle for the old dogma; but 
he has also to contend against the temperament which results 
from the original sins of Protestantism — the desire of novelty 
and the instinct of destructiveness. 

Such an enemy scholarship alone cannot vanquish. The 
more is the pity, then, because Dr. Orr gives us here a sound 
and thorough piece of work. Many critics who take the same 
view as himself of the fundamental question may think him 

• The Virgin Birth of Christ, By James Orr, D.D., Professor of Apologetics in the 
United Free Church College, Glasgow. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 82J 

unduly conservative in regard to a few critical points ; but these 
do not affect the substance of his argument, though they may 
weaken it in the eyes of those who dread not to keep step 
with the advance guard. The book is characterized by good 
sense, by an appeal to plain reason; it can be easily followed 
by an intelligent layman who is interested in religious ques- 
tions, and we heartily recommend it to all who desire an ex- 
cellent summary of the problem and of the proofs. 

There are two Catholic doctrines which issue clearly from 
our author's reasoning, though he fails to perceive them — the 
Immaculate Conception of Mary and the superiority of a re- 
ligious virginity over the married state. One wonders why 
there is such earnest striving to maintain the fact of Mary's 
virginity, if there be in it no surpassing excellence; or why 
God should work a great miracle to preserve the purity of his 
mother's body and not confer the grace which would keep her 
soul untainted of sin. 

Mr. Richard Harding Davis makes 
THE CONGO. his bow to the public with a stout 

volume in his hand, to tell us 
all about his interesting but somewhat cursory trip to Congo 
Land,* and to add to the perplexity which besets our efforts to 
reach '' the truth about the Congo." Mr. Davis is a master of 
literary perspective and a keen judge of materials suitable to 
strike the reader's attention. He describes hil^ arrival and 
brief sojourn, in company with Mrs. Davis, at Banana, the 
''front- door of Leopold's 'shop,'" and his subsequent trip up 
the river as far as Stanley Pool. He denounces without meas- 
ure King Leopold, his officials, and all his works and pomps. 
Though he himself did not see much of the blood-curdling 
atrocities, he heard a great deal about them, and he implicitly 
credits his informants. Though his indignation against oppres- 
sion is infectious, one cannot help regretting that he did not 
take a little more time in order to see things for himself. 
His description of his futile essay in hunting the hippopotamus, 
and of many incidents aboard the river steamers, are quite di- 
verting. But his trick of introducing exaggerations, which he 
does not mean to be taken seriously, is a dangerous one. For, 

* Thi Conio and Coasts of Africa, By Richard Harding Davis, F.R.G.S. Illustrations 
from photographs by the author. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 



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824 -AT^W^ BOOKS [Mar., 

when he does mean to be taken literally, the suspicious reader 
may think that he is treated to another bit of jocular hyperbole. 
Returning by the Cape and the East Coast, Mr. Davis saw 
something of the Gold Coast, Loren90, Marquey, and Zanzibar, 
of which places he gives some interesting accounts. 

The two successful essays, and the 
PEDAGOGY. three which, in the opinion of the 

judges, were next in merit, sub- 
mitted for the prizes offered by a citizen of California for the 
best and the next best essay on ** Moral Training in the Pub- 
lic School '' * are published by the committee that had charge of 
the competition. The first paper, which bore off the prize of 
five hundred dollars, was written by Mr. C. E. Rugh, principal 
of a school in Oakland. A Philadelphia clergyman won the 
second prize, of three hundred dollars. The book is well worth 
the study of educators. To say that any or all of the essays | 
furnish a solution of the problem of how efficaciously to teach 
and inculcate morality on a non-religious basis would be to de- \ 
dare that the impossible has been achieved. Indeed the sig- | 
nificance of these attempts lies in the fact that they manifest . 
eloquently the meagre, superficial, fragmentary, and devitalized 
idea that must be formed of morality by the teacher who will ) 
divorce it irom religion. The conception of it as embodied in 
these essays, speaking generally, has but faint correspondence | 
with the connotation of the idea of morals which we associate I 
with the Decalogue, conscience, duty, virtue. The prize essay 
dwells mainly on the means which the school and its courses i 

provide for developing the social sense in the child. Good citi- I 

zensbip, character as understood to signify these qualities which 
make the successful business man, or the economically satisfac- 
tory social member, are the ideals which are aimed at. The 
author of the second essay endeavors to go a little farther; 
and outlines a method which would build on deeper and firmer 
foundations. But if he does so, it is because he falls back upon 
religion for his basic principles. His solution is : Let the State 
teach in her public schools the system of morality which is 
embodied in her own laws, with such sanctions as the religious 
character of the State herself supplies. In developing this prin- 

* Moral TtainiHi in ihi Public Schools. The California Prize Essays. New York and 
Boston : Ginn & Co. 



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I9o8,] ISiEW BOOKS 825 

ciple he claims that this moral system in public schools would 
be remarkably full and complete, and would cover, in the main, 
'^ the ten all-embracing precepts of the ** Decalogue/' and ''would, 
in the United States, as in all the world, allow of appeal to 
those religious sanctions which provide the highest motives for 
obedience." 

Apart from its main purport, this collection of views is well 
deserving of study for much valuable pedagogical instruction 
that it contains. It is, too, a pregnant, ready-made text for a 
powerful article in defense of our parochial schools. We trust 
that somebody will take advantage of the opportunity. 

The veteran naturalist, Mr. Bur- 

CAMPIN6 AND TRAMPING roughs, in his own delightfully pic- 

WITH ROOSEVELT. turesque and easy style, gives us a 

By John Burroughs. brisk and breezy account of the 

tour to the Yellowstone Park, which 
he made in company with President Roosevelt in 1903.* The 
incidents of that episode in the strenuous life lose nothing in 
his hands. He brings •ut in strong relief the President's hearty 
democratic manner and his love and knowledge of fur and 
feather, in all the varieties with which the wild West abounds. 
In a sort of appendix, entitled '' President Roosevelt as a Na- 
ture-Lover and Observer," Mr. Burroughs, with an eye to the 
nature fakir controversy, enters the witness box to testify to 
Mr. Roosevelt's knowledge of wild life, and his exceptional 
powers of observation. Mr. Burroughs tells of many cases in 
which the President identified all sorts of birds, many of them 
rare ones, under difficult circumstances, in the Yellowstone and 
around Sagamore Hill. More than once, in terms slightly dif- 
ferent, Mr. Burroughs declares that ''The President is a bom 
nature- lover, and he has what does not always go with this 
passion — remarkable powers of observation. He sees quickly 
and surely, not less so with the corporal eye than with the 
mental. His exceptional vitality, his awareness of all around, 
gives the clue to his powers of seeing. The chief qualification 
of a born observer is an alert, sensitive, objective type of mind, 
and this Roosevelt has in a pre-eminent degree." 

* CamptM^^and Tramping with Roosevilt, By John Burroughs. New York : Houghtoi, 
Mifflin & Co. 



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826 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

During the past year an inquiry 
THEOLOGY. was made in France among the 

seminaries in order to find out 
what authors were used as text-books, and whether those em- 
ployed were or were not satisfactory. Eighty- four seminaries 
replied; and out of this number fifty-one used the course of 
Father Tanquerey. Out of this number thirty- one were satisfied 
with it. Those who bore favorable testimony to its value ap- 
proved it for having dropped many questions no longer of ac- 
tual interest, in order to make room for others that have in 
later days swum into the ken of the theologian. Among the 
suggestions — few and unimportant — offered for its further per- 
fection were two : that it should exclude the decisions of Amer- 
can Councils, and that its bibliographies should be less Ameri- 
can. Now these two characteristics it is which, with its other 
merits, have largely helped to win such favor in our own coun- 
try for Father Tanquerey's two courses, the one in Dogma, 
and the other in Moral. It is with pleasure that we note these 
two features strongly emphasized in the new edition of his 
Moral Theology.* This present course is so much more sys- 
tematic and complete than the former edition, and differs so 
much in arrangement, that it would be more accurate to treat 
it as an independent work. Its three volumes cover the entire 
field of Moral and Pastoral Theology. The last volume, treat- 
ing of the Sacraments, is notable for the fact that Father Tan- 
querey, who evidently is convinced of the pernicious effects 
which have resulted for our theological training through the 
anti>scholastic custom that grew up within the last two hundred 
years of divorcing the moral from the dogmatic course, has 
made some approach towards the sounder method of earlier 
days. Another merit of the work, more pronounced in the 
present than in the former edition, is his recognition that the 
economic and commercial life of our age has given rise, or given 
added importance, to many moral problems of which the older 
authorities knew nothing or next to nothing. Certainly it may 
be said that our traditional authorities set forth the eternal 
principles by which such questions as, for example, the rights 
of labor unions, the morality of strikes, of selling on margin, 
of stock- watering, of trust combinations, etc.^ may be solved. 

* Synopsis Theohiia Moralistt Pastoralu, Ad Mentem S. Thomae et S. Alphonsi. Tomi 
Tres. Auctore Ad. Tanquerey. New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 827 

But the student and the professor find the greater and the more 
difficult part of their work in the application of general princi- 
ples to complicated problems — and in this respect our ancient 
authors do but little for the student. By way of footnotes and 
other references Father Tanquerey furnishes a large bibliogra* 
phical direction that, it may be hoped, will stimulate and guide 
the student to the much-needed work of wider personal study 
of writers who treat, in their moral aspect, the great social and 
economic problems of the day. It is pleasant and encouraging 
to observe that the author's long residence in America shows 
its effect in the broader view which he takes on some points 
which European writers have treated in a manner that gives too 
much importance to the merely local appreciations of their mu 
lieu. Of this feature we must be satisfied with quoting a sin- 
gle illusttation. Treating of the obligation of parents to edu- 
cate their children. Father Tanquerey, laying down the nature 
of this education, writes: 

Imprimis educatio debet esse virilis^ quatenus ea tendere 
debet at viros gradatim efformet. Sunt siquidem parentes ac 
magistri qui putent In junioribus nihil aliud desiderari nisi 
perfectam anlmi docilitatem ac caecam voluntatis obedientiam 
qa& statim ac et sine quaereld amplectantur opiniones a super- 
ioribus ezpressas eorumque mandatis pareant. Non ita in- 
stituuntur viri, ratione ac libertate pradita. 

Father Tanquerey is systematic in bis arrangement, clear in 
exposition, and the generous size of these three volumes indi- 
cates that his scale of treatment allows ample detail. 

Under the title of La Theologie du Nouveau Testament,* Pfere 
Fontaine, or, to follow the form of the present volume, M. 
TAbb^ Fontaine, takes up the question of doctrinal develop- 
ment, or the evolution of dogma, for the purpose of refuting 
the views of some of his compatriots which he condemns as 
subversive of Catholic faith. He absolutely denies the possi- 
bility of entertaining salva fide the views expressed by M. Le 
Roy and others of that school. In vain, he argues, do they 
claim the authority of Newman, for Newman's theory radically 
differs from theirs. Though he considers Newman's theory, on 

• La The0lo£ie du Nouveau Testament et V Evolution des Dogmes, Par TAbM J. Fontaine. 
Paris: Lethieulleux. 



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828 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

the whole^ to be safe, he believes it to stand in need of certain 
corrections which he proposes. M. Fontaine, it is pleasant to 
observe, does not display in this work the tone of personal acri- 
mony which so greatly depreciated the value of his Infiltratimis 
ProUstantes. With the exception of references to quite recent 
events and publications bearing on the exegetical and theologi- 
cal situation, the present work is a reiteration of the opinions 
and ai^uments which the learned author has forcibly expressed 
in his former volumes. Had it not been completed before the 
appearance of the Encyclical '' Pascendi Gregis," he might have 
invoked the august authority of that pronouncement for bis 
position* 

This volume* consists of a coUec- 
FOLIA FU6ITIVA. tion of papers read at an English 

Diocesan Conference by varioas 
members who chose their own topics. '' If we are asked," says 
the editor, '' why we cannot be content to let them rest in the 
seclusion of their manuscript, and why we should wish to ob- 
trude them on public notice, we can only reply that such was 
the darling wish and oft- expressed desire of one to whom St 
Erconwald's conference owes a great debt of gratitude, but wh# 
is no longer amongst us to urge the fulfilment of his desire." 
The person referred to here is the late Bishop Bellord, Vicar- 
Apostolic of Gibraltar, whose paper, "On the Number of the 
Saved," holds the place of honor in the book. 

The editor, unnecessarily we think, pleads for indulgent crit- 
icism, on the ground that the papers were not intended for pub- 
lication. In respect of both matter and form the collection is 
a very creditable one. It has, also, a potency for good be- 
yond its intrinsic merits ; it is an object-lesson for the stimula- 
tion, by a method within reach of diocesan clergy everywhere, 
of intellectual life among them. 

If we were called upon to point out the paper of most per- 
manent value, we should select that of Father Thomas Gerrard 
on The Grammar of Assent. Within the compass of twenty 
pages it presents a beautifully lucid synopsis of that famous 
book. Father Gerrard sees clearly the true meaning of New- 
man, which so many have desired to see and have not seen. 

* Folia PttgUiva, Leaves from the Logbook of St. Erconwald's Deanery. Edited by 
Rev. W. Colgan. New York : Benziger Brothers. 



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1908.3 New Books 829 

In this country, doubtless, almost everybody who skims 
first the table of contents will turn over at once to the pages 
in which the Rev. Dr. Fortescue treats of ''Americanism/' 
The iTvriter, at the offset, announces that he aims not at prov- 
ing a thesis, but at telling a story, and, with a modesty which 
is by no means out of place, premises the observation that 
'* one's own view of a movement never matters much/' Amer- 
icanism is, or was, in Dr. Fortescue's estimation, a well-defined 
movement which originated in this country and afterwards spread 
to France. When drawing his picture, he traces as the lead- 
ing features the attachment of ''Americanists" to their coun- 
try; their spirit of tolerance towards their non- Catholic fellow- 
countrymen ; their unalterable convictions on the subject of 
Church and State; and their unquestioning attachment to 
Catholic faith. But be tells his readers, who would have placed 
him in an inextricable embarrassment if they had requested 
proof of the assertion, that "it is certain that in their books 
and sermons one does not find very much about dogma, and 
nothing at all about controversies concerning grace and free 
will/' The favorite text, we are told, is St. James i. 27. The 
controversies concerning grace and free will have, by general 
consent, ceased to be considered fruitful subjects for the pul- 
pit. If Dr. Fortescue had ever examined any large quantity 
of American sermons, say, the number of volumes of Fiv$ 
Minute SermonSy by the Paulists; or if he had ever attended 
one of our American Missions, whether to Catholics or to non- 
Catholics, he could not have been guilty of his statement con- 
cerning the absence of dogma in American sermons. 

Speaking of Father Hecker's career. Dr. Fortescue writes 
that on leaving the Redemptorists Father Hecker returned to 
America and founded his congregation. Inadvertently he omits 
the all*important fact that, in doing so. Father Hecker was 
acting on the advice and with the cordial approbation of Pius 
IX. And when, pray, has Father Hecker spoken "slightingly 
of the vows " ? 

Many other instances of incorrect statements and erro- 
neous interpretations of incidents and issues might be cited« 
And, although he records the protestations of our hierarchy 
that the Americanism condemned by the Testem Benevolentia^ 
had no footing in this country. Dr. Fortescue conveys the im- 
pression that the contrary was the case. If he bad sufficiently 



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830 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

pondered a fact which he notes — that '' the movement, as long 
as it stayed in America, in spite of all opposition to it, was 
not in any way censured by the authority of the Church " — 
he would scarcely have described as one consistent, homoge- 
neous movement those indigenous American traits and tenden- 
cies which provoked no censure or stricture, and the exotic 
Americanist doctrines proscribed by Leo XIII. 

Referring to Americanism in France, Dr. Fortescue speaks 
of the return of ''a number of anti-Christian, sometimes por- 
nographic, French writers to the Church ; and he mentions four 
names only, Bourget, Brunetiere, Copp^e, and Huysmans. But, 
he continues, the movement came to nothing, '' and most of 
these writers went quietly back to their pornography, which, by 
the way, a good many had never dropped.'' We acquit Dr. 
Fortescue of meaning to include among the deserters the writ- 
ers whom he names above. But the context is far from clear, 
and, as it stands, it involves a cruel injustice to the dead. 

It is only fair to observe that the imperfections of Dr. For- 
tescue's history do not seem to be the offspring of prejudice; 
but result from the mistakes in perspective and interpretation 
into which one easily falls who, without first-hand, personal 
knowledge, undertakes to give a judicial account of a foreign 
affair, which, to be properly understood, must be viewed from 
within as well as from without. 

This prettily finished book,* which 
THE KING OF ROME. contains a biography of L'Aiglon, 

the son of Napoleon I. and Marie 
Louise, is rather an expression of the writer's intense admira- 
tion for the first Napoleon and his ill-starred son than a serious 
contribution to history. It is chatty, gossipy in tone; speaks 
of the Little Corporal with the enthusiasm of a private of the 
Old Guard, and of the Duke de Reichstadt with the undis- 
criminating tenderness of a devoted nurse. Marie Louise, Met- 
temich, and all who conspired to turn the son of Great Na- 
poleon, as the author calls his idol, into a German, are severely 
condemned. To the biography proper are added some chap- 
ters on related subjects — the Countess Camerata, a niece of 
Napoleon ; B^ranger's Poem, '' Les Deux Cousins, ou Lettre 

• The King of Rome. A Biography. By Victor Von Kubinyi. New York : The Knicker- 
bocker Press. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 831 

d'uD Petit-Roi ^ un Petit-Prince " ; — and several tables of Bona- 
parte genealogy. The illustrations, of which there are about a 
dozen, are good. Among them are photogravures of the Em- 
press Eugenie, Maude Adams as Duke of Reichstadt in Ros- 
tand's ^'L'Aiglon/' and the Honorable Charles J. Bonaparte. 

The latest addition to the Inter- 

CHURCHES SEPARATED national Catholic Library is a well 

FROM ROME. executed translation of Mgr. Du- 

By Mgr. Duchesne. chesne's study of the origin of the 

Church of England,* and of the 
various Eastern schismatic bodies that broke away from Rome 
in Byzantine times. The English Church is dismissed in one 
brief introductory chapter in which the Roman origin of British 
Christianity is made perfectly plain. If this chapter were omitted 
altogether the unity of the book would be greater; for it would 
then be a concise study of one single phase of Church history — 
the separation of the Eastern Churches from Rome. With the 
details of this complicated subject at his fingers' ends, and tak- 
ing care not to perplex his readers with a mass of unimportant 
details, nor to lose himself and them in the immense clouds of 
theological controversy that hang over the entire field of in- 
quiry, Mgr. Duchesne sets forth, clearly and concisely, the en- 
tire story of the first secessions, the subsequent subdivisions of 
the schisms, and the historical position of the Monophysites, the 
Greeks, the Illyrians, and the schismatic African Christians who 
sprang from the Christian missions south of the Roman Em- 
pire. Though the writer deals rather with origin than with 
present-day conditions, he imparts an actual interest to his 
treatment of the question by a temperate yet crushing criticism 
of the reply made by the Greek Patriarch, the Lord Anthimius, 
and his suffragans to the kindly advances made to them in the 
Encyclical, '' Prseclara," by his Holiness, Pope Leo XIII. 

In reviewing the causes of the great rupture between Rome 
and Constantinople, Mgr. Duchesne does not find that the 
methods and the spirit of those who had truth on their side 
were always without reproach. A little more moderation, a lit- 
tle more concern for charity and less for insisting on useless 
theological distinctions, or for imposing merely national prefer- 
ences, and the deplorable division might have been remedied. 

* The Churches Separated from Rome, By Mgr. L. Duchesne. Authorized Translation 
ttom the French by Arnold Harris Mathew. New York : Benziger Brothers.) 
VOL. LXXXVI.^53 



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833 NEW Books [Mar., 

He relates, as an example, the wise conduct of St. Athanasius 
after his return from exile in 362. 

Mgr. Duchesne does not discuss the probability of reunion 
nor the concessions that, towards this desirable consummation, 
might be made without any derogation from the principle of 
necessary centralization. But it is bis wont to emphasize sig- 
nificant facts, and trust to the intelligence of his readers to 
draw their own inferences. 

While the serious student will ap* 
THE ORTHODOX EASTERN preciate the masterly precision and 
CHURCH. brevity with which Mgr. Duchesne 

By Fortescue. goes to the heart of his subject, 

the general reader will, probably, 
find that he is not sufficiently acquainted with the history of 
events to follow Mgr. Duchesne with full comprehension. And 
others will be disappointed at finding but little information on 
the present condition and position of what he knows vaguely 
as the Greek Church in the lands beyond the Adriatic, the Vis- 
tula. Another writer, the Rev. Dr. Fortescue, has met this 
popular demand with a work which, in its kind, is of no less 
conspicuous merit than that of Mgr. Duchesne. In Ihi Ortho^ 
dox Eastern Church^^ a large octavo of five hundred ps^es. Dr. 
Fortescue presents an ample history of the Eastern Schismatic 
Church, with a complete conspectus of the present position of 
the various bodies which now constitute it, or trace their origin 
to it. 

Dr. Fortescue is an accomplished narrator. His pleasing, 
lively, picturesque style makes interesting even the dreariest 
phases of the dreary wrangles which gave rise to the different 
loosely-jointed parts which now make up the Orthodox Church. 
Especially instructive are the sections in which he gives a de- 
tailed account of the actual religious and political situation and 
the diversities of ritual, existing among the fifteen or sixteen 
churches which are at present very inaccurately lumped up to- 
gether by most Westerns under the designation of the Greek 
Church in Russia, and the nations of the Balkan peninsula. 

It will be surprising if Dr. Fortescue has not left himself 
open to some criticism as he has picked his way through this 
immense maze of age-long quarrels, racial and polemical, where 
much is obscure and a great deal more is presented in conflict- 

* Th4 Orthodox Bastom Chttnh, By Adrian Fortescue, Ph.D., D.D. London : Catholic 
Truth Society. 



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I9o8.] NEW BOOKS 833 

ing ways by the records of parties. There is no fear, however, 
that any adverse criticism will seriously detract from the solid 
worth of this remarkable work. The picture of the religious 
and political condition of the schism as it exists to-day, split 
up into bitterly hostile groups, with a Patriarch who is little 
but a name, while almost everywhere the ecclesiastical authori- 
ties are minions of the State, is a depressing one. The most 
sinister figure on the dark canvas is the Russian Government, 
which has reduced the Church within her boundaries to slavery, 
and, for political ends, assiduously foments religious dissension 
among the surrounding nationalities. Nobody knows this better 
than the Patriarch himself. Dr. Fortescue cites a long list of 
instances to prove his charges against the Czar and his govern- 
ment. As to the prospects of a reunion Dr. Fortescue is not 
hopeful. 

Is there any hope? Unhappily one cannot see any im- 
mediate prospect. A schism always becomes stronger by 
mere inertia as the centuries pass ; things get settled down in 
that state, prejudices and jealousies fossilize into principles 
that seem too obvious to allow discussions, immediate antiqui- 
ty — ^the past that people know best because it is just behind 
them — Is against reunion. 

The only glimmer of hope, we are told, is in the Uniates 
and in a small body of enlightened men, who, in Russia, are 
working, as far as one can work in Russia, to promote an awak- 
ening of their Church in the direction of the Roman Church. 

As a confirmation of his assertion that there is actually an 
awakening in Russia towards Roman Catholicism, Dr. Fortescue 
might point to a book which has just appeared in French — 
VAvinir di VEglisi Russi.^ The greater part of its contents 
first appeared about a twelvemonth ago, in the Revue Catholique 
des EgliseSf in the form of letters from a Russian scholar to M. 
Chevalier, well known as the author of some notable studies on 
the Church of England. The writer of this volume enters into 
an analysis of Russian social and religious conditions, in order 
to interpret the psychologic characteristics of the people. The 
Russian people are, he maintains with striking argument, emi- 
nently religious. Christian, mystical. The history of the country 
leads him to the conviction that, if it has remained for nearly 
a thousand years in a state of isolation and passivity, this is 

• V Avtntr dt r Bilut Russia Par Joseph Wilbois. Paris: BloudetCie. 



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834 N^^ BOOKS [Mar., 

because God has destined it to exercise, in the future, an im- 
mense conservative influence towards - strengthening Christianity 
in the imminent struggle against infidelity. The present sub- 
ordination of the Church to the State is, he seems to believe, 
an artificial and transient situation. Comparing Russian ortho- 
doxy with Roman Catholicism, he holds that they differ primar- 
ily in their conception of the Church. For the Russian, the 
Church is essentially and predominantly an invisible, spiritual 
unity, rather than a visible society — ''between Roman Catho- 
licism and Russian orthodoxy there is more than a religious 
difference, there is a social difference." And, the Russian ''is 
schismatic because he does not understand the term schism in 
the same sense as we do; if the Communion of the early ages 
is to be restored there must be first of all an agreement on the 
sense of the word Communion." In conclusion M. Wilbois dis- 
cusses the question of reunion. Reunion, he says, is necessary 
to the future of Christianity ; it is coming. But it will be es- 
tablished, not by the absorption of Russian orthodoxy into the 
Roman fold, but on the basis of a Communion in which East 
and West will agree without sacrificing their respective idiosyn- 
crasies. 

The tale of The Sorceress of Rome • 

THE SORCERESS OF ROME, has its setting in the dark days of 

By Gallizier. the tenth century, and all who 

know the unhappier side of those 
times, the wars, the intrigues, the immoralities of secular and 
ecclesiastical history, may easily picture what a story an im- 
aginative writer, who dwells upon these characteristics, may 
make of the times. The author of the present book knows 
nothing of neutral tones — he lays on high, glaring colors from 
start to finish. Lurid, sensational, he is an inexact and poor 
historian, and an equally^poor novel writer. The volume is got- 
ten up gorgeously, with loud and varied illustrations. Fantastic, 
over-drawn, surfeited with the extreme and the erotic, the pro- 
duction was not worth the labor and research expended upon it. 

We are shortly to have an American Roads to Rome^ such 
a book being in course of preparation by Miss Georgina Pell 
Curtis, 2919 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, 111. It is on the 
same lines as the English book of the same name, wherein the 
story of their conversion is told by the converts themselves. 

* The Sorceress of Rome, By Nathan Gallizier. Boston : L. C. Page & Co. 



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I908.] NEW BOOKS 835 

Miss Curtis asks, through The Catholic World, that all 
American converts, whether now at home or abroad, who are 
willing to submit their ''story" to her, will please do so. 
The MS. must be in her hands before July i, 1908. 

A new edition of Webster's Dictionary, entitled Webstet^s 
Modern Dictionary — Intermediate School Edition^^ will be found 
practical, well- adapted for all intermediate grades, and useful 
for the general public. It is printed in good, clear type and 
contains useful supplementary matter. 

The latest text-book of the Isaac Pitman system of short- 
hand is a handy and valuable manual.f The lessons and new 
matter of this edition are presented in a brief way, and as 
thoroughly as the size of the volume will permit. It will rec- 
ommend itself to the student who wishes to gain a mastery 
of the system within a very short time. 

We have received from Fr. Pustet, New York, the Reper* 
torium Oratoris Sacri, a work consisting of four volumes and in- 
cluding outlines of six hundred sermons for all the Sundays and 
holydays of the ecclesiastical year, and for other special occa- 
sions. The work includes a wide range of moral and dogmatic 
sermons selected from well-known preachers and theologians of 
many nationalities. The sermons are arranged according to the 
chronology of the ecclesiastical year and the work contains an 
index of all subjects that are apt to present themselves to the 
preacher. We cordially recommend the volumes, and priests 
engaged in parish work will find them particularly useful and 
suggestive. 

Katharine A. O'Keeffe O'Mahoney is the author of an inter- 
esting volume. Famous Irish Women. Miss O'Mahoney goes back 
in her sketches as early as the days of pagan Ireland, and con- 
tinues through every century, even to the present day, including 
noted American women of Irish descent. The sketches are neces- 
sarily short, but are well done. The volume is published by the 
Lawrence Publishing Company, Lawrence, Mass. 

* Wtbsttr's Modern DuHonufy of iht Rnglish Ltrnguagt, AdapUd for Initrmediate Gradet. 
Compiled by B. T. Roe, LL.B. Chicago, IlL : Laird ft Lee. 

t Count im Isaac Fihmam Shorthand, An Exposition of the Author's System of Phonog- 
aphy, designed for use in Business Colleges, High Schools, and for Self-Instruction. New 
York : Isaac Pitman ft Sons. 



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836 New Books [Mar. 

The Philadelphia Catholic Standard and Times Publishing 
Company have issued a small but very practical work, consider- 
ing the purpose for which it was issued, entitled Latin Pro- 
nounced for Catholic Choirs^ by the Rev. Edward J. Murphy. 
It will serve as a great help to choir masters who must deal 
with boys and men not acquainted with Latin. 

The Ave Maria Press, of Notre Dame, Ind., has republished, 
from the pages of the Ave Maria^ Abbot Gasquet's papers en- 
titled The Question of Anglican Ordinations. 

We have received from the Catholic Truth Society, of Lon- 
don, the Way of Truth, by the Rev. P. M. Northcote, O.S.M. 
The aim of the author is to prove the claims of the Catholic 
Church from the very Scripture which Protestants take as 
their spiritual guide; Rome^s Witness Against Anglican Orders, 
by Rev. Sidney F. Smith, S.J. ; The Education Question in JSng-^ 
land, including six notable papers; Blaise Pascal, by Rev. G. 
O'Neill, S.J.; Pantheism, by William Matthews; Alleged Diffi- 
culties in Holy Scripture, by M. N. 

The Australian Catholic Truth Society, of Melbourne, has 
sent us the following pamphlets : St. Francis of Assist and 
Mediceval Catholicism, by Rev. James O'Dwyer, S.J. ; Religion 
and Amusements, by Ronald Stewart; Religion and Society, by 
Benjamin Hoare. 

A small, timely volume, useful in instructing children and, 
we may say, adults also, on the liturgical matters of Catholic 
practice, has been issued by the Wiltzius Company, Milwaukee, 
Wis., entitled The Ecclesiastical Year. 

To any one who would wish to know the real value of the 
works of Marie Corelli, we recommend the booklet published 
by the Examiner Press, Bombay, India, entitled The Writings 
of Marie Corelli, by S. Boswin, S.J. 

Acta et Dicta is a collection of historical data regarding the 
origin and growth of the Catholic Church in the Northwest, and 
is published by the St. Paul Catholic Historical Society, St. 
Paul, Minn. 



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jforeign periobicals* 

The Tablet (28 Dec.) : The non possumus attitude of the Popes 
during the last thirty- seven years is defended in an 
article on "The Pope and the Italian Government."—— 
An interesting study on Venetian guilds and art is con- 
tributed. Fr. Thurston, S. J., digs out valuable informa- 
tion from old Anglo-Saxon chronicles regarding the 
origin of the Mass vestment. 

(4 Jan.) : John J. Toohey, S.J., begins a series of articles 
on '' Newman and Modernism." This contribution is " to 
show that it (Newman's teaching) accords in all essential 
particulars with Scholastic philosophy." Quotations are 
also cited to prove Newman's loyalty to the Holy See. 

" Literary Notes " commends the attitude of the Dub- 

lin Review toward the Encyclical, welcoming especially its 
'' dignified reticence " in matters on which discussion is 

inopportune. An Anglican estimate of the Encyclical, 

sympathetic and commendatory, is quoted at length. 

M. Batiffol's removal from the Rectorship of the Institute 
of Toulouse, it is insisted, was due not to pressure from 
Rome but from the bishops who direct the Institute. 
(11 Jan.): Fr. Toohey contends that Newman is not a 
" Newmanist " in the sense that recent writers have con- 
structed, notably Bremond and Dimnet. Roman Cor- 
respondent announces that before long an important docu- 
ment will be published regulating discipline in the semi- 
naries of Italy. A correspondent, "Theologus," pro- 
tests against certain interpretations given to Newman's 
words by the Dublin Review and La Croix. 
(18 Jan.): Fr. Toohey, S.J., aided by his brother author- 
ities on Newman, P. P. Fontaine and R. P. Schiffini, main- 
tains that the great Cardinal is not touched by the re- 
cent Syllabus, and denies liis alleged connection with the 

Modernist doctrine of Immanence. It is stated that 

M. BatifFol, till lately Rector of the Catholic Institute 
of Toulouse, will occupy the of&ce of chaplain in a 
Parisian college. Who wrote the Encyclical ? Fr. Bil- 
lot, S.J., asserts that he had no part in the construction 

of the document. H. Bremond contrasts Fr. Toohey's 

estimate of Newman with the criticisms of W. G. Ward, 



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838 Foreign Periodicals [Mar., 

Manning, and various Jesuit authorities, all of whom con- 
demned Newman for his disregard of scholasticism. '* To 
attempt, as Fr. Toohey does, to transform Newman into 
a scholastic, is possible only for one who knows nothing 
about Newman or nothing about scholasticism/' 

The Month (Jan.) : Reverend Geoffrey Bliss gives a critical analy- 
sis of the works of Francis Thompson, whom he desig- 
nates a ''Wizard of Musical Speech," and of Richard 

Crashaw, a " poet's poet" Under the title " Stipends 

for Masses," Rev. Herbert Thurston gives the history 
and theology of the custom of giving money payment for 
Masses. ''The labourer is worthy of his meat." The 
Mass is not purchased, neither is there any equation be- 
tween the intrinsic value of the Mass and the stipend 
given. That which is given is in acknowledgment of the 

priest's services. Arthur J. O'Connor draws attention, 

in his article entitled " Socialistic Movement in England," 
to the present lamentable condition of the poor in Eng- 
land. Socialism, he says, is the most popular remedy 
offered for the present evil. This popular Socialism is 
neither "Individualism" nor "Collectivism," but, as de- 
fined by Mr. Balfour, "The State is to take all the 
means of production into its own hands, that private en- 
terprise and private property are to come to an end, and 
all that private enterprise and private property carry with 
them." The ideas which underlie this principle are grow- 
ing throughout Europe and America. The writer points 
out the causes of the growing tendency toward Social- 
ism. Rev. Thomas Wright, in his comparative study 

of Newman and Campion, points out the similarity of 
benefit which they derived from patristic literature. 

The Church Quarterly Review (Jan.) : H. Egerton, in an article 
entitled " Socialism and Reform," subjects the basic con- 
ceptions of modern Socialism to a critical examination, 
and compares them with other conceptions which appear 
to him to point to a preferable mode of reform. He 
maintains that the fundamental philosophic and economic 
principles of present-day Socialism cannot be profitably 

used as instruments of reform. At the conclusion of 

a lengthy discussion of the relation between education 
and crime, W. G. E. Rees lays down the following prin- 



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I908.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 839 

ciples which cannot, he thinks, be lost sight of in any 
re-settlement of England's educational system. '' Reli- 
gious instruction must be welcomed as an integral part 
of the school training of English children. No apparatus 
of Sunday- Schools and supplement classes would be ade- 
quate to the task of building up national character on 
the only solid basis — that of religious truth. And the 
religious instruction thus welcomed and encouraged, must 
be freely given to their own belief by men and women 
to whom it presents itself as an organon of life and not 
as a system of drill.'' 

The Expository Times (Jan.) : Rev. James Moffatt reviews Lepin's 
VOrigim du Quatrieme Evangile^ which he regards as a 
satisfactory presentation of the external evidence sup- 
porting the conservative view of the origin and author- 
ship of St. John's Gospel. Bishop Gore's recent work, 

Th$ New Theology and the Old Religion^ receives an ex- 
tensive notice. It was written, the reviewer says, to show 
the advocates of the New Theology what the old reli- 
gion really is, for they have grossly misrepresented it. 
(Feb.): Mention is made in the ^' Notes of Recent Ex- 
position " of a Fragment of an Uncanonical Gospel^ edited 
by Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt, who discovered it last 
year at Oxyrhynchus. It is of value and interest espe- 
cially because of its bearing on the criticism of the Fourth 

Gospel. ^This number contains also a lengthy account 

of the various papyri recently discovered in Egypt. Ref- 
erence is made in this connection to Fr. Lagrange's ar- 
ticle in the New York Review. 

The Crucible (28 Dec): The editor states in an article, '' Catho- 
lic Women's League," the aims and progress of this so- 
ciety. B. Anstice Baker proposes '*A Society of 

Priests' Housekeepers." Frances Zanetti, in a paper, 

'' Helping Hands," wishes to promote a '' Girls' Mutual 
Aid Society" as a national work, and shows what has 
already been done by such societies in different localities. 

Margaret Fletcher, in an article, "The Catholic and 

the Feminist Movement," discusses the question how the 
Woman's Movement can be brought within the influence 
of the Church. She says that the Protestant attitude on 
marriage led on the Feminism Movement to agnosticism 



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840 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [ICar., 

and socialism, while the Catholic Church, by her moral 
and religious teaching, established and defended the trae 
rights and privileges of woman. 

Thi Dublin Review (Jan.) : The Encyclical " Pascendi " — ac- 
ceptance of, and obedience to, this utterance of the Sa- 
preme Authority. Some current misrepresentations are 
set right Newman's idea of dogmatic symbols is not 
condemned. The Encyclical can be properly interpreted 
only by those who understand how such documents are 

gotten up, namely, theological experts. " Letters of 

Queen Victoria," reviewed by Rev. R. Hugh Benson. 
The letters show the versatility and the admirable char- 
acter of Queen Victoria. " A Reminiscence of Father 

Ignatius Ryder," by Wilfrid Ward, brings to light many 
interesting incidents in the career of the great Oratorian. 
" The Roman Church down to the Neronian Persecu- 
tion," by Rev. E. J. Bacchus. "Olden Faiths and 

New Philosophies," by Rev. W. H. Kent, O.S.C., is a 
review of W. S. Lilly's recent book Many Mansions. 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Jan.): The opening article is a 
risumi of the leading events in Church circles during 
1907. The political measures effected by Catholics in 
different countries of Europe are mentioned, and a state- 
ment given of the Irish University Question as it stands 
at present. Rev. J. Kelleher endeavors to impress in- 
telligent men with a realization of the influence which 
their participation in civic and national politics will ex- 
ert. There are two classes of men to whom he espe- 
cially appeals. The one holds itself aloof because it con- 
siders all politics venal and corrupt ; the other is entire- 
ly indifferent to the ethical aspect of public affairs. 
Every person entitled to vote is bound to exercise this 
privilege for promoting good government. The article 
closes with an apology for religion in politics. The So- 
cialist can go to any extreme he wishes in defence of 
his principles. But a howl is raised when a practical be- 
liever in Christianity champions his religious ideals.—— 
'' The Continuity Theory " is a refutation of the author- 
ities brought forward to support the assertion that the 
present Church of England is the same in doctrine and 
jurisdiction as the Church existing before the Conquest. 



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i9o8.] Foreign Periodicals 841 

Historical facts are offered as proof that both the ancient 
British and the Anglo-Saxon Church of Augustine rec- 
ognized papal authority. The elucidation of the de^ 

cree '' Lamentabile Sane" is continued. The proposi- 
tions concerning the divinity of Christ, his knowledge, 
his resurrection, and our redemption, form the subject for 
the present paper. 

The Irish Educational Review (Jan.) : We welcome a new mag- 
azine from the island of saints and scholars. Its field is 

exclusively educational. Professor E. J. McWeeney 

writes on ** Tuberculosis in our Schools.'' By compara- 
tive figures, the death-rate from tubercolosis is shown to 
be greater among the school children of Ireland than 
those of England or Scotland. Means are suggested for 

fighting the evil. George Mansfield, D.L., offers a 

solution of the University Question. Let Trinity College 
retain its autonomy and endowments. Change what is 
at present ''The Royal University" into a residential 
college under the vocable of some Irish saint, make it 
self-governing and possessed of all its former privileges. 
St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, might be affiliated in 
this university scheme, thereby becoming the Catholic 
counterpart of the Divinity School of Trinity College. 
Norah Meade, Scholar R. U. I., in a paper on ''Wo- 
men in Universities," advocates separate colleges for 
women, with common attendance with the men at the gen- 
eral lecture courses. 

Le Correspondant (25 Dec): Mgr. Mignot maintains that the 
religion of the Old Testament is essentially supernatural. 
The Jewish idea of redemption, the final triumph of the 
Kingdom of God, it must be conceded, were partially, if 

not entirely, different from those of other religions. 

" The Ports of France," by A. Davin, deals with the pres- 
ent conditions of France's foreign trade. Henry Bor- 
deaux contributes an analysis and appreciation of the 
works of Rudyard Kipling. " A Charmer and Charm- 
ing^' are the words which Count de Lagr^ze employs 
to sum up the character of Oscar II., the late King of 

Sweden. Jean Teincey relates the chief incidents in 

the romantic but tragic relations of Mrs. Fitzherbert and 
the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. 



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842 Foreign periodicals [Mar., 

(lo Jan.): Lt. Colonel Rollin outlines a plan to be fol- 
lowed by the French attaches, so that the officers of ths 
army may be kept in touch with the doings, the re- 
sources, and the plans of other nations. A. de Lap- 
parent contributes a short account of the life and work 
of Prof. Janssen, the illustrious astronomer whose recent 
death is so deeply deplored by all classes of French 

scientists. Henri Lammens contributes an article on 

the Germanization of the East. By facts and figures he 
proves that, in the cottimercial and scientific realms, 

Germany has an immense influence. Reform in China 

goes on, writes '' Avesnes '' ; women are no longer to be 
practically enslaved; war is declared on opium; reform 
is promised and is actually taking place in the army; 
and constitutional government is only a matter of time. 

Revue du Monde Catholique (Jan.): M. Sara^te, in ^'Voix Cana- 
diennes," makes many observations. He finds, in the 
words and deeds of Sir Wilfried Laurier, much to com- 
mend. In M. Laurier's address, however, given recently 
at a banquet in Paris, M. Sara^te feels that to France poor 

justice is done. ^The editor publishes another letter on 

the '' Pretended Marriage of Bossuet." The author of 
the letter shows the important witnesses of Voltaire to 
be unreliable, and proves by quotation from *' Memoires 
de Legendre," that M. Gaignet fixes upon conclusions 
that critical study does not warrant 

£tudes (5 Jan.): The opening article discusses '^The Church 
and Biblical Criticism." The author considers the reasons 
why the Church refuses to sanction the methods of 
criticism once they have passed a certain point.-^— H. 
Berchois writes on the '' Spoliation of the Church in 
France."— — A paper on the ** Fragments of the Manu- 
script of Menander," discovered by M. Gustave Lefebvre 
in Upper Egypt. 

(20 Jan.): M. Louis Bailie has an exhaustive article on 
the philosophy of St. Thomas with reference to its re- 
cent recommendation by the Pope.— H. Leroy con- 
tributes a suggestive paper on the movement for social 

work and the conditions that should attend it. An 

article on "Literary Forms and Christian Thought." 

An interesting sketch of the late Pierre Janssen and Lord 
Kelvin. 



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i9o8.] Foreign Periodicals 843 

Revue Binedictine (Jan.) : D. G. Morin discusses the discovery 
of the Dicta of Heriger on the Eucharist. His article 
consists of a review of the main points in the discovery 
and of an appreciation of the various theories concerning 

the authenticity of the work. D. U. Berliere concludes 

his catalogue of the scattered fragments in the papal ar- 
chives of the fourteenth century.-^— Paul IV., in his role 
as transformer of the Vatican palace, is the subject of an 

article by D. R. Ancel. D. P. de Meester continues 

bis '' Study on Orthodox Theology.'' His contribution 
in this number is confined to the presentation of the prin- 
cipal orthodox theories on the material world and man 
considered in his origin and nature. A hitherto unpub- 
lished commentary on the first 70 Psalms is here given 
to the public. 

La Revue Apologetique (Dec): "The Divinity of Christ Re- 
vealed in the Synoptic Gospels " is the thesis of G. La- 
housse, S.J. Jesus appears in the three Gospels as a 
legislator equal to God ; he is supreme judge of the hu- 
man race, possessed of the power of forgiving sins, and 
an authority over the bodies and souls of men which 

knows no limit. The problem of faith and the fruits 

of belief are discussed by Pierre Guan, S.J. 

La Revue Pratique d' Apologetique (i Jan.): M. Lepin subjects 
the allegorical interpretation of the Fourth Gospel to a 
sharp and minute examination in connection with the 
Lord's walking en the water. Various slight differences 
between St. John's narrative and that of the Synoptic 
Gospels furnish the author strong and, in his own judg- 
ment, conclusive arguments against the new theory.- 
Mgr. Le Roy's lecture, opening* the course in the *' His- 
tory of Religions in the Catholic Institute of Paris," 
sketches the theories that attempt to account for the 
origin of religion ; outlines the plan of study and fur- 
nishes a fairly large bibliography on the subject.— —H. 

Lesetre maintains the partial historicity of Job. R. 

Simeterre writes about the condemnation of the Aristo- 
telian and Thomistic philosophy in the thirteenth century 
to show that the facts in nowise countenance the already 
expressed belief that Modernism will yet find a home 
and a place of honor in Catholic theology. 



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844 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar., 

(15 Jan.): L. Grandmaison treats of the development of 

Christian dogma. H. Ligeard begins a discussion of 

the views held by Scholastic theologians from the thir- 
teenth to the eighteenth century on the relations between 
the natural and the supernatural. 

La Dimocratie ChritUnne (8 Jan.) : *' The Causes or the Pre- 
liminaries of the Separation of Church and State/' by H. 
Paul Lepeyre, reviews the causes, the lessons, and lesults 
of the Separation in France. The French clergy have, 
for a long period, been partially divorced from the peo- 
ple. The rejuvenation of the Church will be brought 
about in France, as it has been in England, Germany, 
and other countries, by the formation of a democratic 
priesthood. A speech by M. Jean Lerolle at a meet- 
ing of the Association of Catholic Youth outlines in de- 
tail the reforms for which they stand. These are con- 
cerned with such questions as the integrity of the fam- 
ily, workmen's organizations, etc. 

Revue des Questions Scientifiques (20 Jan.): ''The Darwinian 
Elimination in Repression," by M. A. v. d. Mensbrugghe, 
concerns itself with the refutation of the materialistic no- 
tion of the essential nature of crime and the penalties 
by which society sanctions its criminal laws. The writer 
points out the evil consequences of the denial of free will 
in the matter of responsibility and penal punishment 
M. P. Duhem writes of Josiah Willard Gibbs, formerly 
of Yale, apropos of the publication of his Scientific Pa- 
pers. Along with a brief biographical sketch, the author 
discusses many of the mechanical theories put forth by 

this scientist. R. P. Thirion, S.J., brings to a close 

his discussion of Pascal's part in the discovery of the at- 
mospheric pressure. Pascal has been credited with a more 
prominent part in this discovery than he really deserves. 

La Papauti et les Peuples (Dec): A magazine devoted to the 
special defence of the papacy by means of an interna- 
tional review of such matters as bear mediately or im- 
mediately upon the Holy See. Contains the continu- 
ation of an international tribunal^ quotations from authors 
of all types and countries, on the civil supremacy of the 
papacy in the Middle Ages, and in the juridical and philo- 
sophical services of the popes. An article on the op- 



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i9o8.] Foreign Periodicals 845 

pression of Corea by Japan and the '' humiliating a£Front 

inflicted upon the Hague tribunal by Japan.'' Un 

Diplomate writes of the Concordat agreed upon by the 
Holy See and Russia concerning the study of the Rus- 
sian language in the seminaries of Poland. Reports of 

correspondents in Germany, England, Belgium. Chron- 
icle of the court of Rome. Catalogues of pontifical 

nominations and of audiences granted by the Pope. 

La Civilth Cattolica (4 Jan.): The allocution pronounced by 
Pope Pius in the Consistory of 16 December is given in 

Latin and Italian. " The Jubilee Year of the Holy Fa- 

ther/' a commemorative article upon the fiftieth anni- 
versary of Pope Pius* ordination to the priesthood. 

'* Theological Modernism/' a critical application of the 
philosophic principle of the Modernists to theology, with 
a view to showing the incompatibility of these princi- 
ples with Catholic theology. 

(18 Jan.): ''Historical Truth and Popular Culture/' an 
article protesting against that falsification of European 
history which ascribes to the Revolution of 1789 the 
origin of liberty, and to the Church during all the pre- 
ceding years the fostering of despotism. "Theolog- 
ical Modernism" is continued. 

Espana y Amirica (i Jan.): Father Juvencio Hospital, O.S.A.^ 
contributes a sketch of Buddhism as a religious system, 

to his series on the religions of China. The opening 

article of a proposed series, by Father S. Garcia, on 
Modernism, contrasts the rationalistic and the traditional 
Catholic conceptions of the nature and evolution of dog- 
ma. Father Candido de la Puente tells of what he 

declares to be a well- organized movement for the delib- 
erate falsification of modem French history. 
(15 Jan.): Father Meliton writes at length of a famous 
painter known as "The Greek." He was a disciple of 
Titian and founder of the school of Toledo, where he 
died in 162;. Felipe Robles discusses, from a philo- 
sophical standpoint, the essence and definition of a verb. 



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Cutrent Events. 

The chief pre-occupation of those 
France. who are interested in public events 

in France has been the state of 
affairs in Morocco and the changes which have been taking 
place. There, as in most of the other regions of the earth 
where one man is trying to control the doings of all the rest, the 
most perfect, if so it may be called, chaos exists. Abdul Aziz, 
hitherto the recognized Sultan, has been rejected by most of 
the tribes throughout the length and breadth of the country, 
after having been deposed in the capital itself. The g^round 
for this deposition was, strange to say, the recognized demo- 
cratic principle that he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the 
people and had, therefore, no claim to be considered the ac- 
cepted ruler of the country. This was the judgment of the re- 
ligious authorities; it was accepted by the people dwelling in 
the capital ; they accordingly formally proceeded to elect a new 
Sultan. Their choice fell upon Mulai Hafid, the brother of Abdul 
Aziz, who had already received the allegiance of a considerable 
number of the tribes in the South. The election made by the 
people of Fez has been accepted by most of the tribes even in 
the north, and so Abdul Aziz must be looked on, for the present 
at least, as merely an ex-Sultan, although still recognized by 
the Powers as the de jure ruler of the Moors, so far as it can 
be said that they have any ruler. For, besides Abdul Aziz 
and Mulai Hafid, there are two other claimants, to say nothing 
of Raisuli, the bandit, who still holds his own in the mountain 
fastnesses of northern Morocco, and has only just released 
from his clutches the Scotch Knight Sir Harry Maclean. The 
payment of an enormous ransom had been agreed upon for his 
release, as well as the giving up of a large number of the 
robber's friends and associates ; but such was the disturbed state 
of the country that it was for a long time impossible to carry the 
agreement into effect The new Sultan, Mulai Hafid, proceeded 
at once to declare a religious war against all foreigners, but so 
little is the fervor of the Mahometans that even warfare in the 
name of religion, that lowest form of zeal, has so far failed to stir 
them into action. 

In view of the prolongation of the extremity of misery to 
which the prevailing anarchy subjects so many, it is impos- 



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i9o8.] Current events 847 

sible not to feel indignant at the action of the potentate who, 
by his intervention, is its cause, or at least its occasion. The 
peaceful penetration of Morocco by France was prevented, and 
the decisions of the Congress at Algeciras now rule the situa- 
tion. The temptation to go beyond these decisions has been 
strong and there are foolish friends and astute enemies of 
France who would push on the French government to send 
troops into the interior and restore order by taking possession 
of the country. With great self-denial and good judgment all 
projects of this kind have been rejected, and strict adherence 
to the Act of Algeciras has been maintained and is to be 
maintained. On the other hand, the proposal of M. Jaures and 
of the Socialists of whom he is the representative, which 
amounts to a complete abandonment of Morocco, has been 
negatived after a debate in the Chamber of Deputies in which, 
for the first time after his fall, M. Delcass^ made a speech. 
To the present state of Europe, and to the existent relations of 
the various states one to another, M. Delcass^ has been per- 
haps the most potent contributor. He conducted the negotia- 
tions which led to the Anglo-French entente and to the amic- 
able understanding which now exists with Italy; to the restora- 
tion, in short, of France to the position which she had lost 
since the war of 1870; and if she had had the courage to stand 
by him, when he was attacked by Germany, the situation in 
Morocco would be very di£Ferent from what it is to-day. But 
in a great crisis France seems to be paralyzed, and as she 
was afraid in 1882 to co-operate with England in Egypt, so 
in 1905 she failed to stand by the man who had in recent 
years been of the greatest service to her. 

Ever since his fall M. Delcass^ has kept silence and has care- 
fully avoided doing or saying anything calculated to embarrass 
his successors in office. The interpolation of M. Jaures on the 
Moroccan policy of the government, however, made it incumbent 
upon him to give an exposition of the guiding principles of 
French foreign policy for the ten years during which he held 
office. This policy had as its result the destruction of the 
hegemony in European affairs of the Power most opposed to 
France. His fall had as its effect the placing of France in 
Morocco under the surveillance and control of other Powers. 
That he fell was due, he said, to the fact that his fellow-country- 
men had been deceived and had been led to believe that he 

VOL. LXXXVI.— 54 



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848 Current events [Mar.^ 

was leading them into war with Germany. There never was, 
he said, any real danger of a war, even if France had refused 
to take part in a Conference. That France did consent to take 
a part in the Conference was, he said, to be regretted. As,, 
however, she had taken this coarse, she must, of course, loyal- 
ly fulfil its provisions. The present moment he declared to be 
serious, the real stake at issue being the future of France as a 
Great Power. Her chief danger lay in her own hesitancy. Her 
duty was to become stronger and stronger ; ready, indeed, to dis- 
cuss all questions seriously, but at the same time maintaining 
the efficiency of her armies as also of her ententes and alliances.. 

By a majority of 436 to 5 1 the Chamber expressed its con- 
fidence in the policy of the government This policy consists 
in working under the Algeciras Act, protecting her subjects in 
Morocco, maintaining neutrality in its internal affairs, going 
''neither to Fez nor to Marakesh." On the other hand, any 
further nationalization than that introduced by the Act of 
Algeciras will be resisted. 

Were it not for Morocco there would be very little to say 
about France. This is undoubtedly a good sign, for a peace- 
ful, uneventful life, while bad for chroniclers, is good for na- 
tions. The Foreign Minister, M. Pichon, has paid a visit to 
Spain and people think, or at least say, that a definite agree- 
ment was made between the two countries. It seems certain 
that they are acting together more cordially than at first. No 
progress has been made in the social legislation which has been 
so often promised. A proposal, however, has been brought for- 
ward for electoral reform. Some two hundred members of the 
Chamber have formed a group for the adoption of the scrutin de 
liste and of the proportional representation of which Lord Court- 
ney of Penwith has been so long an advocate in England. The 
present system in force in France is what is called the scrutin 
d^arrandissement. By this system one member is elected for each 
of the 591 constituencies into which France is divided. In the 
strutin de liste the voting would be by departments, and each 
voter would have as many votes as there are members to be 
elected for the department. Second ballots are necessary under 
certain conditions in both systems ; the new proposals, however, 
do not involve second ballots. The namerical importance of 
each party will be ascertained by the counting of the votes 
respectively given for each party, and the seats will be divided 



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i9o8.] Current Events 849 

in proportion to the number of votes secured. The system 
of proportional representation has already been adopted in 
Belgium, Switzerl^md, Denmark, and Argentina, and has for 
its main object the fairer representation to minorities. What 
right the 51 have to rule over the 49 has been and is an 
anxious question to many students of modern politics. Pro- 
portional representation solves this question by trying to take 
away this right. It remains to be seen whether or not its 
advocates will carry their point in France. In the event of 
their success it would, doubtless, have great influence over 
other countries. 

While in France discussions upon 
Germany. the best way of securing for each 

citizen a due share in the govern- 
ment are remote and academical, in Prussia the question has 
become very urgent and actual, and has led to a series of dis* 
turbances in the streets of Berlin. The Prussian franchise was 
described by Prince Bismarck as the most wretched of all 
electoral systems and seems to deserve the description. In 
each of the wards of every constituency the electorate is di- 
vided into three classes in accordance with the amount of their 
property as assessed. Let, for example, $300,000 represent 
the value of this property ; then all who have property amount- 
ing to one-third of this sum form the first class, and these 
alone have the right to vote for its representatives. In some 
cases a single family or even one or two wealthy individuals 
form the class and send to the electoral college three repre- 
sentatives. The second class is made up in the same way of 
those whose property amounts to a second third of the total 
value. They are more numerous and less wealthy than are 
those who belong to the first class; but less numerous and 
more wealthy than those who make up the third class. Each 
of those classes sends three voters to the electoral college; 
this college, in turn, elects the Deputy of the ward to the 
Prussian Chamber. The result of this method is that in no 
case can the working classes elect a representative of their own 
interests to defend and explain their wants; they are entirely 
swamped by the richer classes. 

The situation is aggravated by the fact that the members 
of the Reichstag are elected by universal suffrage; the working- 
man, who is powerless in his own country, has a voice in the 



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850 Current Events [Mar., 

government of the Empire of which his particular country is 
but a part For some time back efforts have been made to 
secure a revision. In most of the other States of the Empire 
these efforts have been successful; Prussia remains unreformed^ 
under the domination of one of the most selfish of oligarchies. 
Shortly after the opening of the session the Radicals brought 
forward a resolution in favor of the alteration of the Constitu- 
tion, so as to establish for the elections universal, equal, and 
direct suffrage with secrecy of the ballot and a redistribu- 
tion of the seats in accordance with the change of population. 
This proposal was met by Prince Bulow with a vague under- 
taking to consider a way of remedying some of the defects 
which he acknowledged to exist; he was not sure how it could 
be done; but he was sure that universal suffrage was not the 
way. The Prince seems to think that the small tradesman is 
the most trustworthy element of the nation, and indicated that 
any reform which he would promote would be for the purpose 
of increasing his influence. The firm foundation of the well- 
being of the nation had, however, not yet been found, and no 
immediate proposals on the part of the government were to.be 
expected. 

The promoters of reform were naturally not satisfied with 
this answer, and not only on the day on which this debate 
took place, but on the following Sunday, demonstrations were 
made of discontent by large numbers of the working people. 
This is a new departure on the part of the Social Democrats; 
hitherto they have deliberately rejected those methods. Of the 
wisdom of changing their plans they must themselves be the 
judges. The penalties in Prussia for breaches of order are se- 
vere, the policeman and still more the soldier are very sacred 
personages. In the recent demonstrations the police were able 
in the end to maintain order, and this without the help of the 
military. The present state of things remains quietly in pos- 
session. 

It is satisfactory to note that the movement for reform, of 
which the Radicals are the initiators, is supported by the Catho- 
lic party, not indeed in its entirety, but in its principal features. 
They voted for the proposals so far as they included universal 
direct and equal suffrage and the secret ballot, but did not sup- 
port the redistribution of seats. The Poles, too, supported the 
reform, on the ground that the nation, as a whole, would not 



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i9o8.] Current Events 851 

subject them to oppression; it was the classes and not the 
masses that were fond of persecution. The proposal was, how- 
ever, rejected. 

An attempt was made to raise the question in the Reich- 
stag; but Prince Biilow would not allow the question to be 
discussed, on the ground that it was exclusively the concern of 
Prussia, an internal question with which the Imperial Parliament 
had no power to deal. He could not, however, prevent the 
debate to which he would not listen. In this debate the vari- 
ous parties defined their attitude towards the desired reform. 
In particular the representative of the Catholic Centre declared 
that, in their opinion, a State which had adopted universal tax- 
ation, universal military service, universal compulsory education, 
could not in justice refuse universal suffrage. The Centre sup- 
ported the Social Democrats in their desire for a more ade- 
quate discussion of the question ; but this was defeated by the 
united forces of all the other parties. The bloc stands in the 
way. At the same time the raising of the question has put a 
severe strain upon it. The agitation for reform is spreading 
throughout Germany beyond the limits of Prussia; nor does it 
seem likely that, having gone so far, it can be suppressed ; al- 
though it is a stronghold — one of the last — of autocratic power. 

The Prussian government is still urging on its plan for the 
expropriation of the Poles, although this project has been con- 
demned by the best opinion oi Europe as a measure worthy 
only of mediaeval times. In the debate in the Upper Chamber 
of the Diet Cardinal Kopp, Prince-Bishop of Breslau, in reply 
to the attempt to justify it by reasons of state, declared that 
there were some great principles of justice which had obtained 
the acceptance of the civilized world, and that to infringe those 
principles, as was being done by this bill, was an affront to 
the conscience of humanity. Moreover, it was inexpedient, in- 
asmuch as it was playing into the hands of the party who 
wished to destroy all private property — the Social Democrats. 
The Cardinal's condemnation has been re-echoed on other 
grounds and even in stronger terms, both by those who would 
sympathize with his standpoint and by those who would be 
opposed to it. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, M. £mile Ollivier, Count 
Tolstoy, Prof. Brentano, M. Maeterlinck, M. Seinkiewicz, have 
all felt it a duty to denounce this high-handed attack upon a 
cruelly wronged race. 



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852 CURRENT EVENTS [Mar.. 

But, although indignation may be felt at this new step, it 
will not cause surprise to any one who has paid attention to 
the treatment which has been meted out for a long time bj 
Prussia to a quiet and law*abiding race. The present is but 
the most recent of a long series of desperate efforts to secure 
by force what fair competition has failed to obtain. When 
brought face to face, the Poles have always outmatched the 
Germans. Seeing this. Prince Bismarck introduced a coloniza- 
tion law which, with increasing degrees of stringency, has ever 
since formed the basis of Prussian policy in the Polish districts- 
Germans were assisted by the State in order that they might 
emigrate into Poland, estates of the Poles were bought and 
divided among these emigrants. Every means was used to de- 
stroy the Polish ideas of nationality; their language was dis- 
couraged in the schools and in public. Every Pole was for- 
bidden to set up a new dwelling on his own land. Immense 
sums of money were spent in support of these measures. 

But in spite of all, the Poles, like the Israelites of old, have 
grown stronger under oppression. The attempts to displace 
them have given them a cohesion such as never existed before. 
Their numbers have increased, and instead of having lost their 
own, not merely have they not become less numerous in their 
own country, but they have spread in large numbers into Sil- 
esia, and large colonies of them have migrated to the opposite 
side of Prussia — the Rhine Provinces. They have turned the 
Germans out of trades which they had previously monopolized 
and have secured possession of the best lands. In Poland the 
immigrating Germans have become isolated. This is the reason 
for which Prince Bulow has introduced the new law. He wishes 
by forced expropriation to save the Germans from being over- 
run ; and by injustice he hopes to save the State. It is not 
the first time that such attempts have been made; nor have 
they always been frustrated. Let us hope that this attempt may 
prove disastrous to its authors. 

The Navy Bill involving, as already mentioned, a large in- 
crease in the number of ships to be built in each year, together 
with a proportionate addition to the annual expenditure, has 
passed its second reading in the Reichstag, the only opponents 
being the Social Democrats. The Catholic Centre gave its sup- 
port to the measure. In fact, travelers in Germany affirm that 
the one subject upon which all Germans seem to be in perfect 



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i9o8.] Current Events 853 

agreement is the necessity of having a great navy, and that they 
are prepared to make sacrifices in order to secure this object. 
One result of the increase proposed by the government is that 
the British cabinet has definitely decided to construct at once 
the long-projected naval station at Rosyth, to the west of the 
North Sea; while Mr. Stead, that heretofore ardent advocate of 
disarmament, declares that it is now the duty of Great Britain 
to lay down two Dreadnoughts or Invincibles for each German 
one. The outcry raised against General Keim has induced him 
to resign the Presidency of the Navy League. What effect this 
will have upon its strength and efficiency it is too soon to judge. 
Meanwhile a new question has arisen which is greatly ex- 
ercising the mind of diplomatists. It is called the Northern 
Question, and it concerns the freedom of the Baltic. Rumors 
are about that it is the wish of the Emperor that this sea 
should be declared to be the private property of the powers 
situated upon its shores, and that other nations should be shut 
out. Such a project cannot, however, have been seriously made; 
the mere, declaration of it would lead to war. The more pro- 
bable account is that, on the contrary, the object of the nego- 
tiations is that the status quo of the Baltic, as a mare iiierum, 
should be guaranteed by Germany, Russia, Sweden, and Den- 
mark. 

The internal questions which have 
Austria-Hungary. so long agitated Austria having 

at length been settled, it has now 
become possible to take more energetic action in foreign affairs. 
Macedonia lies at her doors, a region the whole of which, for 
the past few years, has been the scene of massacres innumer- 
able. Ten thousand murders in four years, it is said on good 
authority, have been committed with impunity, to say nothing 
of devastated villages, ruined industries, and the absence of 
any sense of security. It says little for modern progress and 
a great deal for long-standing selfishness that such a state of 
things, fully known and understood, as it has been, should be 
allowed to continue. Some efforts have been made to curb the 
Turkish power, but it is clear to all who are willing to see 
that, as long as that power continues to exist, no permanent 
settlement can be made. The agreement of Austria and Rus- 
sia to work together has only had the effect of prolonging the 



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8S4 CURRENT EVENTS [Mar^ 

agony. The new activity manifested by Austria may possibly 
break up the union between the two countries. Mutual rivalry 
may break out, and this may lead to more good being* done 
than has been accomplished by their alliance. The proposal of 
Austria to develop her railway system^ so that it may reach 
the iEgean and the Mediterranean has excited the keenest crit- 
icism in Russia, and may lead to open opposition to Austrian 
plans. 

The Hungarian government has as last found a way by 
which it hopes to defeat the obstructive tactics by which it 
has of late been harrassed. It has been a very difficult task, 
for it owes its own existence to the wholesale use of these saroe 
tactics. The bill for universal suffrage, so long expected, has i 
not yet been introduced. To prepare it is, perhaps, a still more } 
difficult task ; for in the eyes of the government the supremacy 
of the Magyars must be maintained over *'the enemies of the 
nation," as Count Apponyi styles the Croatians, Serbs, Rou- i 
manes, and Slovaks, who must all have seats and who are al- 
most as numerous as the Magyars. However, a new Ban has ^ 
been appointed for Croatia, and various concessions have been 
made to appease the feelings which have been outraged by the 
attempt to over-ride their cherished aspirations. 



The third Duma still exists, but all 
Russia. parties agree that the masses of 

the people have lost all interest 
in it. Its existence is recognized as being conditiohed on a com- 
plete subservience to the government and on its being a docile 
instrument of its will. One or two changes have taken place 
in the ministry, a notorious reactionary having been appointed 
minister of Education. The position of M. Stolypin him- 
self is far from secure. Although he has become more and 
more autocratic, he is not altogether pleasing to the wielders 
of the real power. Meanwhile tyranny and oppression have 
full sway. The system of administrative exile for the punish- 
ment of political actions is in full activity. Men and women 
are being sent, at a moment's notice, to the ice-bound regions 
of Siberia, so little food and clothing being given them that 
they are always on the verge of starvation. The need that 
reigns is so awful that it passes all powers of description. 



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i9o8.] Current events 855 

The ministry of Signor Giolitti 
Italy. still remains in office. One no- 

table change, however, has taken 
place. Ever since the formation of the kingdom a military 
officer has always had the charge of the War Department; on 
the resignation, however, in December last a civilian has been 
appointed. For the first time the military forces are brought 
into subordination. The present position of the army is said 
to be critical. Frontier defence has been neglected. Sufficient 
recruits to fill the cadres cannot be found. Discipline is poor, 
dissatisfaction and unrest exist as well among the officers as 
the men. Officers criticize their superiors in magazines and 
newspapers. Modernism, in fact, has invaded the Italian army. 
Throughout the country too, and not merely in the army, 
widespread dissatisfaction is felt. The Socialists are gaining 
greater influence, reckless labor agitations are fomented, while 
the authority of the State is being defied by many revolution- 
ary anarchical groups. The assassin of King Humbert has been 
publicly glorified in the streets of Rome. The government is 
apathetic or sides with the most violent and least reasonable 
party. 

The awful crime which has been 
Portugal. committed in Portugal has made 

that kingdom the chief centre of 
interest for the past few weeks. No words, of course, can ex- 
press a sufficiently strong condemnation of the brutal deed, nor 
does it fall within the scope of these notes to describe it in 
detail. The events which take place in Portugal are, as a rule, 
so much outside of the movements to which the attention of 
the world is given, that a complete account of their sequence 
is difficult. No special correspondents are considered necessary 
to record them for the benefit of the students of current events. 
So far as we can learn, politics have for a long time been in a 
very bad way; both parties were equally corrupt ; all the poli- 
ticians were self-seekers and known to be such. The public 
debt was increasing, the public finances in confusion, education 
neglected, and all the efforts which were made by the King 
and the few public-spirited men in the country were nullified 
and frustrated by an obstructive Cortes. The King, about nine 
months ago, was persuaded by Senhor Franco, a man who was 



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856 Current Events [Mar. 

seriously anxious for real reform, to entrust him with a tem- 
porary dictatorship to set aside the parliament and to govern 
by decree. The country acquiesced quietly enough for the time 
being, in the hopes of good results, and many real reforms 
seem to have been effected. But as time went on Senhor 
Franco's methods became more drastic, and although a date 
had been fixed for the election of a new Parliament, newspapers 
were being more and more frequently suppressed, prominent 
politicians sent to prison, and a great number of malcontents 
arrested. Even municipal institutions were assailed, being taken 
over by commissions. On the very day of the murder judicial 
functions had, by decree, been given to the executive. In fact 
a feeling seems to have got abroad that the dictatorship was 
to be made permanent. This strengthened the hands of those 
who wished to establish a Republican form of government, and 
inflamed the passions of those who wished to destroy all gov- 
ernment. And so persons willing to commit the atrocious crime 
were found. 

The result has been the abolition of the dictatorship. A 
new sovereign has ascended the throne, called thereto by the 
constitution which be has sworn to observe and to cause to be 
observed. All parties have rallied round the youthful monarch ; 
but an immediate change of ministers was demanded. Senhor 
Franco resigned and fled at once from the country. The new 
ministry, as an emergency measure, suspended all constitutional 
guarantees, and proclaimed martial law throughout the country. 
The next step which it took was a wiser one — it annulled ail 
the decrees of the dictator by which the Press was controlled 
and those under which summary procedure was taken against 
political offences, and many of the political prisoners were at 
once released. The new King has declared in the clearest 
terms his purpose to remain ever faithful to the Constitution, 
and under no circumstances to have recourse to a dictatorship. 
A good lesson has been learned, but at an awful cost. 



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THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 

CARDINAL LOGUE presided at the Dublin meeting of the Catholic Truth 
Society, when the following paper on Voices of Irish History was read 
by T. B. Cronin, a young literary light of great promise : 

The human mind never soars to such sublimity as when wrapped in the 
spell of many voices calling from the spaces of the past. The deeds and 
thoughts of other days never die. They live on as memories, and we accept 
them as our heirlooms, and veil them in the gauze of fancy, and raise them 
up above our heads and hail them as aspirations. If a land had not a long and 
shining line of memories to light it at its work, it would toil on in the gloom 
forever unillumined by wisdom, unrevered by time, and frowned upon by 
destiny. And this rare old land of ours is a land of memories. Spirits of 
epochs that are dead are under our crumbling gables and hovering over our 
broken shrines. And these memories all have voices. 

What message has our music for us ? The old, old message of life and 
death — the life that filled the courtyard of Emania with snorting steeds ; 
that welled up serene and beautiful in the cultured cloisters of Lismore ; that 
shone in the harp and manuscript that glorified a hundred halls of Banba ; 
and overflowed in the pining love that brought drown the sorrowed exile in' 
to the green graves of Gaul and of Spain. And the death which our music 
breathes of I Oh, in all the world there is no death like unto that of a once 
proud and powerful nation. Winding through every crevice of our civil iza" 
tion, through music, song, and dance, through patriotism, virtue, and renown, 
through blood and tears and jubilation, is the passionate appeal of our ancient 
language for a lofty place in the thoughts of the men and women of to-day. 

What say the voices that rise so fast and thick upon each other's tracks, 
out of the blood-strewn wastes and desert places of Erin's story ? They speak 
of grand things that were and are to be. They say, too, that of all lands lay- 
ing under the great, all-seeing eye of heaven, there is no land so bright, se 
inspiring, or so true as this. They say, too, that each of us must toil on with 
our eyes forever fixed on the realization of a nation's dreams. There is a 
legend which has come in the wake of these ever-crying voices from out the 
white soul of the ages, and it whispers that dark-haired Rosaleen shall reign 

again a queen when there is esteem of the olden language of the Gael. 

• • • 

There was never a more intense Irishman on American soil than the first 
Bishop of Charleston, though his name, John England, might give a contrary 
impression. He was born at Cork on September 23, 1786, and died at Char- 
leston, on April 11, 1842. He has been called the light of the American 
hierarchy. His far-reaching intellect saw the imperfect organization of the 
American Church — its bishops far apart, and battling with poverty and count- 
less other difficulties. He wrote to his brother prelates, urging upon them 
the necessity of assembling and taking counsel for united action. He lived to 
see this cherished desire of his heart accomplished, and his solid and brilliant 
mind shed its rays of light and wisdom on the first Councils of Baltimore. 

There was no part of the Church in which his influence was not felt. 
He was constantly consulted by bishops, priests, and laymen from every part 
of the country. At Rome his influence in Church matters was very great. 
In compliance with the invitations of the bishops and priests of other States, 
this extraordinary man often went to herald the truths of the Church, or to 
appeal in behalf of the poor and afflicted in his own matchless style. In the 
summer of 1830 he lectured in Cincinnati Cathedral, and a writer of the 
time say^ that a new impulse was thus given to the inquiry for religious truth. 



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8s8 THE Columbian Reading union [Mar., 1908.] 

Bishop England was the reviver of classical learning in South Carolina. 
With the object of providing a clergy of his own for the diccese he opened 
at Charleston a classical school, in which aspirants to the ministry iiete 
made teachers while they pursued their theological studies. 1 his school re- 
ceived numerous scholars from the best families in the city, and yielded a 
sufficient income to support the theological students while preparing for the 
priesthood. His great aim was to present the Catholic Church, her doctrines 
and practices, in all their truth and beauty and grandeur, before the Ameri- 
can people. In his efforts to do this his labors, perhaps, have never teen 
equalled by any other man. It was with this object he established the UniUd 
States Catholic Miscellany ^ in 1822. 

On his arrival in America he found the Church comparatively defense- 
less; but he soon rendered it a dangerous task to attack or villify the faith 
of his fathers. Many who ventured on this mode ot waifare were glad to 
retreat from the field before the crushing weapons of logic, erudition, ard 
eloquence with which he battled for his Church, his creed, and his people. 
He was the real founder of Catholic journalism in the United States. He 
saw that the Catholic religion was regarded with contempt; and to him fell 
the splendid work of changing the current of public opinion and of giving 
the Church a status in the Republic. He perceived at a glance the value of 
the press, and set about employing it. 

• • • 

Among the Southern poets of the Civil War period two are entitled to 
enduring fame. One was the Rev. A. J. Ryan; the other was James R. 
Randall. The death of Mr. Randall, which occurred January 14, will cause 
deep sorrow. He was imbued fully with the spirit of the old South. He was 
in absolute accord with all its aspirations. He had been in touch with the 
men — soldiers and statesmen — who molded its destinies in the days that 
tried the souls of the strongest and most resolute. In the period following 
the civil strife Mr. Randall's pen was devoted to the advancement of the 
South. He was loyal to the last — ever ready, and even eager, to render ser- 
vice to the people among whom his lot was cast. 

Mr. Randall was born in Baltimore, January i, 1839. On his mother's 
side he was descended from Rene Leblanc, the gentle notary in Longfellow's 
Evangeline. He was educated at Georgetown University, traveled in South 
America, settled in New Orleans, and became a contributor to the Sunday 
Delta and professor of English literature at Poydras College. 

The account given in the Delta of the invasion of Maryland by the Mas- 
sachusetts troops as they passed through Baltimore, April 19, 1861, so ex- 
cited Mr. Randall's feelings that he could not sleep. He was anxious to do 
something that might cause his native State to join the Confederacy, and at 
midnight left his bed, and by candle light wrote Maryland, My Maryland. 
The metre is similar to James Clarence Mangan's Karaman, O Karaman. 
He read it to his students next day and they praised it so highly that he sent 
it to the New Orleans Delia, It was widely copied throughout America and 
Europe. Oliver Wendell Holmes said : My only regret is that I could not 
do for Massachusetts what Randall did for Maryland. 

A few days after the poem was written Miss Hetty Cary, of Baltimore, 
heard it declaimed by a friend and began singing it to the classic melody of 
Lauriger Horatius. Words and music were thus united in Mr. Randall's 
native city, and from that time on it was sung in every Southern camp and in 
thousands of Southern homes. 

Mr. Randall wrote other poems and war ballads, among them The Lone 
Sentry, There's Life in the Old Land Yet, and The Battle-Cry of the South. 
He never collected his poems in book form. In 1866 he married Miss Kath- 
erine Hammond, of Summer Hill, S. C. After the close of the Civil War 
Mr. Randall engaged in newspaper work, and for twenty years was editorial 
writer on the Augusta Chronicle, and later Editor-in-Chief of the New Orleans 
Morning Star. He was an exemplary Catholic. M. C. M. 



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